While there are quite a few questionable decisions currently within the PQ3’s economy, I feel like the biggest is how chests and gold currently works.
Currently, salvaging feels absolutely awful. Nothing feels worst than having a diamond chest and being able to do literally nothing with it because all chest slots are currently on missions that cannot be canceled in the reward screen, making it impossible to keep the chest.
Salvaging definitely needs to give something in return beyond gold. One possible breakdown is to make it like the armor system, where there is a small chance to get another material when scrapping them. The scaling could be something along the lines of:
Level 1-10 Chest = 0.5% chance for key
Level 11-20 Chest = 0.75% chance for key
Level 21-30 Chest = 1% chance for key
Level 31-40 Chest = 1.25% chance for key
Level 41-49 Chest = 1.5% chance for key
Level 50 Chest = 2% chance for key
Key rarity of course being the same as the chest that is scrapped.
As for gold, the end of chapter 3 and 4 really start to show the lack of things to use it on. Not sure if end game has something that sinks a lot of it, but I am in chapter 8 with no sign in sight of anything to use gold on. It has basically been perpetually at 10k since chapter 3. If there is something later in the game that sinks it properly, it takes forever to reach it with a massive week/month gap of gameplay before gold has a purpose.
One way to fix this is to make dungeon more doable while progressing through the game so people can sink gold to empower the dungeon runs. Right now empowered dungeons aren’t sinking gold throughout the storyline due to them scaling beyond what players are capable of defeating.
The other fix would be to allow gold to refresh the daily deals rather than gems, but increase the chance that gem offers show among the daily deals instead of gold ones. Something like a 2,500 gold reroll for the daily deals instead of a 75 gem one. Increasing the chance of gems appearing as 2 of the offers would make it more consistent that only 4 gold offers would appear on the free side rather than all 6, which would still act to sink gems, likely even more so than the 75 gem reroll does, while also sinking gold.