On the matter of economy (durability, masteries, gear drops, imbuing)

spoletta

After playing for 10 days and getting a feeling of the decay rate of item and of the general impact that these new changes had on the players, I would like to offer the following feedback.

First of all, a summary of the current situation:

The game right now has an itemization based on 3 levels for armors (primitive, non primitive, set) and 2 levels for weapons (primitive and non primitive).
We have 3 levels of enchantments. Respectively called tier 1, 2 and 3.
Durability is set as follows: all primitive items have 200 durability. Non primitive bows, wooden shields, wooden weapons and mage weapons have 300, metal weapons and metal shields have 400, Non primitive armors have 200 durability on cloth, 250 on leather, 300 on hide, 350 on metal. Set armors have 50 more durability over the non primitive version.
Masteries in crafting go from 0 to 4. Each mastery increases the durability of the items crafted by 50%.
Good and neutral players drop no gear on death. Red players drop almost always all the gear

Now let's see how easy or hard it is to achieve that (note: this post will not talk about the recipes which are already discussed in many other places, I will assume that the recipes are available):

Crafting any primitive item is trivial
Crafting a non primitive hide or cloth armor is easy with common materials, but requires some effort if you want to get some rare material.
The same is true for leather armors, with the caveat that you have to tan the leather first, which adds a bit more effort to the total.
Crafting a non primitive metal armor takes a lot of time and resources
Crafting non primitive wooden weapons or shields is trivial, even when using rare woods.
Crafting non primitive metal weapons takes some effort but is easy enough.
Crafting set armors is like crafting a non set version but with the addition of some PvE drop which can be extremely hard in some cases, like the 5 dragon souls of an hunter set.
Enchanting at t1 level is much harder than in the previous tests due to a "nerf" of the properties of the reagents, but still reasonably doable for anyone (and as a personal note: quite fun)
Enchanting at t2 level requires some very specific reagent combinations which usually are not common. Doable but not something you do on throw away items.
Enchanting at t3 is mostly a guild level effort

Now let's see how much this stuff will last:

A weapon used regularly (archer or warrior) loses around 40 durability per day.
A weapon used by a caster class will mostly not lose durability
An armor used by a ranged class will mostly not lose durability
An armor used by a melee class will lose around 10 per day.
Gear drop rules have some impact on this, but mostly negligible. Items which require effort only change hands, don't get destroyed.

Finally, before going into the discussion of this, let's see which was the reaction of players to this system:

Having a sort of gear progression which requires a certain amount of effort has been very well received by mostly all players.
The non gear drop for good and neutral was very badly received by red players.
The increased durability of items was well received by many players, but there is an underlying fear of how the economy will shape out.

With all that said, these are my thoughts on it, what I like and what I don't like:

My first reaction to this system was very negative. No gear drops and progress through gear definitely did not felt like this they aligned with how I expected this game to be. By playing and talking with other players though, I cannot ignore the fact that some of those changes were very well received. In particular the new gear system. Players like to have to work toward obtaining a certain gear and not having to replace it every other day due to it breaking, and honestly Arboreus would not really work without mechanics like this. Additionally, I feel that this amount of progress is mild enough that you can definitely perceive it, but it doesn't turn the game into a gear check or a world of "have" and "have not". You can still run in mostly primitive gear and achieve about the same stuff, just harder. As such, I'm willing to accept this as a part of Fractured. It doesn't 100% align with what I had in mind but it's not a deal breaker, and since the majority likes it, I could be fine with it too. It can be a fine compromise.

Talking about the gear drops though, this isn't really working well. Having items which require this level of effort to obtain automatically prevents any form of full gear drop in the game. While this may fine on a world like Arboreus, this warps some underlying mechanics and interaction on which Syndesia is based. Syndesia is a PvX world. PvP is half of it, and reds are part of this PvP system. They are meant to be a niche, to have disadvantages, and that the good guys should not be bothered too much by them. But this system has now gone too far in that direction. Playing a red in this system is impossibly punishing. What should the red penalties achieve? Those penalties ideally should prevent the creation of any large red figthing group, due to imposing them severe logistic restrictions, which makes them act more as solo robbers of carts and lone predators of PvE hotspots.
The current level of such restrictions do indeed manage that, but they manage to be so punishing that even solo actions are carried out only through petty tricks or borderline exploits which allows reds to act safely, because the level of risk is simply unbearable otherwise. Also, stuff like this should NEVER exist https://forum.fracturedmmo.com/topic/15019/player-spawn-locations-during-pvp-combat-is-a-big-issue . Player throwing themselves at the enemy knowing that they risk nothing is bad, no matter how you look at it. There must be some form of penalty at all times.
At the same time though, it is having very positive impacts too. Trades have picked up, acquiring an item is a safer investment. Players form groups to go around and look for rare resources. This is nice, and I would like this to continue, so scrapping this new system altogether would be a step in the wrong direction. Despite my initial reaction I believe that this system is proving to have better potential than the old one, so I would like to tune and find the right compromises on this one, rather than going back to the previous one.

