It seems some of you don't seem to believe me when I say that the economy is being destroyed. Since most of you probably didn't read my thread on this, which was locked, I'll post it here.
From my understanding, the reason why we can no longer get a reasonable amount of gold is due to the dev's thinking that the economy was unbalanced with excess money. I would like to point out how badly flawed this idea is, and that drying up the gold mines has in fact shattered the economy in PS.
The few people who can be bothered standing around for hours to mine gold now, have to come back and charge more in auctions for their ore, sometimes up to 500T. This means smelters get less tria for smelting the gold and selling. The others are busy spending the little tria they have on training, which is ridiculously expensive, and then they have to mine again, which means they spend less time actually PLAYING the game. They have to train too, because the monsters are so difficult that newcomers can only barely kill rats, and no one is going to sit around and kill rats for several months before they can afford to train, so they will stop playing. Crafters will go out of business because not only is everyone too broke to buy their merchandise, but also their goods have to become even MORE expensive because smelters have to spend so much longer training to smelt stock for them, which means even fewer people will buy from them. People will be training less newcomers because they can't afford to fund them (and due to current flaws it's nigh impossible for a newcomer to get anywhere in the game without being handed weapons, armour or tria by someone else), so less new players will be wanting to play.
Apparently, the gold mines dried up to bring some "realism" into the game. Many players are considering leaving PS altogether because of these changes (myself included), and many more have already left. Yes, you brought some realism alright: you brought upon the Yliakum Great Depression!
I am also quite aware that this isn't a bug. I do read. The fact that this issue with gold is not a bug makes the point even more clear: this is a deliberate event that is ruining the experience of PS.
Think of the current RL world situation: oil is becoming harder to come by. Due to this
one resource being harder to get, the entire world market is under stress - not just fuel, but things like food, building, everything. The gold in PS has become FAR worse than our real life issues with oil. The entire market is falling apart, and it's hard enough as it is to train anything and now we'll have newbies having to sit in the Hy sewers for months on end killing rats so they can afford to buy a pick, train up ONE level of mining, and spend hours just to get 5 ore pieces.
At the current rate, PS will die off before the end of the year unless something is done to correct this mistake.