I am ever-less convinced that having a lot of gold around is all that much of an issue.
Is inflation the issue? Do we have UO inflation hawks here?
If you look closely at prices, they have actually gone down for some useful, or essential, items. Indeed sometimes prices have gone down enough that people complain prices are too low. I remember people on GL whining in global chat that GL was an "ignorant" shard because no one would pay over-inflated prices for, say, a metallic dye tub.
Prices on the Ornament of the Magician are down from a few years ago, down markedly. Crimson Cinctures are in the 12m to 15m range on GL; I usually sell for 10m because I'm all about the quick sale. Imbuing has made, say, an excellent demon slayer radiant scimitar decline from 20m in value to 3.5m in value. The catch is that it's imbued and will break down sooner or later; but by the time it has gone down in value you will have made enough money to buy another one. There is a shop near Yew that sells very respectable armor from anyplace from 5k to 100k a pop; those prices are all within range given time. For a little more gold there's a nice shop near Zento. This armor would have cost a lot more a few years ago.
Is wealth disparity the issue?
Well, money is surely available. The catch is you need to hit a certain level of effectiveness before you can start making it. For an experienced player who is tired of being cash-poor? This is actually fairly easy. Demons, dread spiders, lesser hiryus, dragons (not greaters), those two-legged wolf demon thingies from Tokuno, troglodytes....All examples of monsters within range of a mid-level player that have great gold return.
The mid-range of monsters is very wide in this game. If anything some of them need to have, slightly, more gold, so a newer player can catch up faster.
And then of course there's joining a guild and talking them into chaining Corguls or chaining the Doom Gauntlet. An excellent way to make money, and to find good equipment, or at least relic fragments, along the way.
To me, wealth disparity is only an issue if it prevents those at the low end from getting what they want or need, and/or from eroding the disparity. When wealth is not zero-sum and someone without wealth can reasonably acquire it? Then I do not see the issue.
Where the failure is, is in a brand new player (we do get a few of those, just not a lot) trying to come up to speed and become viable. Even that's doable if you have someone teach you the tricks. (Make your first 20k to 100k on ettins; it'll take forever but then you can buy better armor and move on to earth elementals and demons.) So even the failure isn't complete. And even this failure isn't an economic situation; it's a new player experience situation.
I knew a guy who made a lot of money on crystal elementals.
And finally let's not forget one of UO's least-sung truths, which I wouldn't have realized had I not sent a character of mine on a random "wander around the map and explore" quest: There's a lot more casual players in this game than we give credit for. There are players who just log in and live out their characters' daily lives, killing, say, solen infiltrators to buy the bay new shoes and have enough left to kick back with some ale. For those players, neither inflation nor wealth disparity are all that much of an issue as long as they can get what they want and need. We at Stratics are not the entirety, or even the majority, of the UO player base, though we appear to want to think so.
People refer to UO's economy as "broken" but the reality is that it's still functioning as an economy. And that's really all that counts. Neither inflation nor deflation nor wealth disparity are all that pressing, as none of them, at present, impinge seriously on the functioning of the game.
Regardless of your RL political or economy orientation, regardless of your stance on welfare or monetary policy, you simply must try and recognize that the RL economic rules don't apply in UO. The RL economy may or may not be zero/sum. UO's, however, definitely is not.
-Galen's player
). Checks could be used to transfer money between players/characters, but would only exist for "x" days (so you couldnt use them as a way to hold money outside of your bank or in your house). When you leave the game ... there is no money sitting somewhere for other people to claim ... it just disappears (until you reactivate your account).