BOGOF

So I was just running along the other day and suddenly out of nowhere I get this tell. "You buy gold?"

I was like, wow /rg but then I stopped and thought about it and thats the first gold seller I've found on the game since launch. So I sat down and thought about why. The major things I can think of are these.

Plenty of gold made. The basic is that you make a tonne of gold, my guild has an 80% tax rate and I still have more than enough for everything.

No real money sinks. What's a money sink? This is something that the game designers build into the game to keep gold levels low to avoid inflation. There are only two real gold sinks in this game though.

1)Flights
2)Healing yourself after you die

Both of these are very low cost monkey sinks though.

No real crafting. People don't seem to be levelling crafting for the sake of levelling crafting. You get the odd crafter and yes, they are dirt poor but on the whole crafting just isn't vital.

Renown Gear This is actually the biggest money sink in the game but I have put it seperately because it's not required you could just as easily ignore it entirely and end up with decent PvE gear.

So why do MMO developers put money sinks in games?

Well its a matter of supply and demand, if people have a surplus of money and a lack of anything to spend it on. it means that prices on the AH will escalate. People have more expendable cash, people can afford to spend more on items, people will ask more for items.

What does this mean for the population of the game? That everyone gets richer? Well not quite, it means that people that have been playing for ages will just keep racking up more and more gold that they have nothing to spend it on so they will be fine. Newbies however will end up with a huge amount of gold faced to buy anything that they want.

A big influx of newbies to the game will lower prices temporarily but this is unlikely to happen. But to be honest, like I said earlier, no one really crafts and you can get all your armor through questing so the newbies have no incentive really to twink out their chars through the AH. Meaning that they wont bother spending money and will level up just fine.

So I dunno what the game will be like 6 months down the road but I will be interested to find out what this means for the population.

PS: All of this adds up to no one needing to buy gold (at least at the moment) so we don't see any gold sellers and thats a pretty big plus.