On behalf of the upcoming changes to Icecrown, Neltharion and Frostwolf
A lot was already said in the official thread, that, for a reason I don't really understand, is currently closed.
I did post in said thread and had a chance to voice my concerns already, but I forgot one important point.
Please take your time to read through the entirety of this post, and don't just dismiss it halfway through if you disagree.
I'd like to address the cutting gold in half thing once more. The preliminary argument seems to be that by cutting all players' gold down by 50%, effectively nobody loses their buying power / value. This impression however is mathematically flawed and in fact crudely unfair towards richer people.
It's really not all that hard to understand. Let's take, for example, a player with 10k. Due to the cut, their balance is reduced by an absolute amount of 5k gold.
If we take a second player with, say, 1 million, the number tied to their account drops by 500k. It's safe to assume that player 2 spent way more time earning 1 million gold than player 1 spent earning 10k. So although their relative buying power does not change at all, the amount of work they both put into acquiring their funds differs notably, and so does the time they spent earning the gold they lose (in numbers).
This would only be half as much of an issue if market prices were entirely tied to players' gold. But they aren't. Learning your mount abilities costs a fixed amount of money. Orbs for JC panthers cost 20k each, that won't change. The 120k yak will still cost 120k after the change. What I'm trying to say is that market prices don't work like that. You can't just assume the absolute amount of gold everything costs will drop by 50% if every player suddenly has 50% less gold. It's not all tied to the amount of money that's currently in the game, but in fact, many different factors.
In comparison to a percental drain of gold, a specifically crafted logarithmical approach would yield results much more evenly spread in terms of fairness, however that would still be unfair towards the playerbase as a whole for the aforementioned reasons.
The gist of my post is that no matter what you do, it is mathematically unfair towards either all players or specific parties on your server.
If you have a look at current market prices on retail, you'll notice that they're somewhat similar to prices on Warmane servers. Blizzard would certainly never get the idea to do a clean 50% cut on everything, instead, they add more of what has always been part of a stable economy: money drains.
I've mentioned a few of those in this post already, and I'll point them out once more. Adding items with very high and fixed prices is the proper way to deal with inflation.
The alternative I propose is expanding your website's item shop and adding a new tab that allows players spending huge amounts of gold on items that are currently only available for purchase with coins. Take the original item shop mounts for example. I'd happily spend 200k on Heart of the Aspects if I were given the chance. Or transmorg items. Most of those in the shop are only available for purchase with coins, but not with points.
Another option would be to just flat out allow converting gold into coins. That way you could easily drain huge amounts of gold out of the economy while treating every player equally fair.
That's my suggestion.
