as shown by the image above, last year panic caused prices to increase (just like now) and when they realised that no gold squish announcement was made they started to reduce prices again. after that, a proper gold squish announcement was made and prices skyrocketed overnight.
in my opinion, there are 2 ways to fix this:
1- make sure that no gold squish announcement is made (note: this does not mean "do not make gold squish". if it happens, dont announce it until its done). and if gold squish is not happening, then make sure its not. as shown above if people realise they feared nothing then prices will go back to normal. it just needs time
2- announce the REQUIREMENTS for a gold squish (inflation, too much gold on the server, too many items on the server, whatever). that way you are not telling the people "this will happen" but rather "if this happens, we might do it". this will A: calm people down if requirements are not met. B: if there is inflation, it will be with proper reason, and in proper time (lets face it, we cant avoid people rising prices in preparation for something. but now they are incrasing prices for something that might not happen) and C: this will throw some light on how gold squish actually work, rather than "today we're fine, tomorrow someone woke up angry and decided to cut gold in half" (as happened last year, that in a month we went from "we're not planing to do this" to "this will happen)
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Legendary Weaponsmith
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Forum Veteran
Well, I still think last year major thing to reduce inflation was that post from staff. Sure majority of people who just knew that its not announced realized it's not going to happen as you said. It worked!
What actually would aim at the problem, not it's symptoms:
Monitor infaltion(excluding pre-squish panic) and adjust drop rates. Maybe raise quest reward rates to x5 and drop rate to x1(exclude coking, fishing and rdf daily), maybe other way around. Maybe reduce both.
If the infaltion is really that bad(NOT pre-squish panic)Maybe introduce some sort of decay system - each week character is not logged in it loses 1% of its total gold. Or it happens regardless. Let people "abuse" it and sent it in mails to their own chars, etc, spend it on things before it happens. GG half of the gold is drained out, even more and there is no pre-squish madness, just in the winter holiday season when you should collect new players instead of scaring them away with 200g flask prices. While this would raise average prices overall, at least it would be steady.
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Banned
Well that kinda makes sense though doesn't it? Since last year one of you lovely blokes at the staff team said there was no squish planned and lo and behold, it happened anyways. Reactive decisions will always, for the lack of a better word, suck, compared to proactive decisions. Creating more gold sinks where the gold doesn't get exchanged between X & Y is the way to go in my opinion. Slap it on something as vanity as transmog for 2000g the piece and you got yourself a working goldsink. Of course people will still inflate prices, just not as many of em.
