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Originally Posted by mek If moneysinks must continually be added patch after patch it's pretty clear that something is very, very wrong.
World of Warcraft's devs clearly subscribe heavily to moneysinking, as this sort of stuff is added to the game like clockwork - Naxx attunement fees and T3 resource requirements are simply icing on the repair bill cake. I'm not here to bitch - the devs add this sort of stuff because they believe it is good; if we want it to go away, let's disprove that assumption.
Note that moneysinks and IGE (and other pro farming outfits) feed off each other. This is also nothing new - as moneysinks are created, demand for gold goes up & supply goes down. More gold is needed by the game... more reason for farmers to get as much of it as they can.
The really big problem is that farmers entirely mitigate whatever moneysinking is added. These outfits hire farmers as the market demands - labour is not a problem. Selling more gold this month? Stick some more hunters in Maraudon! As more moneysinks are added, more gold is farmed to satisfy demand. Therefore, gold moves around more, but all the moneysinks in the world will not reduce the average total gold in circulation - just increase the number of 60 hunters online.
WoW has discovered that over-moneysinking creates a new and entirely different problem, perhaps worse than the problem of inflation. It's a mistake to blame WoW's chinese farmer problem exclusively on its popularity, as it is clear the devs have inadvertently created an MMO where money farming is uniquely profitable.
So where do we go from here? The theoretical goal of moneysinking is to negate the natural excess money earned by player activity, and thus prevent inflation. Moneysinks beyond that point are, WoW has shown us, worse than none at all: they drain player assets, creating demand for professional farming outfits. Now that the demand exists, the only way to fix this new problem is to eliminate moneysinks, allow inflation, and thus make gold farming at its current scale unprofitable. Moneysinks could then be slowly reintroduced until we hit the sweet spot where in=out and then STOP. If gold out > gold in, farming becomes not only profitable but necessary to the game's survival. If IGE & co all disappeared tomorrow, a good deal of the playerbase would literally go bankrupt. |
I'm pretty sure you would cry about having to pay 30 silver to accomplish an end game task. This is evident by the inane whining over the ENORMOUS (read: nonexistant) costs for T3 armor. The problem with WoW isn't casuals, it's raiders and their 'we deserve everything at no cost' mentality. Believe me, if you are crying now, other games in the genre are going to be a bitter pill for you to swallow once you pack up your shit and move on.
"But I don't want to log on and do anything but raid..." Yea, ok. How is that Blizzard's problem again?
