Money makes the world go round. Be it in game or in the development studio, it goes without saying. However, bring in too much money too quickly, and it no longer has the same impact.
Any avid MMO gamer has seen inflation time and time again. It is bound to happen and a known evil of most MMO economies. What is inflation? Simply put, money becomes so widely available that it loses value. Value ratios may stay the same while costs appear to rise. For example, say this shiny new sword costs 1/100,000 of the available gold in game. For ease of math we'll say there's only 100,000 GP in game. Suddenly every player buys gold from the EP store. The availability of the resources drastically increases while the product availability (shiney sword) is still fixed. Now the value may still remain 1/100,000 GP in game per sword, but now say there's 10,000,000,000 GP in game. You get the picture.
If you can just buy gold why is it a problem?
Initially, it isn't. But for a game that's just a few months old to have early signs of a rapidly inflating economy, it needs to be dealt with now. The risk comes not for the current players, but new comers. Prices will become so outrageous that a new player will have no choice but to buy large sums of gold and contribute further to the problem, or try to play the game and save gold on their own. By the time they reach their ideal savings mark, the item costs would have increased again because of inflation. As you can imagine, this gets frustrating and the new player eventually quits, slams the game, and discourages new players from joining until the new player influx eventually stops therefore stopping income and development to the game itself.
Let's take a quick look at current systems.
Cash in: Currently cash can be created in game from the following ways
-Complete a quest
-Kill a mob
-Sell loot/sell craftable
-Buy it with USD/EP
Cash out: Currently cash disappears from the game in the following ways
-Crafting supplies
-General NPC trades/Repairs
-Store transactions
While some store/repair transactions are larger than others, overall in the influx of money into the game is severely higher than going out. The economy seems to focused more on the blackhole of gold than a player driven economy.
Stop selling Gold. Make it more valuable.
- CurveS likes this

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