Why not x4? I haven’t seen your reason to change that to x1. Is it because the blood crystals provide a way to quickly recover from a wipe/raid? The focus is not about the time it takes for x1. PVP is more fun on x4. x1 doesn’t support solos much. A bigger clan can easily recover.
Unless, you get purged with each wave taking blood crystals away like it is treasure. 
The problem with x4 is the ease of which to gain materials and sure even recover.
It takes the fun out of the anticipation and preparation of battles and raids.
The game is made and encouraged to have a clan. It’s not made for solos. Despite that many have discovered clever ways to be a solo, good on them. But it shouldn’t be catered to solos.
See, now we need alliances. Not some motley fool of clan leadership. 
Well said. There should be strength in numbers. If a group of folks can form a clan and effectively work together, they should have an advantage over solos. It is the whole reason why societies exist in real life. This whole idea of needing to make solos equal is a bit silly. Gives folks an incentive to group up.
If a group of folks can make an alliance, then it can be more equal to both solos and non-solos. We are thinking ahead to the next chapter with scraps of truth about alliances vs clans. About that fun, however, I digress… you can have both clans and alliances. One is just more persistent. 
You are forced to it, you’re a slave owned by your government. You are not? Then try not to pay taxes to your masters and see what happens 
I always thought it odd that demon orbs and explosives are two totally different techs. I wouldn’t have dragon powder at all and all explosions require the gland.
As a PvE player, as long as I can still blow up star metal meteors with a single arrow, I’m good. Feel free to do whatever with everything else to balance PvP. Just don’t make dragon powder TOO difficult to craft. Crafting several steelfire gets tedious.
Interesting aspect. I’d argue that by nature humans will always form groups/communities. You can argue whether or not you have a good government but the reality is that there will always be some form of government. Even in societies where the prior government completely collapsed, some sort or organization/government will fill it’s place. Just our nature.
Works for me
Always felt like dragon powder did not belong to this game. Offlining and explosives discourage a lot of people from plating on pvp servers
Dragon powder is not just something that you just happen across.
Castles, Knights, Swords, Armor, Cannons, and Gunpowder co-existed on European battlefields for around 400 years. The Mongols introduced guns to Europe in like the mid-13th century - armies were using gunpowder before plate armor. Even when gunpowder weapons became predominant, castles and city walls remained imposing obstacles. Hell medieval castles were used to decent effect in WWII. Most castles that are still standing, unless they’ve been converted to simple palaces, were adapted at some point to both resist and employ guns.
I believe dragonpowder draws inspiration from the “magic dust” used by Natohk in The Black Colossus to blow up the Khorajan heavy cavalry. So something akin to an explosive exists in the Howardian lore, although I always thought Natohk’s stuff to be more like white phosphorus and less like black powder. But in either case, it showcases the idea that in Howard’s Conan stories, most of the flashier “magic” was just highly advanced science ahead of its time.
And that’s something to consider. Science such as that has been the domain of ancient sorcerers and highly educated priests, not random barbarians. Making them mass produceable removes the sense of wonder and awe from those inventions.
Okay, maybe the Giant Kings possessed the secret of dragonpowder and left the instructions lying carelessly around. It’s a bit of a stretch, but not entirely unbelievable in the Funcom version of the setting.
And there is the elephant in the room. It’s not the dragon powder, it’s the fact that you can mass produce this to have hundreds ready to use by raid time tomorrow.
What about making it so you have to be present to make dragon powder and can only do one at a time, like the kurak tome? It actually limits the amount being made because it limits the playing time of the player.
Oh no, suddenly I can’t be a PvP rat that stay hidden farming DP only to wipe some bases clean at some point 
And… Imagine having to fight in any other way that spamming bombs!!!
I say this with a bit of sarcasm, but I wonder how accurate it can be at times 
I can make three at a time on the go. A bigger clan could easily multiply that.
That just ruined my imagination on how to get this to work. As a solo, I’m not going to stay in my base all day letting the sun go around the earth with no harvest.
There is nothing you can do that will hamper the clans’ productions that will not neuter a solo. Sorry but if there are clans, the solo will always get the shaft in any fix to the obnoxious amounts of dragon powder.
One quick fix would to make DP decay at a rate of 1 per 15 min (and cant place in feeders or fridges to stall timer). Jars at 48 hours, no freezers as well. Arrow at 24 hours, no freezers as welk. So instead of mass dp storage, clans would have to store non stackable jars. That change is at most 15 mins of dev time. Add decay timer to the three i listed in th BP, black list thos ids in freezers and feeders. Thats it. Just number editing.
So how do you counter that idea on PvE? We craft for convenience in farming starmetal or support in battles rather than raiding (obviously). As I’ve mentioned, crafting dragon powder is tedious—mainly the steelfire. We’d be stockpiling tons of materials only to craft a few arrows at a time. It would be tons of materials in chests when we already know full chests can contribute to additional lag. I’m not sure there’s any REAL easy soliton to DP.