Talking about durability instead, I honestly smell a disaster incoming. The economy will collapse. I would like everyone to understand that this game economy can work only if every week the amount of resources destroyed through durability is exactly equal to the amount of resources gathered. With the current durability this will simply not happen, and one of the the curprit of this are the masteries.

Like with the item progression, I do not like having a craft progression through grind and repetition, but I do understand that many like it, so I will accept that part too. In their current incarnation though, masteries are a terrible element of the game. While in this system gear progression players in different levels of gear can coexist, fight with and against each other with the same rules and varying degrees of advantage/disadvantage, this does not happen with masteries. A player with 4/4 in an item and one with 1/4 simply cannot coexist in the same economy.
This is a difficult concept to grasp, but durability is a very important stat. Many frown upon masteries because they "only increase durability, but no stats", but durability in a system where you can't repair and can't be looted is a HUGE element of value.
Even if enchantments were not in the game, a sword made with someone in 0/4 would be worth only 1/3 of one one built by someone in 4/4, because the latter has 3 times the durability. It will give me the advantages of that item for 3 times longer, so it is worth 3 times as much. Simple as that. These 2 items are made from the same materials, and simply cannot co exist. There is no competition on town position or price which can bridge that gap of value.
This is made even worse by the cost of enchants. Since higher level enchants have an high cost associated, the value of an item with higher durability is further incremented by being a better recipe for higher enchants. Enchants put on a higher durability item offer a bigger return of investment for the same resources. In the end the item from a 4/4 is impossibly more valuable than a 0/4. This means that you are either 4/4 or you don't craft, because the price of raw materials will be based on a 4/4 craft. This will 100% require a change.

The second critical flaw of this system is that as highlighted previously, some items simply do not degrade. The armor and jewels of any ranged character is almost eternal. The weapons of mages too. This is not good. Items have to get destroyed for all the economic system of Fractured to work.

In summary, the issues I currently perceive with the game are:

Too heavy penalties for Red
Not enough penalties for good and neutral
Excessive progression of item value granted by masteries
Items not breaking often enough to have a good economy
Wood items are too easy to make

Based on that, I would propose the following changes:

Should we bring back gear drop for good players?
I'm mostly convinced that the answer is NO.
Not having them drop gear has had too many good impacts on the game. That should stay, and we should look elsewhere for a solution.

So, how we give them penalties for dying? How we rebalance a bit the huge disadvantage of red toward good players?
I would say that we should look back to the last time the system worked. For that we look at the last alpha, were we had goods drop 2, neutral drop 4, red drop all. This was also with an average value of the items which was drastically lower. So I guess that we can start just by rescaling this.

The items have an higher value, so to inflict the same value of penalty you need less gear to drop. I like zero drops on good players, so let's move from there. Good zero, neutral one, reds 1-2 depending on Karma. Reds should drop 1 when under -2000 (killing is -2500, so this red only stole a cart or similar levels of crime), 2 when under this value (they killed someone). Dropping all items is too much of a penalty. Losing only 2 I feel is bearable.
Why not zero on neutral? Hmm, I'm in doubt between zero and one. Because neutral players are the core of the PvP of Syndesia and they must feel confident in engaging in as much as activity as they want. After all any possible target is willingly participating. But at the same time it feels wrong... I feel like one would be better.

So, how would this solve the fact that blue are actually unaffected by any penalty for dying and can charge head first into a fight while risking only bandages? I would tie this with our current issue with durability, and simply apply this:

Every time you get purple health, you suffer an amount of durability damage on all your items equal to the 2/3 of the percentage of health lost. When you get executed, it counts as suffering all the remaining red health as purple health. What this translates to, is a 10 durability damage on your items when you get knocked down, and a total of 66 when you get killed, no matter how many times you were knocked down before that. You can get knocked once and lose 10 then be executed for the remaining 55, or get knocked 6 times for 6 and then be executed for 6.
In the end a full life lost is always 66.
This is a good deterrent to throwing away your life, and introduces a decent degrade on items, which affects even those which normally wouldn't suffer damage.
This though would not introduce a "reward" for reds killing them. And I think that it is fine. On Syndesia reds should go after good players to rob them of their loot and their carts, not to take their equipment. It would be too severe of an impact.

