The issue I’ve seen so far is because silver values get so low for freshly spawned mobs and so high if they haven’t been killed in a while there is a big disadvantage for anyone who mostly plays during prime times. Playing extremely late night/early morning I can earn in 30 minutes what would take me many hours to make in the evening. One of the nice things about the last alpha was that there were a lot of dungeons that weren’t marked on the map so if you explored a zone well and learned where the hidden dungeons were you had a much better chance of finding mobs that hadn’t been killed recently. I haven’t found any dungeons like that in this alpha yet and the ones I knew about from the last alpha don’t exist in this one.
That’s alright though, I mean I can always trade or work the market to make albion online silver right? Maybe, but most of the markets are dead and even the most active aren’t active enough to make as much silver as you would running even a T3 dungeon in the early morning. The major issue limiting people’s use of the market is, as far as I can tell, that there is no real reason to trade on a large scale. Resources are pretty much available everywhere. A zone with T3 trees will have T3 of everything else. Even a zone with T7 trees will probably have up to T6 of everything else. There is no region in the game that is missing stone or metal almost entirely, forcing people to trade from the cities with an abundance to those with a lack. Combine that with the fact that you can’t really specialize in the gathering or refining of a specific resource to the point where you can bring your costs down and give yourself a market advantage and it takes away the need to trade completely. The crafting grind would drive trade in equipment but most guilds I’ve seen level up their craftsmen internally and have a non-market system for farming and producing gear for guild members.
I don’t think there’s any way you can fix things in this alpha since it’s all pretty core to the game right now but for the next one you should really look at changing resource distribution to drive trade between cities. Additionally there need to be jobs/services that can be done during peak hours unless you’re planning to have a map big enough to where each player or two online essentially has their own zone. I have no idea what this job could be other than farming and it’s looking like personal and guild islands dedicated to farming are sufficient for all but the smallest guilds to handle their food needs internally.