I am really uncertain why the developers want the game to seem like you're hardly getting rewarded at all for gameplay.



Hellgates aren't really my style of gameplay, nor that of my friends, we prefer open world pvp along with open world rewards.

In Diablo 3, we have treasure goblins that give good loot, resources, bloodshards, gems, all sorts of usable items... and then you can even find goblin hoards where you can try to kill them all and get a ton of loot... in the long run though, at 'end game' status, you end up maybe finding one item upgrade a day... depending on how good your gear is, it may even take a month, so while goblins may not give you something you necessarily need, they still feel very rewarding when you kill them because you're getting a bunch of stuff.



Chests in Albion while at one point could give 20k silver and some runes still didn't feel very rewarding... at that time, yes you could easily afford several months worth of premium in just a couple days farming them, but I believe the gold/silver market would have eventually balanced out, and it will, and is working its way there already. Unfortunately there are people who have had really good groups that have done nothing but hellgates or some people that have only done gathering and have collected FAR FAR FAR more gold (hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions in the top earner cases) that far outweigh what I could have personally earned from chest hunting. So personally, I have 9k gold right now, my buddy has about 15k, and I've been informed of someone that has 400k from just gathering (already gathering t8 while my buddy and I are struggling to gather t5).



The monsters in albion in general do not feel rewarding at all when you kill them for the time and risk you put into it. In many cases people have to drop pvp skills from their weapons and/or armor to do solo mob hunting either when it comes to camps or solo dungeons, which adds a great deal more risk to the situation. Then the mobs only drop around 60? silver or so for t6 hounds, 100-200 or so for each other monster in a camp. It is a bit strange to think about... but it still doesn't feel rewarding. Runes are certainly not rewarding and any item drops from the creatures you kill are incredibly rare.



Back in Ultima Online in Ren times (we're talking basically 2000-2002), it felt rewarding to go into a dungeon, find an Ogre Lord spawn, sit there for a half hour, hour, or however long you wanted until your backpack was full... get 500 - 700 gold per kill along with a number of magical items varying in value (mostly trash, but still sellable). In Felucca (the pvp facet of UO) if you did this, you'd get the same rewards, but there would usually be less people, however when you did see people they would more often than not be there to kill you., making it much riskier.



Eventually Ultima Online developed the Risk vs Reward system, and your company could do something a bit similar... For UO, they ended up basically doubling the resources and gold gained in the felucca facet compared to the trammel facet (trammel being restricted to consensual pvp only). One idea you could potentially use is making random zones either daily or hourly worth a great deal more to visit, increasing traffic to zones that right now might not get much traffic. I would suggest multiple zones in multiple continents so that not everyone rushes straight to one zone. I am not just saying that mobs would drop more in this area either, resource gathering would be doubled (or potentially tripled depending on how popular the system is) for everything that spawns in those zones as well. It doesn't have to have increased number of rare resources, just a bonus to gathering in general.



Naturally the whole gathering thing I mentioned could be completely skipped, since we are mostly talking about the rewards that camps and monsters in solo dungeons give.



I don't know, something needs to be done though and I really feel like the last 2 nerfs to chests was the absolute wrong direction to go. If anything, they should have been more rewarding. If it felt for some reason that hellgates were less rewarding because of the chests, then maybe that means that hellgates needed to be buffed? Although from what I've been told, for groups that survive hellgates, they come out of them with hundreds of thousands of silver for each player... So I really don't get how chests were even comparable, especially when the more people you have farming chests in an area the less profit that is made.