With this system, blue will most of the times go around with their best or close to best equipment, which is what most of them want. Reds will be able to run around in non primitive gear with t1 and t2 enchants, because it is reasonably possible to replace them if you lose only one or two. Neutral players too will mostly fight in non primitive t2 enchanted and bring out the sets only for the best occasions. This is a decently fair fight. You can fight against good equip using t1/t2 non primitive gear, and imposes that gear disadvantage on reds which is what is expected for Syndesia.

This should in my opinion solve the issue of reds, blue and item degradation.

Next issue, masteries. The +50% per level has to go. I would prefer an increase of stats to it, and many players would consider it more natural. So I propose that the 4 mastery levels become: first level +5% durability, second level +5% damage/armor, third level +5% durability, fourth level +5% damage/armor. This is more natural and gives someone at 4/4 a significant advantage of 10% in stats and 10% in durability over someone in 0/4. This is a big advantage but not big enough to completely put anyone else out of business.

Last issue, wood items. Currently with one yew tree you can make something like 10 yew bows. Definitely too easy. Wooden items will never have a value like this. They would have to require something like 10 times the current logs to give them a worth. Personally the best solution would be to give wooden item creation a bit more depth, introducing the kilns, long time curing like leather and so on. This though would require a major effort from the devs, which right now look very busy with that roadmap. So I would say that for now the easiest solution is that high quality trees only drop 1 log of their specific material, and all the other logs that they produce are simply light wood and hard wood. After all only some specific parts of a tree are good for crafting.

With that said, this was my wall of text and I would like everyone to drop in and contribute to finding the right compromise.

Tuoni

This was so comprehensive and constructive feedback that it deserves a +1 only because of that, well done. I agree with most of the points and even if I disagree with few I understand the argument and point of view.

At this point I raise only one item because there is so much to discuss with.. Durability. Items are clearly decaying too slowly which will have impact to the economy, therefore, I would like to see some tweaking there. However, making items decay too fast will irritate players especially if resources are hard to get and expensive. This can lead to situation where better gear is less used in action so it will not be destroyed. I like the idea that gear takes extra durability loss upon knockdown or death because this rewards player if he or she plays well. It would be nice if durability loss was balanced better between different gear pieces and not punish e.g. tanks over ranged damage dealers.

spoletta

Consider that the armors used by tanks (metal and hide) have higher durability, so between regular damage and KD they should degrade at the same rate.

THH

As I already suggested, give people the opportunity to flag a certain amount of stuff aa unlootable according to their karma.. like blue can flag 4-5 items as safe, grey like 3-4 and red like 2.. so you will both thrive the economy as well as incentive people using (at least partially) their high end stuff.

Furthermore, make some item sink for cosmetics.. like merging x highlevel stuff to get some gimmick for your house.. will also reduce the amount of items.. or let people sacrifice stuff on some kind of altair to give them buffs.. there are endless possibilities to thrive the economy instead of the durability stuff, which i really dont like too much... I think acquiring like 1 piece of S Tier stuff should take like 100 plus IG hours.. and not everyome should get that gear.. but when acquired, it should stay with you and not be lost due to lame durability or random drop on death (yes, even for reds)..

So i think its totally fine that most items will be worth a sh#t when meta starts (its the same in every sandbox) while others are so damn rare or you need it in so high numbers thar with players quitting, new ones starting, loot, etc, the demand will stay... it was the same in UO, which had the best player driven economy..

So my thought is:

Player loot according to karma, but choosing what you keep
Add item sinks that provide end game bonusses and cosmetics
Make acquiring end game S tier game extremly hard with like nightmarish ressource consumption

another thought: let people sacrifice ressource heavy stuff for increasing KP limit or for reskilling.. so many ways to keep the demand side high..

spoletta

If paired with durability damage to the equipped items then yes flagging items as unlootable would work too.

