The inflation is here.

I want to be the first to announce that the dreaded gold inflation is finally here.

I was out this week and unable to play raid, but when I logged in I noticed all the cheap stuff (food, chests, etc) was pretty much gone. There are some exceptions (such as soup), but even those items I expect to go up in price (and in fact have been repricing them). There have been numerous gold farms created (I myself have created a 4 spawner farm in the last few weeks), and the folks in the top 10 have far higher balances now than the folks in the top 10 were 2 months after the prior map reset. I don't have any hard numbers, but there seems to be way more gold in everyone's balances than should be 2 months after a reset. I'm already over 27,000 gold, and the last map I ended up with 50,000 gold right before the reset, and that was 8 months into the map if I recall.

From the shop perspective, if I had to guess, I would say that inflation has pushed up prices somewhere in the 200-1000% range (i.e. 2-10x) against where it was a month ago. Trending that foreward, I would guess that by the end of summer prices will be 10-100x what they are now, and every major team and experienced player likely will have access to a multispawner gold farm.

These observations aren't just my own, but everyone else has seen it. I think we need to talk about how to (or even whether we want to) deal with it. A few thoughts are as follows:

1) Do nothing. Let the market be, this is Raid, no one will starve to death or lose their homes, etc.
2) Remove gold from the market. This could be something like a tax on gold in balance (but people will then just store gold in chests, so rip). Another option might be a gold fee to play in KOTH or The End event; a KOTH with Gold armor and weapons only; increased shop taxes; player bounties (where you kill a player, their death drops some (maybe 10%) of their balance, and some of their balance 'disappears'); or something that makes gold go away.
3) Nerf pigman spawners. One option would be to disable any existing pigman spawners (make the spawn rate like 1 every 100 years), and drop 65 levels of XP when they are mined along with the egg, and disallow any new spawners. This lets players get their investment back from existing spawners. Another option could be to remove gold ingots and nuggets as a pigman drop so they just drop flesh and swords.

Any thoughts?

 

So then I defer to this solution:

“Disable any existing pigman spawners (make the spawn rate like 1 every 100 years), and drop 65 levels of XP when they are mined along with the egg, and disallow any new spawners.”

This eliminates spawners as an issue completely but is fair to the players since they get their materials back.

 

@lebronjames0 had a brilliant idea by converting his gold into gapps...

I’d like to see a gold armor only KOTH, though

 

But spawners in general aren’t the problem, pigman spawners in particular are.

I have access to a lot of different spawners (enderman, creeper, whither skeleton, and pigmen) and no one is having an issue with too many whither heads or ender pearls or gunpowder. It’s just with pigmen gold that the problems happen because they directly add money to the economy.

 

Sits on 32K gold * Ain’t no one else getting richer

Sorry Reganomics doesn’t work. Rich people hoard money and it doesn’t go anywhere. If anything, my gold hoarding has absorbed a lot of the extra gold.