It's nearly impossible to get completely rid of botters and their main source of meso is monster drops, because it's not limited by anything but time.
So increasing meso drops would backfire quite easily.
Crystals are from bosses and if the easy bosses are left as they are there won't be that many botters to actually take much advantage due to preqs and gear reqs. And ofc illegit boss runs are quite simple to catch since the bosses happen always in same maps which could have improved supervision for hackers (like hard magnus in old times used to be quite much trap for hackers). Also if the items from bosses could be sold to npc for fixed prices the bosses would atleast have some value of doing.
Upgrading those legion boxes would be quite simple solution. Especially the advanced ones. Currently the expectation values for max boxes are 127,5m+157,5m+44,94m (novice,intermediate,advanced)/week. And if the advanced ones had normal distributed meso it would be 510m/week. That would help so that you could actually get decent amount of meso to sf your gear and also with more meso on legit players it would help quite a lot to fight against real money trades.
And i seriously doubt that hackers would take much advantage of that since those boxes cost 4400 coins to buy them all (that's impossible) and 1400 for just advanced ones which takes like 6k+ legion and starforced gear on all mules, which takes quite a lot of time to manage.
Probably everyone has noticed that there's quite huge price drops in AH and "dry seasons" in late autumn and late spring because there aren't that many players around.
Basically everything you do requires meso or something you can buy with meso, and where does all that meso come? Atleast not from cs meso sacks. Atleast 95% of ingame meso comes from monster drops. When playerbase gets low that creates some problems. The game eats way more meso than it produces.
Assuming you are capable of soloing nlotus and ndam and have 6 man squad for nlucid/nwill+ doing daily bosses and free maple tours you get ~500m meso/week which is enough for 2-4 safeguarded 15-17* sf attempts. That way it takes on mathematical probability about 3-6 weeks/item for 15-17* and well that's 1-2 years for every item which is enough time to get some new items and you have to start that circle all over again. scrolling 1 item is around 1b/item also so if you don't get meso from selling stuff it's bit hard to make any progress in game past certain point. And only ones who are meso farming in regular servers are botters which should be got rid of.
Also when you try to sell some better equipment with over 30b price the lack of meso seems to cause other problem, ppl offering real meso instead, which is illegal.
Raising the meso cap would help a bit on these situations since it would be safer to trade anyways when you don't need to do multiple transactions.
I could suggest several solutions to these problems.
1. Make the boss crystals and maple tours give more meso, and maple tour being 7 times/day for free since who buys 9m meso for 300 maple points when there's meso market with better rates.
2. Standardize the npc prices from 1 meso to something decent so bosses and daily quest items wouldn't be worthless even after the items they produce aren't really wanted anymore (empress, pink bean, tyrants...)
for example:
Von leon armors: 10m ea
Von leon weapons: 15m ea
Empress armors: 25m ea
Empress weapons: 75m ea
Elite heliseum items: 25m ea
Nova items: 50m ea
Tyrant items: 100m ea
CRA armors: 75m ea
fafnir weapons: 150m ea
boss set items: 20m ea
A core/faint stigma: 5m ea
S core/stigma: 100m ea
droplets: 100m ea
Lucid/will droplets: 300m ea
Spark of determination: 15m ea
cracked gollux: 10m ea
solid gollux: 30m ea
reinf gollux: 75m ea
sup gollux: 200m ea
Absos/umbras: according to coin values in shop
Ofc these prices are just for example but atleast if those bosses would give more than just few millions from the crystal ppl would have some motivation to do them instead of just forgetting them.
3. Add some meso pouches as pq reward with standardized amount of meso in each pouch (like 250m) , not those randomized things which always give something from the lower end 5%. The piggy bank from world tour is quite nice item but takes bit too long to get it.
4. Make the chance of gaining the meso amounts from meso pouches just linearly interpolated, not heavily weighted to the low values. It's quite nasty when you see items that give 100k-10b meso from some events and the amount you get is usually something like 500k. Opened once 20 of those advanced meso boxes from legion shop (give 1-50m ea) and i got total of 26m of those (when statistically you should really get 25,5m from each on avg)
5. This is not really about meso income but auction feature in AH would be nice.
Hope you had some time to read this and i would enjoy having your thoughts about this.
The coin prices are bit high ye, but when you collect those coins for ring and pendant you probably get ears and belt as a drop from hellux.
That store which spawns after gollux is killed has quite weird prices aswell, like 250 coins for meister cube. Well in 10 days you can get smithing meister and farm the ingredients for atleast 4 cubes or clear hellux every day.
Having gollux itself being hard is good thing since the eqps are still quite good (2x BiS+several 2ndBiS).
1 Entry per day for bosses you can fail isn't really something that should exist, and you could fail bosses even with issues that aren't even related to you like disconnecting. Limit the clears not entries. Same goes for all 1/day bosses.
It would also be nice to have the actual auctioning possibility, make that anonymous anyways.
Also it's quite annoying when there's quite insane price stomping going on, with some items the prices may go down by 30% in a day until someone buys the cheap ones out. MS2 used to have the feature that you couldn't undercut by more than 20% of the item average price so the prices would stay somewhat stable.
Gollux got revamped couple of weeks ago and now it's only 1 entry/day.
easy gollux is basically doable by anyone (smash 3 parts)
normal gollux is quite much same as nmagn (smash 2 parts)
hard gollux is similar to CRA (smash just 1 part, i recommend abdomen)
and hellux is quite much on the level of normal damien/lotus (go straight to head)
