[Suggestion] Gold Income and Node Upgrades

kerrai

Raw gold income is hard to come by. Selling glint directly feels pretty bad. The primary source, instead, is caravans. This has led to some frustration from PvE/crafting/gathering-focused players who lack a meaningful avenue to generate raw gold. This post isn’t about the caravan situation that has been discussed ad nauseam. Instead, it’s about two things: raw gold income and node upgrades.

Node upgrades are great, and it’s great that they require coordination and hard work by the community. Yet players are still hoarding resources rather than turning them in. Why? It’s a freeloader problem. This comes up often in economics. Why pay for it themselves when they can wait for others to pay and reap the reward?

There are two solutions. The first is to limit access to the good to people who contributed to it. This is a bad solution in Ashes. The second is to permit meaningful rewards for people who contribute. I think you should do that.

Let mayors use the node treasury to incentivize turn-ins directly with raw gold or, alternatively, let the mayoral tickets be exchanged directly for gold. This creates a PvE/gathering/crafting flow of raw gold creation.

Second, please increase vendor sell prices for crafted items. The low vendor prices are just silly on gear.

(Alternatively, and this probably deserves its own separate post, but has the Dev team ever asked themselves why raw gold/silver/copper is even in the game? I’m not sure it adds something meaningful instead of just making glint not a “material” and replacing the gold/silver/copper with glint and letting you buy commodities that then unpack into valuable materials once delivered.)

Pham

Gatherers can always sell their rare gathered materials for gold for a bit of a side hustle. Crafters likewise can sell stuff they craft on the market if it is good/rare. Not sure on the margins here as I am not a crafter and don't process many materials either.

Caravans are indeed the other main source of earning gold. There are ways to minimize exposure to pvp. Different routes you can take to avoid people. Have friends/guild mates volunteer to help guard it, use better caravan parts (sturdier frames, faster wheels, bob's, etc.)

The potential problem with the proposed solution is that it would undermine the focus on the existing methods, which are the intended ways to earn gold by the developers. If you make an easier way to make gold that has less risk and requires less effort, no one (or not many) would engage with those existing intended mechanics (caravans, market).