In-game Inflation

I read somewhere that “gold is the only thing that won’t become outdated”. This is true in a short time perspective. This argument was related to a discussion about what things we will sell before Catclysm hits. This is however only partially true. I claim that the 1000 gold value is far less than the value of 1000 gold two years ago, and definetly far less than 1000 gold was in Vanilla. Looking ahead the 1000 gold value will be even lower in 1-2 years.

The reason for this is inflation. At the moment we have the following things adding gold to the game:
*Quests and dailies
*Monster drops
*NPC Vendors buying stuff from players

The following things remove gold from the game:
*Repairs
*NPC Vendors selling stuff to players / trainers
*AH cuts / deposits from failed auctions
*People quitting / freezing accounts to never come back

Simple mathematics: if X > Y you get a surplus, and that’s what’s happening every hour, every day in World of Warcraft.

Since the implementation of gold from quests instead of XP and dailies the inflation started for real. I don’t believe the devs in vanilla WoW could ever imagine someone hitting the gold cap, 200k+ gold in vanilla was a huge amount of cash. I would say that 100 gold today is what 1 gold was 5 years ago. To state an example: swift ground mount at 60 was a whopping 900 gold, and that took alot of effort (even more effort than getting gold for today’s epic flyer). Today 900 gold is something even a newly dinged 80 can farm in a couple of hours.

What effect will this have on us long term auction house players? Probably very little at the moment. The question is what will happen in Cataclysm? Will we see stacks of end game herbs going for 100 gold / stack? Will we see repair costs in the 300 gold region? X will still be higher than Y though, and the inflation will continue.

How can we avoid inflation? There is little we can do about it really. To invest for a really long time would be to invest that gold into items that won’t become outdated, and hence sell those items at the future gold value. Rare pets, vanity items that are not attainable anymore and similar stuff comes to mind.

Sitting on 200k gold and gonna take a break? Invest it.

//Nim