where does the gold go?

simple_specops

Hi all, I was just wondering, where does all the gold go? Like the fixed charge to put something on the guild store and all the millions used to hire the guild traders? Does it just disappear into thin air?

Cpt_Teemo

ZoS regains all of it

Kiralyn2000

simple_specops wrote: »

Does it just disappear into thin air?

Yes. This is the purpose of "gold sinks" in online game economies. Since piles of gold are being created out of 'thin air' every day, there needs to be something eating it up as well, or you get (even worse) inflation.

Shawn_PT

It vanishes. It's much like repair costs, bribe costs, bounty costs, bag upgrade costs, housing costs, etc. When we get 'free' money for doing quests and killing stuff, if the gold never got removed from the game it would be disastrous since it be worth nothing. If it vanishes at about the same rate it gets generated, its value remains stable.

Don't quote me on this though I'm no economy buff.

wolfie1.0.

Shawn_PT wrote: »

It vanishes. It's much like repair costs, bribe costs, bounty costs, bag upgrade costs, housing costs, etc. When we get 'free' money for doing quests and killing stuff, if the gold never got removed from the game it would be disastrous since it be worth nothing. If it vanishes at about the same rate it gets generated, its value remains stable.

Don't quote me on this though I'm no economy buff.

Yep this is essentially correct. Whenever gold is dropped from an npc it is the same as "printing" cash and if there is too much of it then you have inflation. And games with really bad inflation are a barrier to entry for new players. To combat this gold sinks were created to remove large amounts of gold from the game. This is most effective if you can remove those large amounts from the players and guilds that have the most gold. Guild trader bidding does a decent job of doing this.

Crafts_Many_Boxes

In this game? Deleted. But there was a neat little arc in a series called Log Horizon about this topic.

It was one of those anime about getting trapped in an MMO that's been popular in recent years, only this one is actually good because it dealt with issues like NPCs gaining sentience and the divide between them and the player characters, macro economics associated with guilds and player-run businesses, and most relevant to this conversation, where all the gold goes and where it comes from.

From what I recall (it's been a few years) there was a sort of "banking clan" of NPCs that had dominion over their own money dimension. In this dimension, gold was given to monsters as they were born into the world, and gold spent at various NPC-controlled shops and locations returned to this dimension. Log horizon was super cool and was a lot more realistic than SAO or other such titles, I would highly recommend it to anyone who can at least tolerate anime and loves MMOs.