Nice discussion, but I didn't see were anyone stated exactly how many hours of boring moving stock and molten steel between the furnace and stock caster it takes to get to metallurgy level 20. I figure it took me about 2 hours a night for each level of metallurgy after about level 5. If you wish to figure the true value you have to come up with a total measure of time and cost, for example, it's no point to train metallurgy to level 20 to melt 100 gold ore, that much is obvious, but where is the breaking point versus just mining gold for that many hours and selling it. Assume it took me 30 hours to train metallugry to level 20, how much gold ore could I have mined in that time and transported to Harnquist and sold for 400 each, and you also have to take into account the fortune the smelter paid to train to level 20 and the fact that you used to have to train at Trasok's but all the gold was near Harnquist, that is you paid Trasok's trias to train metallurgy but then you had to mine gold ore to get more trias and back then there were few gold buyers if any and the price was 350 when there was a buyer. And the gold mine was the one at the magic shop, slightly better then it is now but not much depending on the eaxct spot you tried to mine and your luck.
In addition, not that many people wish to spend their game time standing around waiting for some miner to come around selling their gold. I've often got caught up in the sprit of buying gold, using it to train a bit more metalurgy instead of shuffling steel stock around, and then selling the ingots to Harnquist. But at the end of the night I relaize I could have been doing any number of things that are more fun. The devs had a great idea of mixing Ulbernuats and gold mines, gold mining got a lot more interesting after that from my point of view.
Some people had a better training system figured out and had the fortune of being able to play when most of us were dealing with the real world. I always thought mining was boring till I tried learning metallurgy, then I thought learning metallurgy was boring till I tried learning weapon making, with every increase in level I still made blades of the same or worse quality. In fact for each increase in metallurgy skill I still make steel stock of the same or worse quality then I used to.
The devs have managed to create a stable economy with regards to the buying and selling of gold ore with no more then about 200 people in game at any one time. That is truly amazing. Gold mining used to be a lot harder, but then again skill levels used to top out a lot lower. There are a lot of things that need to balance in the game for this one part of the economy to work.
The only things that disappoints me is that they took existing good weapons and made them nearly useless by giving them qualities less then a dozen other weapons. I still haven't found the balance in that, as it was once weapon wear and tear was working old weapons gradually lost value.
In addition, whether they knew it or not many of the smelters actually risked physical injury in the real world from such repeatative movement with the mouse in order to reach level 20, many friends complained about the pain not knowing the risks are more serious then they imagined. Mining need to be no more the touching the keyboard every fifteen seconds while exercising or watching TV. The repeatative movement of smelting is nearly as bad if you decide to stick around the furnace and buy gold and cast one ingot at a time.
