[Spikedude]

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To Gab's main point
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There's only one real way to control a virtual economy forever, and that's to never create money without intentionally pre-defining the exact amounts. If someone is getting money from the game, someone else somewhere should be losing money from the game. If you have an NPC shop that players can stock for money, for example, then the stockers of the store should only be paid based on what revenue the store brings in during that same time period. For anything like flower picking, it would have to be limited (IE the store would say "we're buying x rose boquets this week") and directly offset by taxes, auction revenues, etc. As long as we allow players to endlessly earn a consistent flow of cash by doing some mundane task like mining or picking flowers, the economy is eventually going to spiral out of control. A reset now without massive changes wouldn't help much because we'd be back in this situation in a year or two. Unless there were some sort of "Reset Schedule" I guess (like the ladder seasons in the old blizzard games) - not sure how people would feel about that though.

OR

We stop pretending anyone on Era has ever cared about the economy, or that we have any control over it whatsoever in the current state, and just continue to release higher and higher priced items as people get more and more wealthy. As long as there's still things that a noob can purchase for 25,000 dollars, what do they care if Seth gets some 250 million dollar gold plated metal storm with .001 less freeze than the normal version? (This is also what almost every video game ever does when they start to realize their currency is being devalued by gold farmers). As long as someone is around to make new content, we wouldn't have a real problem.


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To the current conversation
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Also - totally agree that the Gelat shop would fix a lot of our problems. A
legal outlet for USDing real useful items would also be a good reason to unban a lot of the old players who were in trouble for USDing (since it would be awfully tough for them to find customers then). It would be sweet if someone could get traction on that. I know I tried at one point, and Zao tried before that, and I'm pretty sure Ice tried before that, and Tim and Exolia are definitely trying now. Hopefully something gets changed there.