Gold Is Out of Balance

Faucets

Sinks

I felt the same as when ML came out. I had to have  a strategy to kill things in Ice. The weapons and armor may not advance as quickly. Took me minutes to kill a WW.

Gold is an issue. I was not trying to make gold and I gave most of my stuff away to others who needed it. However, I ended up with well over 2m from beta weekends. The curve is too sharp for a seasonal server, and people are going to feel behind if they come in late and things are priced as if everyone has 1m gold laying around after a few weeks to a month. The goal of the seasonal server seems to be to ensure people don't feel left behind and can enter in at any time.

1. You're absolutely correct here and I agree completely. This is a must.
2. Honestly, since they're once a week I could go either way on this. To me they almost felt low given the effort compared to just mob farming over the same amount of time, going back to how valid the issue is for point 1.

Nice research!

  Faucets:
  I think that you did not take into account many different factors that could affect your calculations, so I think it would be good to live the whole season in such a state as is in order to have real data on how things will be with gold.
  The dependencies of density of monsters, respawn speed, and killing speed during the life of the server are not taken into account. There will be more competition that will not allow farming so easily.
  So I think we need more data to really draw conclusions.

Sinks:
1. It’s a good idea, but you can’t just increase the price, it could really help to think about producing arrows, but then we need to add a larger supply of feathers to the resource storage, let’s say up to 5k, and feathers should drop a lot more.
2. I don't mind.
3. I don't mind. But we have to realy fix reagent droping from magic creatures like lich still drop necromancy reagents.
4.I don't mind.
5. Ethereal mounts should not be freely available in NL. I think that they could be as an account reward (assigned to the account) that can be received for some seasonal achievements, for example, being one of the main BOD contributors for the conginarium or being the first in killing some boss or seasonal battles in outposts or guild challenge.
  And the reward could be a token that you can receive only one piece per season on your account and it could be re-received in the next season.
  Each season will have new type of ethereal mount.

I think just to lower the amount of gold from quest rewards, or limit them to one per character is enough or maybe even take them away.
You should'nt loose gold while killing monsters. I remember the first weekend as a mage I was always broke. 

Kel:
To help players coming late to the season, nothing really will help. Since if  you make prices higher or give less gold  as loot, the new player will struggle longer to just get enough gold to play the game. It will not help to catch up to the players who have been there from start.

Ian said:

1. Decrease monster gold

Monster gold drops are way way too high. I could easily make 110k an hour killing White Wyrms. You could try to reduce the spawn rate, but waiting around is boring. I think decreasing the drop amount is the way to go. The graph below shows gold against monster fame. I think lower level mobs are fine, but even liches are too good at the moment. They can be killed with 2 spells at the lowest Congiarum level and 1 spell with power spellbooks. The blue line shows what a healthier drop rate might look like.

Greater dragons are giving 3k gold on NL, and I'm not counting the gems worth another 3k gold

Sinks

1. Increase the price of arrows and bolts

Arrows and bolts are too cheap. Start by doubling the price from NPC fletchers. This might also encourage players to actually craft them.

3. Consider increasing the price of reagents

Could try 15gp per reagent. Perhaps add additional reagents to the early quest rewards for newbie mages. Alternatively, this could encourage more players to be warriors or archers.

No thank you

Increasing prices and reducing loot are just ways to cripple new players to compensate the real issue: nothing to spend gold for.

There is the need of ways to spend gold constantly for end game and little expenses at start. For example a good solution would be remove repairs from crafters (it's just annoying to go bother people for repairs), and move it to npc. NPC will get paid based on the quality of the items, like an invulnerability item repair will cost way more than a fortification. This way people will spend to repair and the repairs cost will scale with quality being more punishing to a point where people has more money to spend.

Additionally they can add more consumables to vendors, like special arrows (example explosive arrows) to deal aoe or apply dots, also special grenades would be a good idea. In general removing the crafting of consumables and let the npc handle it will be a natural gold sink. Player trades just move the gold around in the end.

As for ethereal, I think everyone should get an ethereal horse from the start so we don't have to bother buying horses. Why? Because at the rate they die at the start of the game will increase the price exponentially making them inaccessible to new players.
They can always sell ethereal paint, or any other ethereal types in the store.

Last thing, if people spend hours farming gold this shard has already failed, because it means there is nothing better to do, an that's BAD. Gold should be earned primarily by finding good items or artifacts and trading with players, loot gold should be just a way to get started.