Originally Posted by
Deepone
Your logic escapes me. I think you just made my point, though. Yes, hundreds of people per faction/realm will buy these in order to re-sell them. HUNDREDS on your auction house alone. The first one will list for 20k. The next one will list for a bit less. The next one will say, “hey I want this to go fast, I’ll list it for 10k!” The next one will … yeah, and by the time it’s over, they sell for 100g because there just aren’t all that many people lined up around the block to buy. In the first few minutes (literally, minutes) I suspect some folks will make good coin, but within an hour or two the prices MIUST stabilize at a level that makes at least half the people who would have bought one of these to re-sell, think twice and not do it. Unless the sale price is discouraging, there will be more who will want to “get in on it”... that’s how supply and demand works.
But—and I can’t stress this enough—none of this matters to the point that this is “gold selling” by any other name. There is no gold being added to the game. None. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Some of those folks are my friends, so yeah, I know. That doesn’t matter. Most people who have lots of gold have bought what they wanted to buy and the gold isn’t interesting to them anymore. They horde it, but really have no use for it.
If you’re buying gold from a gold seller, then you do so explicitly because it has a value to you, which means you’re going to spend it. The way economies work, adding currency to a system adds inflation. There are some number of Sword of Truth that the economy is worth, and that’s it. It never changes unless you add demand for new Swords of Truth (using that as a placeholder for everything everyone wants to buy). Add players or add an in-game reason to need something and you change the size of the economy, creating deflation. Add currency like gold and you do not change the size of the economy, only the value of the currency, and thus inflation.
At worst, adding this item will create a small amount of deflation, which can only be good for players.
There are two options: a) there is enough demand to fuel a certain number of resellers b) there is essentially no demand. Both of them have about the same effect on the economy: very little.
There are only two ways to make it a problem: make the item something you need to progress (e.g. selling access to content or gear ala DDO) or selling gold. Nothing else will have any real impact.