Scholar is OP
The curio are OP
Village claim on resources is OP
Quests are actually also OP
All can be solved easily:
Lower the effectiveness of stats at higher levels, it's the only way. If in PvP it doesn't matter if you're 500, 580 or 3000 and we all fight as if we have 500 then that already alleviates the majority of the unbalance.
Someone being better at fighting animals really does not matter, if they want to grind for that then let them.
Ice is not incredibly valuable if you take this into consideration because it would just become a race to 500 from world start, so if someone quest permanently and also get ice then yes he is ahead but someone racing by purely questing will be very far too.
But then again I think this is all aids in general it's better to remove the overpowered credo stuff while also trying to balance localized resources as well as remove lp and xp rewards from quests.
Just study and have localized resources be fought for.
Rest is just incentive to make people pump so much time while not really being fun gameplay during that time.
If you just put curio and then do something nice it would be a more pleasant experience than whenever you're not questing you feel like you're losing out.
Also people can put in the same amount of time and have very different outcomes due to the randomness associated with everything for example traveling half the world and then finding the questgiver is walled or upon completion raising the local seagull quality or something like that.
Go back to the roots, all this shit does not work.