Killeropriest

Hi so my suggestion here is simple first of all get rid of good its not needed in this game keep it only neutral and red and the gear drop system is useless for red no one gonna go red and in turn there is no pvp and pvp players will leave the game. so easy way here is make neutral lose less durability on death with inventory drop and for RED players make a high durability loss like 25-50 percent or or both jail rather than dropping the gear. if reds drop gear there is no reason to go red. everyone loses durability just that red will lose more than any other this will make people go red and pvp more and aggressive pvp players are also catered. also gonna put this point forward for sieges and wars raids make the system like NEW WORLD WARS 2 or 1 flag outside 1 inside walls with doors being destructable or something. that would give incentive for all to fight a fair fight. just my 2 cents here

Ulfnaor

I have read your entire post and, while I disagree with a few of its conclusions and premises, must compliment you on its quality. It is refreshing to see articulate opinions.

First, what I agree with:
-Reds are way too severely punished at the moment.
-Good and neutral are having it too easy.
-Crafting t3+ enchantments is indeed a "group" effort.
-Crafting primitive weaponry and gear is trivial.
-Crafting set gear can be, sometimes, ridiculously difficult.
-A durability loss on "knocked out (fake death)".
-Masteries and your proposals to fix them.

What I disagree with:
-Crafted gear is not difficult to make.
-Rebalancing based on Karma and, especially giving good characters a free pass.

I believe that you have done a fine job explaining where we stand, where the economy is and what the fear is for the future. It seems to be something players from both sides don't always register: a game needs to have both casual PvErs and hard PvPers to have a decent economy. Its corollary: easy isn't better.

I agree with several of your propositions but, while I agree with almost all of them, feel like they sometimes do not go far enough.

To be specific:

On the issue of Karma:
Karma comes easy to those who are good characters but is hard to those who go red; recovering it, while red, exposes you for a long while: it isn't "one murder = you may die once and lose two pieces of gear" but more along the lines of "one murder and you are going to stay red for several hours at least, where you may lose multiple sets of gear". On the other hand, a good character is likely to stay good forever and would thus be never exposed to any gear loss.

In my opinion, a red character should be forced to stay red for at least two hours (of ingame time, being offline doesn't count) following his crime (which allows for revenge killings). After the hour has past, he should have two options: stay red and farm mobs to gain Karma OR go to the shrine and pay the "Temple" to absolve his sins, which brings him back to zero karma (thus neutral). The price could then be set based on his crimes; the more severe the sins, the more expensive the penance.

Moreover, I'd make it so we get more Karma from killing higher tier mobs. Not massively so but a little nudge to bring repentant Red players to higher-end areas would bring interesting potential open-world PvP scenarios.

On the issue of gear drop:
I do not believe Good characters should be entirely exempted from this. However, I do think we have the potential to make this better. Hear me out.

First, I think you are 100% correct with the "one gear drop" for Neutral characters and "1 to 2 gear drops" for Red characters. With that said, I think that we could introduce a 30% chance for Good players to drop gear. It'd reward their dedication to the "Good" play style while still presenting a certain danger and a potential reward for their enemies.

Second, I think that one good way to tackle all of the problems you mentioned (from gear drop to balancing the economy) is to introduce gear destruction. The problem with "gear drop" is that it is a nullsum when it comes to the economy; sure the dropped gear is likely to have lost some of its durability but no more so than if it had continued to be used by the same player. In my opinion, each piece of gear that drops should have a 30% chance to destroy instead: after all, a fight just occurred. It likely was brutal. It'd make it so gear doesn't always drop and successful red players just don't collect entire wardrobes. Or at least, it'd help alleviate that concern a wee bit.

General thoughts:
I believe that this "three-tiered" system is a fine one but it needs to be streamlined and equalized; there should be set weapons as well and the difference between primitive and non-primitive gear (T1 to T2) should be important The idea is that we should discourage red players, as much as possible, from going out there and do "naked kills".

I feel, personally, that T2 plate gear is in a perfect spot but this should be equalized to all types of gear; with the proper infrastructure, a solo player can relatively easily get himself two full sets of plate+weapons a day. Enchanting that gear to level 1 should possibly be made slightly easier (as you, yourself, pointed out). At this point, if the reforms proposed here were to be implemented, I could easily see a world where T2 gear becomes the norm and the bread and butter of players around. Losing it wouldn't hurt terribly and one could reasonably expect to replace lost pieces.

Everything beyond that should be difficult to get and reserved for big outings with your guild or sieges. Speaking of the latter, I will conclude my post by saying three things on sieges.

On sieges:
First, everyone should be dropping one piece of gear on death during sieges, good and red characters alike. This is a special occasion where people should feel like they can and must bring their best.

Second, until some of the most egregious issues with sieges (tp'ing through walls, flags having legit 10 HPs, etc.) are fixed, the conquest mode should be disabled as to not drive more people away from the game.

