As the ease of acquiring a certain item goes up, the price that consumers are willing to pay for it goes down. The higher the price of an item, the more suppliers are willing to sell it. Eventually the two, the supply curve and the demand curve, meet together in a place called the "supply/demand equilibrium", which is that exact point between the price and the quantity of the item.
(Someone took economics last semester for the first time.)
Next question: What is money? Usually it's a representation of one portion of an entire country's wealth. The more of the money that's printed, the less it's worth, because whether there are 100 dollars in the entire country or 3 trillion, each dollar is just a reciprocal portion of the country's entire wealth. If you pictured stuffing all of these new dollars into a giant garbage bag that just keeps stretching, you see how the term "inflation" comes around. The more money there is in circulation, the bigger the garbage bag, the more it inflates, and the less each piece of money is worth. So how does that translate to platz?
Every time you kill A_Decaying_Skeleton_01 and get your 1 copper/1 bone chip drop, you just increased inflation and decreased the value of all of the money out there, including your 1 copper and the 5 gold you were hoping to get for that bone chip someday in EC /auc. Also, this is why petitioning for free plat doesn't work; "HEy rogean gimme 400k lol" is like saying "Please devalue all of the platinum ingame, and since you're giving me 400k give everyone 400k which would make plat even less valuable, meaning that people would want even more of it, so they're going to raise the prices on things even more"
Game developers have to put "money sinks" into the game, just like they have to put in time sinks to keep top-level players from feeling like there's nothing to do, getting bored, and moving on to the next "next-gen" MMO around the corner. Time sinks are things like fear drops, repeatable quests, Kael armor quests, and sometimes too true: corpse runs. Money sinks are food and drink, JBoots (The 3500g part), epic quests that require a few hundred plat, skills trainin, and spell scrolls.
The conflict starts when you have a maximum-level character. They don't need money anymore, yet they keep acquiring it. If you played your level 60 and farmed blackburrow all day, all you would do is loot and never die and make barbs and humans cry. You are the 1%. All of that money you're getting from selling rusty weapons, and only taking breaks to destroy those useless stacks of gnoll fangs, is just piling up and creating more inflation and raising prices(directly and indirectly) of the high-demand items.
Whose interest is it in to have such a gap? No one really, except for real money traders. This is the only exchange rate possible in our closed economic system; it's not like humans use one currency, Iksar another, and Elves another. We all use platinum. But then there are some rich assholes who are too entitled, even when playing a game like classic-era EQ, to go through the grind like all of the other peasants out there. Platinum now becomes the commodity sold by the gold farmer, and by increasing inflation in-game they create more of a demand for platinum which means they can sell it for more dollars. The higher the price, the more that suppliers are willing to supply it, right?
TL; DR: Inflation, which favors real-money trade. Supply/demand economics, which creates a strained middle-class. Do your duty to fight it all by not buying overpriced crap, and by undercutting all of those half-AFK half-bots in the tunnel.
|