I agree, but even if it was people probably wouldn't bother to. One band of essence from 1-99 creates really awkward economic issues - if it's worth bothering with for a high level player then it's vastly too expensive for a low level player, and low level players can't produce it in high enough quantities to fuel the high level economy.
Add a higher tier of pure essence that can only be mined at higher level mining that gives extra runes when RCing. Lower level skillers can still use pure essence.
"Tierscape" is a really interesting problem. Without tiers we have the problem that RC has, where the low level material's value is set by its highest possible use. (Flax is the same.) On the other hand if you tier things you get the stone spirits problem, where only the highest or few highest things are worth having. (That would be different right now in RC because of waters, but arguably that's also a really weird state for the skill to be in.)
Then why not have the amount you gather per minute increase as your level goes up. So a 99 mining would mine it a lot faster than a level 1 mining even if they were using the same pickaxe
This doesn't really fix the issue in isolation because the value of things is exponential but the rate at which you gather them can't be significantly better than linear. You also introduce a weird situation where it's simply not worth gathering a material like this at low level - assuming the economy is working correctly, it would make more sense to buy them than to gather them at 1/100th of the rate.
Well the thing is, you can adjust it by let people mine them as a noted version. To lower the trips between banks/ using additional stuff, thats makes it better/faster by big margin.
I don't mean to imply it's not a solvable problem, just that you'd have to change quite a lot of things to result in people actually mining it.
I don't think I want Ess to come primarily from mining, but maybe a benefit to mining yourself, or an alternate type of untradeable essence, or a product used to 'enhance' pure essence that yields more xp and/or runes.
Like Daeyalt essence in OSRS would be neat, though I think they would need somewhat of a buffed version to not be Dead on arrival in rs3
Yeah something like that was one of the mechanics we had on the shortlist for M&S - every time you mine an ore you also get a free untradeable one for yourself to reward DIY. In the end we felt like we didn't need it (and it's thematically and technically quite clunky) but it's definitely a mechanical option we have if we need it.
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