Gems and money sinks

#1 - April 19, 2013, 12:33 a.m.
Blizzard Post

Okay, this is not an argument. I am not an economist and I’m new to MMOs, so I have no idea what the plans are. I’m actually curious, and I thought people might have some ideas about this. So, two questions:

1) Will there be a levelling off period with gold to gems eventually, or will it go up indefinitely? Put into the term I am thinking of, will we reach a stage where T3 armour will cost something like a few dollars? Will we also reach a stage where grinding for gold is completely impractical, due to the conversion rate? Relatedly, is this a problem?

2) Given inflation is what it is, what is going to happen to current gold sinks? When orichalcum axes and T3 armour are trivial to buy with gold, what happens? Do the prices get raised at some point, or can we expect new tiers to be added to materials and armour sets as time goes on?

As I say, I’m not an economist, but there was a thread in general discussion about the price of T3 and how expensive it was. It just seemed that there were many reasons for it to be expensive, but they were all going to be irrelevant in a few months.

#8 - April 19, 2013, 11:22 a.m.
Blizzard Post

Okay, this is not an argument. I am not an economist and I’m new to MMOs, so I have no idea what the plans are. I’m actually curious, and I thought people might have some ideas about this. So, two questions:

1) Will there be a levelling off period with gold to gems eventually, or will it go up indefinitely? Put into the term I am thinking of, will we reach a stage where T3 armour will cost something like a few dollars? Will we also reach a stage where grinding for gold is completely impractical, due to the conversion rate? Relatedly, is this a problem?

2) Given inflation is what it is, what is going to happen to current gold sinks? When orichalcum axes and T3 armour are trivial to buy with gold, what happens? Do the prices get raised at some point, or can we expect new tiers to be added to materials and armour sets as time goes on?

As I say, I’m not an economist, but there was a thread in general discussion about the price of T3 and how expensive it was. It just seemed that there were many reasons for it to be expensive, but they were all going to be irrelevant in a few months.

1. The best way to think about prices in senses like this over time is in terms we economists call Real. There is an exchange value between gems and Real value of gold. The real value essentially means some base purchasing power of gold, irrelevant of how much gold it actually requires. We might say 1 Real gold is what it takes to buy a stack of copper ore, then we look over time and see, how much has that changed, and adjust how we look at it relative to the change.
Now the exchange will have an exchange rate relative to the demand for gems and real gold. This can change forever without too much trouble.

2. As the game changes and ages and gets better gold sinks and other mechanisms are created to adapt to current values. The best sinks though adapt naturally to changing prices. The TP is a good example of this, since it takes a % of trades, it remains a great gold sink irrelevant of inflation.

Disclaimer that these are highly simplified answers, the questions can be made much more complex, but for this medium this is best.

#11 - April 19, 2013, 2:23 p.m.
Blizzard Post

Preferably you use a bundle of goods all tied together, that haven’t been modified by design and found equilibrium pricing quickly.