Posted elsewhere, but in hindsight maybe deserving of its own thread so here goes!
Here is a potential idea to “fix” the economies of each server based on the ideas behind Cryto Currencies (eg bitcoin).
The situation is wow endlessly produces gold, whether through legitimate play, or through bots/ You kill something - silver drops. You complete a quest - gold materializes out of nowhere and appears in your currency tab.
Gold is removed from the economy when you purchase from a vendor, repair, or through AH fees.
Gold is neither created or destroyed by GDKP or Real Money Trading. Banning either doesn’t change the fact that the value of gold decreases over time as more is farmed. The speed with which it devalues is increased by the number of players killing mobs and completing quests, which it you have rampant botting is pretty quick, and you rapidly find that item, or stack of potions that was 100g last week is costing 1000g this week. Not because the item is worth more, but because the gold is WORTH LESS!
NOW WHAT IF THE AMOUNT OF GOLD IN THE ENTIRE ECONOMY WAS CAPPED!
WHAT IF THE AMOUNT DROPPED BY MOBS AND REWARDED BY QUESTS WAS REDUCED, SCALING ALL THE WAY DOWN TO ZERO (0) ONCE THE GOLD IN CIRCULATION REACHED A CERTAIN AMOUNT?
Bitcoin mining rates halve every 4 years, at a certain point in time no new bitcoin will be ale to be mined. What if raw gold quest rewards, raw gold drops, and vendor sell prices halved every 4 weeks in WoW?
Gold would retain it’s value in relation to the materials being farmed and sold on AH, the inflation problem we have as stated above is because gold loses it’s value the more is in circulation.
For gold to retain it’s value, so that 100 gold buys the same amount of copper ore or black lotus or primal fire in Phase 6 as it did in phase 1, is to restrict the production of raw gold.
Blizzard can add as many sinks as they like, but every sink is either voluntary (i.e. how many mounts do you really need,) , one off (a full set of bank slots is one and done), or easily avoidable by botters and punishing to players (eg what if we went x10 on repair costs or vendor mats).
So people who come to the game late are just screwed. I like it. If they aren’t playing on release and making as much gold as possible, they don’t deserve to have as much fun as everyone who did grind like crazy on release.
Complete opposite, guy comes to the game late, he goes out into the world and farms cloth, herbs, ore, sells them on AH he gets the exact same amount of gold as the guy who does it in phase 1, and that amount of gold (value) buys him the same amount of consumables as it did in Phase 1.
It takes the same or less time played to save up for his mount or any pre-bis BoEs he might want.
Remember when Edgies were 200g (because 200g was alot of money before everyone had a mage making 50g/hour on ZF zombies), then they were 6000g because 6000g became not all that much money because everyone has a mage making 50g per hour on ZF Zombies.
What he can’t do is go vendor trash drops from ZF Zombies for 50g per hour on his bot 24/7, making 1200g per day and buying/selling/laundering it through GDKP runs. Now in order to keep up with the bots someone playing 6 hours a day needs to be making at least 200g per hour, so the mage selling mara is doing it at 10-15g per run x 4 boosts x 5 per hour and the hunter that was selling DMT at 5g is now asking 20g, and the herbalist selling pots for 2g now wants 12g …and yet 90% of the forum posts address the symptom (bots, GDKP, boost meta) rather than the root cause - rampant hyper inflation due to currency devaluation (the government is printing more money so your money is now worth less).
Imagine a world where everyone could hit PRINT and produce $100 bills whenever you wanted. What would your $100 buy you by the end of the week/month/year. Does it matter if your neighbor has an industrial printer set up and you are using a press? The crap you are both printing is going to be worthless. You have to go to the Bank and get REAL MONEY that has an underlying value. Wow Gold has no underlying value becuase it can be created at will by players.
It’s a great concept for a NEW game but you can’t tack it onto an existing game. I would love to see things like item decay and a real economy but THAT game would need to have that all planned out in advance or the game may become unplayable very quickly.