[Trexmaster]

There's nothing at all arbitrary about it. If you are a brand new player, then you have not legend extended and will thus have a lower tax rate. If you're experienced enough to legend extend, then you understand the perks and are willing to pay a bit more. There's really no way to "abuse" this because you're mainly looking at taxes on shopkeeper stalls, houses (ideally) and goods purchased from shops. What are you going to do, rent a house using a non-LE'd alt and say it belongs to your main? That's a major inconvenience to save just a few hundred murai.

You'd be surprised. It's not uncommon to have an alt dedicated to holding a house slot if the character you'd want it on already has a house on file. So if it were somehow changed to tax home owners based on their progress...everyone would just have level 10 alts dedicated to holding homes to get around this. Not even getting into the fact that owning a home =/= being rich. You get access by forking over 500 asagos (5$) which is completely independent of any in-game progress. The only thing that demands having money is how much you want to furnish it.

If we wanted a good money sink we'd need to have something in game that actually incentivized the constant spending of murai. As it stands once you've upgraded/bought your equipment, paid the Hikari tax, and furnished your house, there's little left in the game you'll be spending murai aside from repair/teleport/inn fees every now and then. Thus why people who have played the game even more than a few months and still grind end up with so much excess money, let alone those who decide to be sellers of the many one-time purchases new characters have to make (quality tools, material kits, weapon parts) or those who produce what few consumables the game has (food, alchemy items, magic stones).

Sure, having a crafting tax makes the producers cut into their profits, but anyone who isn't crafting for profit is eating a lot of fees. It's a sad day to be a sushi chef who catches their own fish then has to shell out twenty murai to fillet their fish every time for each fish. This would be fine if there were a bigger market for consumables, but as it stands even a single crafter can feasibly meet the demands of the entire server in terms of consumable consumption. Meaning that odds are, most crafters aren't going to be able to easily sell what they make for a return on the tax they had to shell out to do anything.

Others have already pointed out how the issue is that with the current SL2 economy the only thing keeping murai flowing is the constant influx of new characters who need to go through the aforementioned brief period of spending to get up to par. Once they've spent their part they'll no longer contribute any murai to the economy aside from occasional consumable purchases if they do not opt to completely alter their build and re-enter the new-player spending phase. SL2 has been active for going on 7 years now, so many people are sitting on millions of murai where it takes less than 100,000 to get everything a character needs for the entirety of their existence bar drastic build changes.

Of course there's also the question of if we even need a money sink right now. As Tanasinn pointed out it isn't an issue that some people have loads of murai as it ultimately serves no purpose other than out-bidding people, as we still don't have any meaningful use for murai once you've upgraded equipment and paid your Hikari tax. Typically when you have a lot of unused money piling up inflation happens, but as those who amass that much tend to not need any of what's generally circulated, prices remain geared toward those who aren't obscenely rich.

The only thing that's actually caused inflation of good prices is...taxes. Crafting tax combined with the update that effectively jacked up the material cost of nearly every recipe by forcing ores to be converted into ingots for metal recipes and the introduction of thread material (basically ingots for cloth) pushed the cost onto the consumers as well. While equipment is generally priced the same anything that must be crafted is now noticeably more expensive due to how much more it takes to be made.

For example: I used to sell most quality tools for 500-600 murai a pop, nowadays I sell them for 1,200+, as they went from costing roughly 200~ murai in materials to 3x that. To illustrate-

A Whetstone (+2 Power tool for non-tome weapons) used to cost:
2 Iron Ore (15 Murai from Tannis)
1 Solid Stone (200 Murai from Oniga Casino) to craft.

Coming out to a material cost of 230 murai if all the needed materials were purchased.

Now a Whetstone costs
2 Iron Ingots (Average of 2.5~ Iron Ore per Iron Ingot at max efficiency, so approx. 80~ Murai from Tannis after taxes)
3 Solid stones (600*1.1 Tax = 660 Murai on average after taxes).

Coming to a material cost of approximately 740 murai AND a crafting fee of 30 murai for a total cost of 770 murai, an increase of 3.3x the original price.

The massive increase in production cost isn't an issue for the producer only if they plan to in turn sell the quality tools for profit...but wait, their product is then taxed AGAIN when the buyer goes to make the purchase, meaning the consumer is getting hurt even more by these changes if they aren't running an equally profitable business.

To put this into perspective, the 1,200 murai tools I typically sell then end up costing 1,320 murai to the buyer. I, the producer, am not the one taking the hit, rather the person who needs my service is the one paying extra due to taxes and material cost increases. Said people are often not the people who need their money taken away more as they're still part of the initial spending cycle and often making just enough murai to be able to afford to build their character. This same logic applies to any craft as the crafter isn't the one who's going to lose money unless they're not operating purely to sell at a profit, and we shouldn't be forcing all crafters to compete for what fleeting business exists due to the current state of the economy.

Removing the crafting fee all together would allow crafters who don't solely craft to operate a business to enjoy what they do. Not even to mention how weird it'd be to be trying to cook dinner for your friends and suddenly get told by your stove that you have an insufficient balance to boil your ramen.

If we really want to keep an upkeep on crafting I might suggest having some kind of items that can help crafting in some way (greater great success chance? IDK) that have a durability to repair after X amount of uses or something. Something to create an incentive to invest murai but won't completely gate you if you don't think it necessary for what you're doing. As it stands the current crafting fee does absolutely nothing to those with hoards of wealth and cripples those who don't already have a constant influx of murai from what they craft to support future fees.