In any virtual economy there needs to be “gold sinks” – assuming the currency is gold. Otherwise the amount of gold in circulation increases too quickly. A gold sink is an expense that players pay which has the effect of taking gold out of the economy. This prevents prices from getting too high as more and more gold chases the same number of items. In real life, there aren’t ‘money sinks’ although maybe there should be. Also in real life, you also don’t ‘create’ money when you kill a demon (you actually might go to prison). Gold sinks are an important tool in virtual markets, they combat inflation and keep the currency scarce. So what are they in Diablo 3? We don’t know exactly what will be what, but here’s my current observations (guesses).
Repairs
The first one that comes to mind is repairs. Blizzard has promised us in their You Will Die Video that, not only will you die, but you’ll be scraping up gold for your next repair bill. In World of Warcraft, repairing isn’t really expensive anymore. There was a period of time during classic WoW where some players were so poor that they couldn’t afford their newest talents, a flight at the gryphon master and sometimes even their repairs. Lately in WoW, you can earn enough gold for repairs by doing 1-2 super-easy daily quests for 50 gold.
Training Artisans
Training artisans costs money, and once you spend the gold it’s gone. Sure, you’ll earn it back later by selling the gear to newbies but the gold leaves the economy until those newbies get it back by killing monsters and completing quests. Training your Blacksmithing Artisan will cost you about 64,000 gold while training your Jeweler Artisan will cost you only 46,000 gold. Based on the available gold in the beta these gold sinks are pretty pathetic, since I usually end up with 10,000-15,000 gold on a character by the time it’s level 13. I can see this being adjusted before the game goes live though.
Crafting and Combining
Once you level your artisans it costs 100s of gold to craft items. This certainly isn’t a lot but we don’t know how much it’s going to cost to craft rare and legendary gear yet. What we do know though is that it’s going to cost millions of gold to combine gems. Combining gems is probably the largest gold sink that we know of. Like I mentioned last week, it’s going to cost almost 40 million gold to combine almost 160 thousand chipped gems into a single radiant star. Of course no single player is going to go through the process of combining all those gems themselves, but the aggregate of thousands wanting a level 14 gem will take its toll on the gold circulating in the economy.
So those are the potential gold sinks in Diablo 3. What we need to watch for is the scarcity of gold. If it’s too abundant and people end up with gold pouring out of their ears then blizzard did a bad job at controlling inflation and prices could climb over time. If Blizzard does a good job we’ll see prices and supply of items climb at an even pace, reducing the chance of inflation (price increases) and deflation (price decreases). If Blizzard makes gold really hard to get, but new and improved items keep showing up we could see prices plummet over time.
Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.
Subscribe with RSS
Subscribe with Facebook
Subscribe with Twitter
Subscribe through Email
I predict that, far and away, the biggest gold sink will be the 15% cut that Blizzard takes for stackable item sales on the Gold AH.
Blizzard is trying to make it as easy as possible to trade for items on the Gold AH, and then pulling a huge whack of every sale out of circulation. The existence of the RMAH actually amplifies this effect, since people will be that much more likely to fuel their Gold AH purchases with gold purchased from the RMAH.
This gets gold which had previously been sitting dormant in someone else’s account back into circulation, where Blizzard can take another whack at it when it’s used on the Gold AH.
Having almost nothing soulbound compounds this even further, since it encourages people to buy what they need from the Gold AH (giving them a 15% whack at the value in the transaction once), use that item, and then resell it later to help recoup the gold (giving Blizzard another whack at the value).
The items keep going round and round, and Blizzard extracts gold from the system every time.
Man that’s awesome. I didn’t think about that at all. Relative to the character though I don’t see that being the biggest. Consider that each account can only have 10 auctions at a time (subject to change) and 15% of that would need to be greater than their repair bill, their aggregate gem combination costs, and their artisan training costs. I’m not seeing it be that much for the typical player but hell who knows. Thanks for sharing man I should I should have put that in the list of gold sinks above.