Third, a city conquest should not allow the conqueror to just outright destroy every building in five seconds flat. This absolutely destroys any and all chances for revenge or come back for the conquered, which deprives the game from precious and interesting gameplay. Instead, I believe that the newly conquered city should benefit from a three-day "no destruction of buildings" peace window after which the governor can start initiating destruction of buildings. The time required to destroy the buildings would vary based on their size and importance; a 2x2 house or a crop can easily get removed overnight but a bank, townhall or workshop should take a few days. What this would accomplish is give a chance to people to move their stuff out (and then be attacked if they don't sneak in properly) or take revenge and recapture their town before it gets razed to the ground. It also forces the conquerors to try to defend a town they likely just ravaged.

Alright. I'm done. I had not planned on adding this bit on sieges in this post but I feel it ties in with the gear drops and general balance of the economy.

The overall goal should always be to have a lively, healthy open-world economy and it is clear there are a lot of great ideas here.

OlivePit

I also see a market crash coming.
The cost to make vs length of use is just too absurd.
The coin sinks are not working either, as such gold coin acquisition is far far in excess of use, which makes prices constantly climb.
This is a huge turn off for any newer players.
While I very much like the scarcity of recipes allowing for traveling merchants to sell their rare wears or do custom crafting for a fee, this is purely an artefact of the new system just now dropping recipes and later market saturation will return it to a state similar to previous alphas, thus not a very sustainable system.

I believe we should go back to the imbuing gems and item socket system.
It provided a way to pre-fabricate enchantments to quickly update equipment instead of having to go through multiple chests of reagents, looking up a recipe, and enchanting each piece of equipment multiple times.

The only problem with the Imbuing gems system that I saw was the high cost of entering the system at the T1 level (chipped gems)
Sadly now there is yet again no use for non-flawless gems.

Clinion

I agree on most of the points and disagree with the PvP ruleset.

Good players should also be subject to item drops. Otherwise, Good players in Syndesia will be identical to the Good players in Arboreous. We know that Syndesia will be mix of PvE and PvP, so any player accepting to play in this world should expect both. That means, someone wants to do a lot of PvE content(farming, gathering, building etc.), he should also expect some sort of PvP and action and its consequences.

I also would like to see some changes with the durability system. The main issue I observe is that, lets assume we even have full loot drop system, players obtaining the loot from kills are in an awkward situation because they cannot sell these items in the marketplace. They either have to use them or constantly type in the global chat to sell in via personal trade. With the current systems, I cannot see a possible solution to this problem. Either we need a repair option with gold and materials(which Devs stated they do not want), or provide some other mechanics such that looted items can be utilized in the marketplace economy.

Tuoni

@Clinion I remember as well that devs are not that interested to utilize repair system, however, repair systems are typically a really effective gold sinks, and if some materials would need as well (or as an other option) to the repairing process, it would sink also resources. Perhaps the max durability gets lower everytime gear piece is repaired so that nothing will be everlasting stuff anyway.

In addition, if gear could be sacrificed (research) to progress in crafting and/or gear could be salvaged to get some resources back, those would help to sink gear from the game. Also crafters can then buy some gear from the market and use it to progression purposes, that would enliven the market a bit also.

Ulfnaor

@Tuoni The economy is already extremely problematic because we're having way too much gear and resources coming in and you think we should just... make it worse?

To fix your marketplace-->durability issue, we could simply add the sale of items missing durability to the marketplace and show the durability of the item as you try to buy it.

Kazzier

I just want to expand some of my feelings on two of spoletta's points. This is based on someone who is testing the economy as a solo player (currently).

Items not breaking often enough to have a good economy

This is absolutely correct. I'm noticing that demand for gear on market places is virtually none. Once someone has their gear it degrades so slowly that the economy is hardly moving, and the gear itself doesn't seem to have much value attached to it, bar a few obvious exceptions. I was hoping to see some good gear crafters making a name for themselves and creating a thriving economy. Instead it's stagnant. There is currently NO DEMAND at all for gear crafters. Which is a whole playstyle itself neglected.

Hammers and Axes also don't loose durability when being used on resource nodes - This is a huge factor to people wanting to sell lower end materials (stones, sticks etc) - (New players).

Durability currently needs a big adjustment....

Wood items are too easy to make

I'd say most of the lower quality items are too easy to make. They should require more resources and ideally different types of resources. I've been saying for a while that many resources in the world feel overabundant (possibly due to a low population with it being beta), but's as it stands, the value of lower level materials feels far too low. I agree that more resources need to be added to recipes and ideally resources need some more fine tuning. Currently everywhere has an abundance of the basic materials and there is no need to explore for different or rare materials because of this. It therefore lowers the value of items and regions/cities.

