There's no real answer to "Fixing" the economy, the issues that have inflated it to this point won't go away. Sure they can get rid of dupes, and other artificial means of acquiring gold, but those have little real impact on the games economy. They do have short term spot effects but you know what discounting Siege and possibly Mugen the economy on all shards has inflated drastically and Duping isn't the reason I promise.
What duping did is give a select few players an economic advantage, it didn't sway the entire economy of the game. The fact that the game has a unilateral flow of currency has. Gold comes in much much faster than gold goes out. Sure gold shifts from player to player, but each day more probably is introduced into a shards economy through legal means than flows out of the shards economy in a 2-3 days. This trend has happened for going on 14 years now. Yes before insurance the in/out rate was better balanced, but it had to maintain a higher influx in order for players to build some wealth.
What's happening now, is there is so much gold that it has reached a point of devaluation. Gold simply isn't worth as much as it was 10 years ago. Us from an outside standpoint have more trouble realizing this because UO's economic model is so different than what is in effect in our daily non-virtual lives. You see in the real world we have "Gold Sinks" Countries regulate the amount of currency in circulation in order to attempt to stabilize the value of their currency, in UO we have no such balancer. What's happened in UO isn't that duping, higher loot dropping monsters, ect. have ruined the economy the rate of flow out of the economy has decreased.
Now we're going to have to accept the following as being either true or the opinion of many players...
- No one wants "their" gold forcefully removed from their possession
- No one accurately knows how much Gold other players have, in general.
- Gold matters not, it's what you can buy with it that matters. Supply and Demand aggravate the issues.
This only leaves one good solution, instead of watering down the value of Gold further, you need to increase the supply of commodities players are buying with that gold and let the laws of commerce bring things back into balance.
If instead of there only being 2-3 120 magery scrolls available on a shard at a given time there were always 10-20, players couldn't demand 12-15 million a piece for them. They would be constantly competing with someone else undercutting prices because there would be competition. Right now as long as desirable commodities are dropping at low rate boosting gold as loot will just let prices drive up. Increasing drop rates for things players want will drive prices down through competition. If a crimmy dropping was instead of a >5% chance more like a 20% chance they wouldn't hold the value they do. If Fel Spawns only dropped 115 and 120 scrolls the prices on those would lower as well. If a wider range of BoDs dropped top tier Runics, Vally Hammers wouldn't be 20+mil a pop. People would sell at lower prices because the commodities would be loosing value not gold.
** Good Example **
Thinking back, remember when "The Six" part of the story arc happened, the arties etc that were dropping devalued because there was a short term flood of them on many shards. This is a result of exactly what I was talking about. More availability = lower prices.
Factions suddenly became extremely popular with the introduction of Faction Artifacts, they circumvented the rarity aspect by creating a ready cheap supply of a commodity players already wanted.
