Many of our monsters have droptables that generate a very high amount of cash in the form of alch drops. This might be a problem because more cash gets generated than sinked and thus cash slowly but surely inflates. My idea is to take a look at each droptable and simply balance them in terms of the amount of cash they can generate. I don't expect this topic to get a lot of positive reactions, since it's gonna make people earn less money, but I'd appreciate constructive feedback on the topic.
The problemLet's take one of the most killed monsters as an example; blue dragons. This is their current droptable:
There are a few things you may have noticed: There are a whopping 30 items in it's droptable, 19 of which are likely either gonna be alched or sold to the general store in order to generate cash. It has 3 guarranteed drops, which all have a use in terms of skilling. For something that already has good guarranteed drops it has way too big of a droptable.
Let's do some math shall we. For this, we'll assume the droprates are absolute and in 1000 kills we get the exact amount that is the droprate. This won't happen in practise but it's done for the sake of statistics. In 1000 kills we get the following: 1 Dragon hatchling, 40 half keys, 200 herbs, 5 d skirt, 5 d legs, 5 shield left half, 5 shield right half, 5 d med helm, 6 d scims, 6 d 2hs, 7 dds, 7 d spear, 7 d long and 7 d mace. This leaves us with 694 common/uncommon drops. I do not know the rate at which these drop so I am going to take the average amount of cash that a common/uncommon drop would generate. This is 13,616 gp. The value of 694 common/uncommon drops is 9,449,504 gp. The value of the dragon drops is 4,493,535 gp. That makes 13,943,039 gp total, divide that by 1000 and
we have our average of 13,943 gp generated per blue dragon killed.It takes no less than 10 seconds to kill a blue dragon in decent gear, and with the amount of people killing them a ton of cash is being generated. While something like thieving (which is supposed to be generating cash) gets nowhere close to that number.
There's also the fact that dragon items are more attractive to alch than to sell. I remember selling my dragon weapons/armour in scape, I do think I'm not the only one that misses them having an actual value.
So what should we do?- Less alchable items and more variety among them, quite a few monsters have the full sets of a metal armour in their droptable
- This isn't gonna be liked, but more junk. There is quite a lack of bad drops in a lot of places. Lower level darts/javelins/knives, barb bolt tips, runes, black & mithril drops could all be proper bad drops.
- Decrease the max amount of coins per drop. A blue dragon would still be fine with 11k max instead of 22k.
- Flat out remove a lot of dragon items from droptables. A single monster should not drop more than 2-3 of them.
Once again, feedback is appreciated.