I'm hoping this post won't come across as a "whine" or a "sky is falling" type post as I've been accused of in the past. Let me preface this post by saying I genuinely want this game to succeed and have put a lot of time into it. I have had less time lately due to work but am still dedicated to the game. That said, everyone I know in game has noticed a similar problem: the economy is pretty dead. I'm seeing more merchant shops open now than ever before even in the "B" section which I've never seen before. Admittedly I have not played that long, but the population is really dwindling. I've heard people say that its just the season but this descent has been going on for 3 months or so from my observation. Rather than remain negative I wanted to try to take stock of what can be done to address these issues to ensure the best possible testing and launch.
1. Combat and changes. Erdrick had a great post in the patch notes for the August 28th patch and I understand he is a veteran with a lot of experience. I don't want to add much to it other than a caution that I think if some of these issues aren't resolved a huge portion of the population may leave in the coming months (as I have seen in the past few). I keep seeing nerfs to things, which is inevitable and hasn't impacted me really, but we also need changes to systems like threat, healing viability, mob hp, etc. Lets get to this and help the devs get this tweaked. I'm hardly the person to give advice here as I don't have a ton of experience with Gazluk - but from having played a lot of skills to 70+ with pretty solid gear I think Erdrick's post and a recent post by Andelas (in another thread if I recall) are spot on. I can link them if asked.
2. The economy. Currently we're losing players and testing is getting more tedious. We need to have the cost of the merchants drastically reduced to help all types of merchants. You have to be REALLY grinding to get enough stuff to sell to make 7-8k a day worth it. It doesn't sound like much but it can really reduce profits. Even when I sell 100k a day of items I'm losing nearly 10% to a "tax" and also having to compete with other players. Now with work I'm functioning more like an "average" player and not grinding as much so I might make 10k some days and that barely pays the tax - meaning I just basically deleted those items from my inventory and got nothing back. Removing or reducing the tax a lot could really help the economy by giving people incentive to keep a shop up. I'd say just make it something minimal and have shops auto-close if they reach 0 items (after 24 hours) - so we don't have empty shops but we can see more goods. The other main issue with economy is the number of players which will likely get a boost at Beta/steam launch.
3. Another issue is transportation and banking. I have made a post before but I'm going to be blunt here: the banking system is not acceptable. We spend more time micro-managing our inventory than testing. I get that in a "real" economy we can rely on other players to sell stuff - but absolutely can't right now. There is hardly anyone selling stuff. Rather than change systems permanently, you might consider temporarily buffing the inventory size of all banks and doubling our personal inventory to help reduce this tedium. After all, we are testing - and if we spend all our time testing an inventory mini-game.... well lets just say I can see why so many that I know have quit and verbalized this as their main reason.
I will make some more suggestions later, but I'm simply asking that the devs consider how "fun" the game is to test considering we have so few players to trade with or buy from. It is becoming a true hindrance to testing. Hell, I spend weeks grinding for things to test something when I could have figured it out in half the time or less if there were a reliable economy to purchase these goods from. Then I could make some detailed feedback on the issue or keep testing to discover "meta" issues like balance amongst skills. I hope that this feedback helps in moving the game in a better direction for testing and keeping players involved.