This post has been prompted partially by the post on the economics of mining and partially by observation of the fact that ingame economics are not very well balanced.
Accepted that this part of the game is still under development, now that the game is so highly playable in so many ways, ingame economics is now a much more prominent issue for everyone playing it for the sheer enjoyment of it. Anyone not doing that?
Rat Race Okay, rat hides and eyes are not really that valuable, but for new characters they are a compulsory pursuit. They provide cash for training and weapons and, my personal feeling is that the balance of time vs cash return is just about perfect for new characters learning to fight and saving up for those two essentials.
But there are just not enough rats out there. And, tbh, the easiest rat is a pretty stiff opponent for a noob character, given that they might lose most, or all, of their hp in one fight.
My suggestion there is that the difficulty of a rat should be low enough that one rat should not be strong enough to take more than half the HP from a character with average health.
Gobbling Progression Points By the time you can actually kill these, they are fairly easy, but because they generally mob you (which is fun!) they are not the meat for the outright noob.
On the other hand, they are so easy to kill that you can make large amounts of PP in a very short period of time. This is not really very well balanced and the same problem persists when you get to harder monsters later.
PP is far too easy to get in large amounts and cash is in far too short supply so that the balance of PP vs the cost of training is very wrong.
I would suggest that one way to offset the huge amount of PP that can be gained would be to require as many PP per KP as the next skill level of the character.
IE
training once when your Sword skill is at level 2 should cost you 3 PP. Thus, it would cost my Klyros 12 (=4x(2+1)) PP in total to fill the yellow bar at level 2 and 16 (=4x(3+1)) PP at level 3. Getting that many PP is relatively easy, but making enough cash to pay for the training is nightmarish and we really need the Gobbles to be dropping something that we can sell.
eg I started writing a quest based on Gobbles dropping hides that would sell for roughly the same amount as a rat hide, but where you can carry 20 gobble hides at a time, thus a full load would reward you with 140 tria and pay for 3 training sessions.
That, I feel, would give us a fair way of earning cash in reasonable amounts and balanced in well with how far a character will have developed at that point.
Jayose I know we are not meant to mention ingame quest info, but the quest for this guy gives far too much cash.
Given that he works in a library with a magical looking book in the corner, I think a much more balanced reward from Jayose would be a Glyph that the player could choose to complement whatever Way their character happened to be most interested in.
eg \"Thank you, $playername In return for collecting those herbs for me, I will reward you with a valuable Glyph from my collection. Please select one of ... as what you would like as a token of my appreciation.\"
Gold Ore Mining is a painstaking passtime and not very rewarding in cash terms. I estimate an hour to collect 10 gold ore with Mining 2.
In the light of the fact that it is gold and how long it takes to get, I would suggest that the Gold Ore quest for the guy in the magic shop should not involve a quest assignment but should be purely a transaction intended to help him stock up on a valuable compoinent and should require 10 gold ore, be repeatable and reward the character with around 200 trias.
Thus a PC could take an hour to get some cash to pay for training in something.
Blacksmith Given that the playter has to wander about to get the item required for this quest, and that it is clearly something that he wants a lot, I would suggest that the reward for completing this should be at least 50 trias.
Other Monsters Even the Rogues do not have any cash. Given that, by the time you get to the arena, the lower rank mobs are relatively easy to kill, though still harder than Gobbles etc, these monsters should really drop upward of 10 tria each.
I think they are worth about 400 exp (?) so perhaps a rough estimate of how much cash a mob might drop would be approximately 1 tria per 40 exp? Which is not to say that I think all monsters should have cash, but only that that might be a reasonable approximation of how much they could drop.
Wrt other less blatantly intelligent / humanoid monsters, it would be nice to see them dropping things that could be given to the right NPC\'s in exchange for other items or which could be used in crafting things like armour.
Conclusion Basically, the balance of earnable PP vs earnable cash is extremely lopsided and simply does not work.
In the long term, the game is going to need some well thought out, carefully devised guidelines on how PC\'s can earn cash and how much they can get at a time.
A big problem, as always in MMORPG\'s, is to ensure that mobs do not become camp targets for people short of cash, so there have to be different enough mobs that give cash and enough ways of making cash that people do not end up fighting over the spoils.
