Speedy: When players are complaining that the fact that the 15 relic fragments you need to make one piece of armor only cost about 1.5 million, besides the additional 1.5 million for the essences and gems, making it cost 3 million for an item that will wear out, it just sounds ridiculous to me. Not all of us farm gold constantly; 3 million is still a pretty hefty sum to us. If relic fragments cost a lot more to make, then the armor we make from them will cost a lot more. I applauded the Devs for allowing people who don't have a billion gold in the bank to get some decent equipment; you're trying to undermine that effort and keep the status quo, where only the super rich can afford to either PvP or PvM.
You seem to forget that for the first HALF of UO's 12 year history, we all used cheap GM made weapons and armor almost exclusively, both for PvP and PvM. Combat in UO didn't depend on how many million in gold you had in the bank; it depended almost entirely on your own skill. Weapons and armor were cheap; if you lost your suit, any GM smith could make you a whole new suit in like 5 minutes for a few thousand gold. If you didn't have any gold, you could fight perfectly well, even in PvP, in bone armor you picked up off skeletons. 5 day old players had equipment that was just as good as any other player. It was only in 2003, when the Devs brought us Age of Shadows, that crafting became irrelevant and the game became so item based as a result of artifacts and a massively overcomplicated and ugly armor, weapons and combat system. Coincidentally, that's also when about half of the player base left.
Personally, I welcome the idea that those of us who don't have 200 million gold in the bank can now have equipment that's just as good as the stuff that the uber rich, and the gold buyers, have.
Ever since the AOS team figured out that the game wasn't broken, so they fixed it until it was, it has allowed the super-rich to get continually richer, while it has become harder and harder for the poor and the new players to ever get started. When Doom was set up so that only tamers got arties for the whole first year, that didn't help the situation. Then ML allowed the players with those 200 million gold artifact suits to farm Miasma, Swoop and the Trog cave for endless gold at practically no risk. If you have the 200 million to buy the suit, you can make several million a day gold farming. It's a vicious cycle. That has been disastrous for the long-term health of the game.
Why should the Devs care whether we gold farm or not? The game is what we make of it. UO did perfectly well for 6 years when they let us figure out what we wanted to do and didn't worry about whether it was profitable or not. We figured that out for ourselves. It wasn't about figuring out which monster to farm to get the most cash the fastest; we decorated our houses, fought guild wars, put bounties on our enemies' heads, fought whatever monster we felt like, or just explored. Some of us sat at the Brit forge, making weapons and armor on demand, and repairing stuff. Others sat at Brit bank hawking their goods, or at Moonglow selling their dragons. Basically, just leaving us to our own devices seemed to work better than trying to push us into making UO into a Diablo clone.
As for the relic fragments, it takes at least 15 relic fragments and 40 various essences to make one piece of quality armor. That means that suits are still expensive; we need 6 pieces of armor, 2 jewels, a weapon and shield. That's 10 pieces, which is 150 relic fragments and 400 various essences. IF the crafter doesn't fail at least once. If we count an average of 30k per essence and 100k per relic fragment, that's 12 million for essences and 15 million for relic fragments. By the time you add in essences and gems, an imbued suit will cost 30 million or so. That may be a little cheaper than a 200 million artifact suit, but it's not anywhere near affordable for a new player.
On Atlantic, any bronze runic that's priced at less than 850k doesn't last over a few minutes. 40 perfect emeralds cost 1 million, and that was cheap; they generally cost about 30K each. And 1,000 valorite ingots were 200k. That's 2 million plus to get 28 relic frags. 73K per frag is NOT CHEAP!!!!