So I exaggerated on the amount of gold found in gold ore. However, I still maintain it is a fair price. Essentially from a game design standpoint, mining simple gold ore is stage one of crafting out of several (increasingly difficult) stages. The devs must make it cost effective for people to learn how to smelt ore into ingots, and they must make it cost effective to craft ingots into tools or weapons. Now, a load of 12 gold ore will get you 72 tria in the current system. Since a meal at Kada\'s is about 6 tria, this is a decent daily wage for an unskilled miner (apologies to all dwarves, I know how proud you are of your skills), also assuming you don\'t complete maybe three \"ore runs\" in a planeshift day.
For a skilled craftsman who has trained how to smelt and bought the book? I would say the 140 tria for a gold ingot is a decent price (I think it is about 140, I am not sure though). However, this is still just a blob of metal. For it to be even more valuable, it must be crafted. For this, the player must have trained in crafting respective weapon types, and as such, the amount they recieve on payment of a completed weapon must eventually be worth the training (after selling several weapons).
Remember as well that when all this is implemented there will exist a complete player-driven crafting economy. Newbies will not have had the money to train in smelting or crafting, so they will be doing the digging for ore. They will also be auctioning their ore for the best price to smelters and/or crafters, making money so that they can eventually rise in the ranks to be a blacksmith.
I am not sure which dev is designing this system... but I think they have done a very good job so far. When all the crafting is implemented, six tria for a gold ore will be a decent price (and respective prices with the other ores). The complaint then is that because the rest of the crafting system is not implemented, ore seems cheap and pointless. Finally rmember that this is a pre-alpha tech demo, they cannot raise the ore prices for now, then lower them later, it doesn\'t make sense.
Xirius