So, I know gold isn't exactly that valuable right now, but I plan to change that. It will probably more handy in season 2 as I develop more sinks and it seems likely that some form of crafting will appear in the game. Anyhow, I was also brainstorming about how the economy works in this game, and in other games for that matter. Gold just sort of appears from mobs and merchants via selling. It's all sort of strange because that means that there's technically an infinite amount of gold in the economy with no say from the server at all. It seems a lot of games work this way. Kill more stuff and vendor items on your way toward an infinite money supply. A lot of economies run into problems due to gold farmers causing massive inflation and that sort of thing.

In any case, I was toying with the idea of developing an economy with a fixed amount of gold in it. Obviously, this would have to be carefully managed to some extent, but as long as there was enough total gold in the economy, I think it would work fine. The nice benefit about this is that it would create a lot of upward pressure on the value of gold due to the fact that it is finite, something no currency on Earth can claim—except perhaps precious metals.

How would it work? I'd have to track server gold and character-owned gold. Buy and sell prices would fluctuate based on this balance. When there is a lot of character-owned gold, sell prices would actually increase. When server gold levels are high, I would make buy prices lower. Kind of a neat dynamic. Of course when there's high levels of server gold, mobs would also drop more currency. And when everyone is hoarding gold, mobs would drop almost nothing.

This could cause a lot of problems via emergent gameplay, but I'm okay with a little chaos from time to time. Has any other game tried such a silly idea? I am not aware of one.

Mmm weird indeed, and I'm not aware of any other game that has such an economy...
Do you plan to implement it at the same time as your AH/Trade idea? It could get interesting!

Just off the top of my head, and if I understand you correctly - unless you're tracking individual account gold vs server gold and adjusting per account, this could easily end up punishing new starters as they try to accumulate gold at the beginning. It could also end up creating gold barons where someone has a lot of gold, server drops less accordingly, creating a bottleneck based on a few high level accounts that just happen to be sitting on a Smaug hoard.

If you go individual acct vs server, then you're effectively attempting a gold cap for each player. Accumulate x amount and that's it for j00, no more gold til you spend some! Depending on what they want the gold for it might end up being rather annoying (eg a new gold sink to craft, maybe you want to save up enough to do a big crafting session but the game will only allow you to save enough for 3 skill points then back out you go farming).

Not sure that "infinite" gold is a problem per se. Gold acquisition only becomes a problem imho when it becomes an easy route to winning or imbalance. Since this is essentially a single player game with no AH, right now it makes no difference at all how much gold someone has.

With an AH gold becomes an interplayer currency but unless you're intending to implement a gold-bought I WIN button (or possibly crystals/gold exchange?) there's no intrinsic value to any currency and again, it doesn't matter how much gold is washing around in the system. Even if Epic Weapon X is on sale on the AH for 50 bajillion gold it doesn't matter - Epic Weapon X doesn't confer any imbalancing player advantage except perhaps to better equip them for a run on the leaderboard (and not everyone cares about that ).

Just my ...... 2gp

The meta nature of the system would be obscured to players. All they'll notice is if they can get enough gold to do what they want or if they cannot. If they cannot, then they're barred from some aspect of the game seemingly arbitrarily. It's an interesting thought experiment but I'm with Suvana, I don't think limitless gold is an issue.

Until Miranda threats to strike because her small bag of gold keeps falling in value. Before long she'll have to lure greenhorn adventurers with wheelbarrows full of nigh-worthless gold.

Be very careful, fully closed systems for resources aren't used often for a reason. It would be very easy to implement something that seems like a good idea and be ruinous to some portion of your players, either the new casual players or the veterans.

Ultima Online launched with a closed economy, but the economic model failed. Within a year, the developers transitioned it to the now familiar faucet-drain model.

Zachary Simpson's paper on the In-game Economics of Ultima Online sets out the reasons the closed model failed.

It's accessible at: http://www.mine-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html

Cheers
Harrok

Nice! I'll read this when I get a chance.