You could try to balance faucets with omnipresent unavoidable sinks aka. taxes. But how fun would it be to pay taxes in a game? "You loot 100 gold. Minus 30% gold drop tax. 10% dungeon upkeep tax and 15% financial transaction tax." :)
So the thing is: As soon as you try to model a "real" economy (possibly with real money exchanges) you can't have artificial faucets and sinks. Even Eve Online - which has the most advanced game economy - struggles with inflation as there are too many faucets. For such an economy to work you need to have a steady amount of money circulating the economy. And the only source (and destination) for money for players has to be other players.
But then you get a lot of other problems. Like what if a player hoards all the gold? Or if players just deactivate their accounts with significant gold sums on them? How do new players get their first gold? etc.
At least one problem with gold in games is that the management of large sums of gold is unrealistic. If you really had a huge portion of gold available in the game the storage and transportation of said gold would be both costly and risky. These concepts work mostly for fantasy themed MMOs though, not as much in something like Eve Online.
Heh, yeah ... I remember Ultima Online where gold had weight and you had to carry it in your back pack. If you wanted to move large sums you had to get a pack horse. :)
But most MMOs nowadays treat gold as something ethereal that you even can't lose when you get killed.
You could try to balance faucets with omnipresent unavoidable sinks aka. taxes. But how fun would it be to pay taxes in a game? "You loot 100 gold. Minus 30% gold drop tax. 10% dungeon upkeep tax and 15% financial transaction tax." :)
So the thing is: As soon as you try to model a "real" economy (possibly with real money exchanges) you can't have artificial faucets and sinks. Even Eve Online - which has the most advanced game economy - struggles with inflation as there are too many faucets. For such an economy to work you need to have a steady amount of money circulating the economy. And the only source (and destination) for money for players has to be other players.
But then you get a lot of other problems. Like what if a player hoards all the gold? Or if players just deactivate their accounts with significant gold sums on them? How do new players get their first gold? etc.