Economy and Inflation
Posted: February 3rd, 2012, 9:31:03 pm
This is a continuation of the discussion from the HWYD thread.
Please read the whole post before you contribute.
I have been thinking about how to fix the inflation for a long time, and I've tried a lot of things (goldsinks, mainly). I'm not going to make any large decisions without much discussion and prior warning. Don't panic.
The solution to the economy has several parts.
The first part is reducing the ratio of new gold vs spent gold.
1) Make it so adults don't give you gold when you click them
2) Large trade tax
The second part is making it so gold hoarders don't suddenly see their gold values skyrocket and become infinitely more wealthy than everybody else.
1) Reset everybody's gold back to zero
2) Divide everybody's gold by ten (linear reduction)
3) Decrease everybody's gold with a square-root based reduction (the more gold you have, the more you lose. The less gold you have, the less you are affected)
4) Phase out gold entirely, replacing it with another currency (silver?). Everybody would keep their gold and have zero silver. Shops and quests would start only accepting silver. No new gold would be generated, people would mine silver instead. The gold would become a closed system. People would use gold less and less, finally forgetting about it altogether. I would then remove gold entirely. (difficult in general)
5) Sliding-scale trade taxes based on player's equity (difficult to calculate)
Doing nothing is not an option, because eventually everybody will get sick of inflation and leave.
Flat-rate trade taxes are not a complete solution.
I would especially appreciate someone with an economics background's input on this.
Please don't feel as though you should post as much textual anger as possible. This will work much better as a civil conversation.
Please read the whole post before you contribute.
I have been thinking about how to fix the inflation for a long time, and I've tried a lot of things (goldsinks, mainly). I'm not going to make any large decisions without much discussion and prior warning. Don't panic.
The solution to the economy has several parts.
The first part is reducing the ratio of new gold vs spent gold.
1) Make it so adults don't give you gold when you click them
2) Large trade tax
The second part is making it so gold hoarders don't suddenly see their gold values skyrocket and become infinitely more wealthy than everybody else.
1) Reset everybody's gold back to zero
2) Divide everybody's gold by ten (linear reduction)
3) Decrease everybody's gold with a square-root based reduction (the more gold you have, the more you lose. The less gold you have, the less you are affected)
4) Phase out gold entirely, replacing it with another currency (silver?). Everybody would keep their gold and have zero silver. Shops and quests would start only accepting silver. No new gold would be generated, people would mine silver instead. The gold would become a closed system. People would use gold less and less, finally forgetting about it altogether. I would then remove gold entirely. (difficult in general)
5) Sliding-scale trade taxes based on player's equity (difficult to calculate)
Doing nothing is not an option, because eventually everybody will get sick of inflation and leave.
Flat-rate trade taxes are not a complete solution.
I would especially appreciate someone with an economics background's input on this.
Please don't feel as though you should post as much textual anger as possible. This will work much better as a civil conversation.
AND taxes 
