The thing that made PKING, Staking, and even the general economy work well in original RSC was the players. There was always an influx of new players, an active and steady player base, and lots of players that would eventually quit and never log back in while their banks were full of stuff.
The problem with private servers is that every thing that required long-term investment has been up (rightly so cuz we're all adults now and have no time). Also we're all essentially God-Mode at this game now. We know every single little technical nuance to get as close to perfection as possible when it comes to staking, player killing, even skilling and merching. There's no guesswork, and there's no large player base to affect demand of certain items.
Wildy used to be high risk high reward because you could run into any player type of any skill level up there. Sometimes you'd get lucky and off some noob who brought all his gold with him. Other times you'd get smoked by a pack of level 13 mages. The point is, everyone knows how to produce the most cost-effective and efficient chars for pking and staking now. So all the variation is gone. All the potential luck is gone.
Same with skilling and the economy. Nobody merches anything lower than rune or addy anymore. Cuz everyone's first move is to immediately train on chickens until they hit 40 atk/def and jump from nothing straight to rune. Where's the incentive to mine and smith bronze, steel, mith, etc? Nobody buys it. Where's the incentive to fish anything other than swordies because the only people pking with food are high level? There's no low level pking so nobody needs to buy trout, salmon, etc.
The point is, if you want the game to thrive and be more fun, either massively increase the active player count (not gonna happen) - or people need to stop playing the game the same way they play every other server. Stop making the same exact character with the same exact level as the last server. You want pking to be fun? Make low or mid-level pkers and actually play on them. This will stimulate the economy in huge ways. Everybody is just chasing wealth for rares in pretty much every server anymore. Make a pking and Staking rank table and base it on overall wins, not level.
I dunno - you gotta look at the root problem and fix it. You can't just bandaid it.
I think its also inevitable that by design this game will eventually have an oversaturated and inflated economy. With no way to take wealth out of the game at the rate that it comes in, it will eventually go off the rails. The same thing happened to original RSC in its waning years. The player base figured out how to make money the fastest way and just created so much wealth into the game it was impossible to de-inflate it. That process is magnified on private servers with QOL improvements such as batching and multiplied xp rates. It just makes it a way faster process.
You gotta pull money out of this game somehow. That's why I think P2P content should be a separate "world" like in the old days, and you should have to pay a for a monthly sub for it, OR pay a TON of in-game GP for it (like 500k or 1m).