GamerSeuss

@Tuoni Change 'not that interested' to 'the Devs have set a hard line that there will not be a repair function'

A Repair function or Salvage function would just make the economy problems and durability issues 1000x worse off. In fact, even if they adjusted the durability, by adding such functions, you would erase any good you got from those adjustments.

I do agree, as some have said, that more damage needs to be taken by some equipment, like axes and hammers when 'gathering' and maybe a bigger Durability hit when someone is knocked unconscious/dead.

Tuoni

@Ulfnaor said in On the matter of economy (durability, masteries, gear drops, imbuing):

@Tuoni The economy is already extremely problematic because we're having way too much gear and resources coming in and you think we should just... make it worse?

To fix your marketplace-->durability issue, we could simply add the sale of items missing durability to the marketplace and show the durability of the item as you try to buy it.

Why it would be worse? I have said that gear should have less durability. If that is not enough then perhaps devs should take a different approach to the whole system. I have just presented already existing systems which have worked in other games. I am sure that those would work here as well if wanted.

Tuoni

@GamerSeuss said in On the matter of economy (durability, masteries, gear drops, imbuing):

@Tuoni Change 'not that interested' to 'the Devs have set a hard line that there will not be a repair function'

A Repair function or Salvage function would just make the economy problems and durability issues 1000x worse off. In fact, even if they adjusted the durability, by adding such functions, you would erase any good you got from those adjustments.

I do agree, as some have said, that more damage needs to be taken by some equipment, like axes and hammers when 'gathering' and maybe a bigger Durability hit when someone is knocked unconscious/dead.

Oh the discussions are now at level semantics, "hard line", christ man...

I did not say there should be a repair system, just pointing out that there is this option to take another path especially if the current system will not work after adjustments.

And please tell me how salvage system would make economy problems 1000x worse? It basically sinks resources and items from the game.

GamerSeuss

A salvage system would make matters worse because you would be taking basically almost broken, or essentially useless (skill training) items, and exchanging them out for some of their previously used materials, thus allowing those previously used materials to be used again.

A salvage system essentially means a Material is now worth like 1.1 to 1.5 times as much or more, considering how many times you can use them.

Tuoni

@GamerSeuss said in On the matter of economy (durability, masteries, gear drops, imbuing):

A salvage system would make matters worse because you would be taking basically almost broken, or essentially useless (skill training) items, and exchanging them out for some of their previously used materials, thus allowing those previously used materials to be used again.

A salvage system essentially means a Material is now worth like 1.1 to 1.5 times as much or more, considering how many times you can use them.

Have you thought that even with the current durability system the result can be scaled based on the durability of the salvaged item? There is not that stupid game designer in the world who would implement such a system which provides more materials than it is worth. Now you have made up your own system where you get always the same amount of materials back regardless of what is the durability of that item at that moment.

GamerSeuss

@Tuoni

They aren't going to scale back material availability. That is a big part of exploration.
This means that if, when you salvage an item, you get even 1 Material back from said item, you've added 1 more material use into the game, thus adding to the Material glut. You would have to scale back materials gathered in the wild and as I said in point 1, they aren't going to do that. (Not likely)
Right now, a material sink for the game is people making lots of lesser items and then trashing them, just to get mastery. You remove this sink by giving some of the materials back. Or rather, you scale this sink back heavily, as now items get recycled into the system.

Rife

Also agree with most things that Spol said.

I would like to add on that right now Neutral is almost a useless alignment. I think we need to change two things about Neutral.

The first thing is that when world bosses spawn, there should already be an announcement throughout the continent, so that people can actually contest, considering how travel times in this game are really long. Not when they are dead.

The second thing is that when you are getting resources from other territories other than your residency, you need to flag neutral. This makes it so that where you choose to live becomes more meaningful, cities with more resource hotspots might get more contested because they get higher tax due to higher population.

The other thing is that resources are finite, and even with the limited number of players in the test, we could see the first days certain resource spots were really farmed. On release, it would be much worse, so we need to be able to prevent players from "stealing" the resources in your territory. In this regard, we should also let neutral players steal other neutral player carts, because it would be no meaning if you could kill a neutral player that is trying to take resources from your territory, but not be able to do anything to his cart.

spoletta

These neutral changes are interesting, but they pose the issue for players without residencies. They would not be able to gather all, it would require to implement a "pre-residency registration" system.