Inflation lessons from video game design

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But there’s never been a perfect MMO economy, not even the one monitored and meddled in by a professional economist. Inflation… inflation is the enemy. At some point in time, perhaps half a year or more into the lifetime of the game, the amount of money flowing into the game via quest rewards and monster drops far exceeds the amount of money being drained out of the economy. In other words, there aren’t enough gold sinks for the gold coming from the gold faucet. Slowly but surely, money becomes worth less and less, and the more player-driven the economy, the worse the situation for players new to the sandbox, because the amount of money they can squeeze from the faucets pales in comparison to the huge stocks of “old money” being traded between wealthy players.
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Gold sink is an economic process by which a video game's ingame currency ('gold'), or any item that can be valued against it, is removed. Most commonly the genres are role-playing game or massively multiplayer online game. The term is comparable to timesink, but usually used in reference to game design and balance, commonly to reduce inflation when commodities and wealth are continually fed to players through sources such as quests, looting monsters, or minigames.
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As virtual fantasy worlds go, Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 3 is particularly foreboding. In this multiplayer online game played by millions, witch doctors, demon hunters, and other character types duke it out in a war between angels and demons in a dark world called Sanctuary. The world is reminiscent of Judeo-Christian notions of hell: fire and brimstone, with the added fantasy elements of supernatural combat waged with magic and divine weaponry. And within a fairly straightforward gaming framework, virtual “gold” is used as currency for purchasing weapons and repairing battle damage. Over time, virtual gold can be used to purchase ever-more resources for confronting ever-more dangerous foes.

But in the last few months, various outposts in that world — Silver City and New Tristram, to name two — have borne more in common with real world places like Harare, Zimbabwe in 2007 or Berlin in 1923 than with Dante’s Inferno. A culmination of a series of unanticipated circumstances — and, finally, a most unfortunate programming bug — has over the last few weeks produced a new and unforeseen dimension of hellishness within Diablo 3: hyperinflation.
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