Realms [Icecrown] Monthly Gold squish instead of yearly gold squish

[Vikvaryass]

The yearly gold squish causes a lot of chaos, and panic selling/buying in the market as it cuts gold in half.

So instead of a yearly 50% cut, we can have a monthly 3% cut which adds up (multiplicatively) to around 50% for 12 months.

Since 3% is a small number and it happens every month, it will not cause massive price increase and crash every time, but the end result is the same that gold gets cut in half each year to control inflation.

[dccct]

That math doesn't check out. It should be 1 - e^(ln(0.5)/n) where n = 12 in your suggestion, which yields 5.6%. I'm guessing it's just not feasible for them to purge gold that frequently at the moment. I think it's a great idea if they can. If they do it daily, it'd be an imperceptible negative interest of 0.19%.

[Vikvaryass]

That math doesn't check out. It should be 1 - e^(ln(0.5)/n) where n = 12 in your suggestion, which yields 5.6%. I'm guessing it's just not feasible for them to purge gold that frequently at the moment. I think it's a great idea if they can. If they do it daily, it'd be an imperceptible negative interest of 0.19%.

Yes you're right. I made a math mistake, I did (1.5)^(1/12) instead of (0.5)^(1/12) that would be ~5.6% per month. It would still be a small number from the perspective of economic disruption. But yes I did not consider the technical feasibility of performing such a calculation on all player gold/AH bids/store bids every single month. My intution is that it would not be such a big deal, since its a simple multiplicative formula, but I have no way of verifying that.

[xanaxas]

Very good insight.

[Sekie]

yeah, good suggestion, losing 50% at once feels bad
or even better increase gold sinks (ah tax especially) and remove squish altogether

[ivannoob]

i feel you about the Cut, but maybe learn how to invest your gold before the Gold squish? A litle tip (Potion of speed)

[angrylol]

How would monthly squish help? All that would happen is everyone would want to get rid of their gold and keep items the whole time, raising prices to current pre-squish levels permanently.

[hexxen69]

Once a year seems almost too much to me as well, especially for casual players. What about every two years? Hell, 5 years? IDK what the magic # is. All I know is as a casual player this practice kinds of annoys me and I'm sure it does for others as well since Im no gold farmer...
Then they can also include an idle-account removal. Two years is plenty of time to allow a char to idle to see if the user is still playing it or not before deletion.

Also, would love to see a graduated/tiered squish based upon the balance of each char. IE. a % amount of squish depending on how much a char has in its purse.

So like this (*granted I have no idea how large some char purses normally are post-squish...)
10 to 10000 Gold - 5%
10001 to 50000 Gold- 10%
50001 to 250000 Gold - 20%
250001 to 500000 Gold - 35%
500001 to 1000000 Gold - 50%

This is more to help the lower/casual players get less of a hit. Because lets be real, most high purses move their gold to materials, then liquidate back to gold after the squish.

[Vikvaryass]

How would monthly squish help? All that would happen is everyone would want to get rid of their gold and keep items the whole time, raising prices to current pre-squish levels permanently.

The prices of goods depends on a complex interplay of goods supply, goods demand, gold supply, transaction rates etc. What math and models are you using to assume that prices will stabilize to "pre-squish level"?

And if that turned out to be true, why is that a problem? The problem is not that pre-squish prices are too high, the problem is that without a squish there will be continuous inflation.

[LezChap1]

One of the promises to premium members is that their max level characters will NEVER be deleted as long as Warmane exists. If they go inactive, they may lose their character names, but they will ALWAYS be available to play on should the player come back. The current inactivity cleanup works to keep this promise, and I don't see any point in going back on it...Data Storage is pretty cheap, and the characters, even if they're inactive and nameless, are still subject to the gold squish (so they can't come back 3 years later and take over the economy).

I do see SOME point to the thoughts that an annual gold squish isn't often enough to keep the economy/market well regulated. It's almost the same view as that with banwaves for bots. YES, you need to make the gold squish happen across the board to everyone at the same time...otherwise you have people trying to get around the squish by spreading their gold around and as soon as one account gets hit, that account gets flushed with the unhit reserves. But by only doing the squish annually, it's like letting the botters go for 6-12 months doing damage to the economy before putting them down. Prices and everything would stay a lot more regulated if it was possible to do it quarterly or monthly, and new players coming into the economy a couple months before an annual squish don't have the hyperinflated market that desperately requires one.

[angrylol]

The prices of goods depends on a complex interplay of goods supply, goods demand, gold supply, transaction rates etc. What math and models are you using to assume that prices will stabilize to "pre-squish level"?

I use the same logic which you can see in AH right now. Prices are approaching peak(caused by squish, not because of inflation you are referring to). Reason for that is that everyone wants to get rid of gold, and keep their wealth in items. Now we can keep wealth in gold at least some part of the year. With this kind of mechanism we can't, gold will lose it's value even more. Pushing out all gold on realm into circulation, instead of it remaining drained out and rotting in forgotten bags. Not even talking about artificially created market, where people have to buy things they would never buy otherwise.

And if that turned out to be true, why is that a problem? The problem is not that pre-squish prices are too high, the problem is that without a squish there will be continuous inflation.

There is continuous inflation even with squish. I doubt there even is actual data, not even talking about logical long term correlation for squish and inflation theory. If anything, logically speaking, squish pushes way more gold into economy than it drains.

[zorino]

If it's something they feel they need to do, then it needs to be reviewed and better programmed.

To those who tell others to invest better to be ready, I want to remind you that this is just a game.

We're here just to play hoping to find some fun and not for economic or capitalism lessons.

[xanaxas]

If it's something they feel they need to do, then it needs to be reviewed and better programmed.

To those who tell others to invest better to be ready, I want to remind you that this is just a game.

We're here just to play hoping to find some fun and not for economic or capitalism lessons.

There are lots of people who live in this game, like in a metaverse, sadly.

[Bloodwhisper]

The yearly gold squish causes a lot of chaos, and panic selling/buying in the market as it cuts gold in half.

So instead of a yearly 50% cut, we can have a monthly 3% cut which adds up (multiplicatively) to around 50% for 12 months.

Since 3% is a small number and it happens every month, it will not cause massive price increase and crash every time, but the end result is the same that gold gets cut in half each year to control inflation.

Why does it matter? Don't most of the people on that server buy most of their gear with IRL cash anyways? You could squish the gold 10% every single day (flat rate) and it wouldnt make much difference.

[Bowtech]

this idea is sweet, but then people would spread their gold across all characters in order to avoid being taxed more than 5% (following your example).