I like the way things are now, where only spawners give experience. (EDIT: SolaceDevotio's reply changes my mind on this a bit)
My issue with exp coming only from mobs is that standing at a mob spawner is a completely lazy way to make money. This is a hard core economy server. :/ We shouldn't be able to be so lazy. I can stand in one spot and chat for however long I want and then click a bit to kill the mobs that have built up. It requires nearly no work. It's ridiculous. I like Revan's idea of only having exp on the rarer ores. Exp and max tools and enchanted books etc would still rise in price. And it would actually take work to get the experience.
Your words have changed my mind. I'm ok with the way things are now (exp from spawners only), but if it's not turning out that well, I think this "rare ore" idea is worth a try.
Doesn't prove a thing, I'm just refraining from discussing how we find and determine fastbreakers/autoclickers/etc
This is likely another nerf to money making. Mining in the nether was very profitable (selling the exp/quartz to players, not to the server) and from my experience, made more than the 20k/hr cap on farming. Mining in the mining world with an eff7 likewise made quite a bit of money, although I'll admit that I don't go on mining runs very often with my eff7 and am mostly basing this claim on reports from others. On the other hand, I also agree with Solace. There is very little work involved beyond finding spawners and setting them up. After that, all you have to do is afk and come back every ~15 minutes to click for a couple seconds. This doesn't seem very Hardcore to me. And how would this affect server performance? I imagine a lot more people will be afking at spawners and the overall number of entities will probably go up. I believe andrew removed item frames at market because they count as entities and were causing a lot of lag. Mob drops (and I believe exp orbs as well) also count as separate entities. A player comes back from afk and kills all the mobs that spawned in the last 14 minutes, causing a temporary spike in the number of entities. Now imagine 10 players doing that. How about 20? 30?