Not any more strange than being able to heal a crippled leg. We are all Fallout Jesus. \o/
Chi si ritira dalla lottaE' un gran figlio di mignotta!
Virtual economies are almost always going to be whacked. The foundation of economics is scarcity and as we all know there is no scarcity when you reach the higher levels and have rl experience under your belt. I get that mining/crafting is an exploitable way to have unlimited production of guns/armors/caps to satisfy your needs but the same could be said about farming encounters. The only way that the supply side of the game's economy could be kept in check would be for there to exist a limited resource. In pay to play games this would be the one that rl money would buy. As fonline's license prevents that this method won't work but the exchange rates between the pay resource and the rest of the game are usually shit anyways. An alternative would be for the GMs to spend their time making sure that there are only so much of everything in the game, only x sniper rifles in the hands of players, if theres x, then no more will drop until 1 breaks or is sold and disappears. I feel like this would only make the hoarding habit worse and prevent noobs from EVER getting equipment (you swing your hammer but there is no ore left/you can't make that now, there are too many already in existence/raider drops: nothing). On the plus side the lag problem would probably be reduced and unarmed use would go from select few to mainstay of all but a few rich players...BTW this is all theoretical, I personally would prefer our current system and all its myriad flaws as opposed to the problems that would come with most of these.
high tier stuff
I'm gonna briefly shed some light on what will future comes and how it addresses your concerns:a) scarcity of resources - gathering cooldowns are gonna be removed in favor of scavenging locations. On those locations, resources will be spawned occasionaly, on known rates. This means, they will be unlimited, but 'countable' (we know exactly how much is gonna be produced in a world per unit of time, as opposed to gathering cooldowns, where we knew exactly how much one player could produce in a unit of time)
makes sense, will the mines be removed?
Don't know yet how exactly it will look like, probably HQ ones will be some kind of dungeon with PvE.