To be honest, DTV does need a good buff. I mean most peasants that start playing CRPG with friends who are high lvl, start in DTV. This way they learn the game, but they will progress really slow and the gold gain is just horrible. If they want to be any good then they'll have to face dieing a lot in other modes such as battle,siege, rageball etc for XP and gold. If they don't, then will be stuck in DTV untill they can finally afford a decent weapon or armor.
I find it worthwhile to somehow incorperate a multiplier for DTV they same way Rageball and Siege have. All though I'm not really sure how it would work in this mode, but I would think that the higher you come (ie nomads, sea raiders and so forth.) will earn you a multiplier. For example: You manage to beat bandits and reach Nomads then give the player a multiplier of x2 and maybe after nomads x3 etc.
But do make sure that if a player joins, he'll have x1 multiplier 1st, and gains multipliers accordinely.
Anyway, this is very theoretical and you can fiddle around with it to make it balanced.
