It's very easy to control the cashflow in the game. Handling the game currency isn't the issue, it's what players do with it, which you can't control. Sometimes this is good, sometime this is bad.
This is completely false, for the record. It is impossible to control the cashflow of fiat gold in a game even if you are exceptionally gifted in the field [of finance]. Absolutely nobody ever involved in game production to date was, and consequently this impression that "it's easy" and a solved problem simply belies a lot of Dunning-Kruger effect (ie, people are too clueless to even realize how clueless they are).
For that matter if you ask any fiat, inflationary economist they'll tell you the exact same thing: it's easy to control the cashflow in a country and mostly a solved problem. It never happens to be the case, in spite of actually gifted people in the field [of finance] being involved. So no, by no means has there yet existed an MMORPG which correctly handles the game gold problem, and I'm pretty sure unless this project succeeds there won't be for a long, long time (because people who grok this sort of thing are usually spending their time elsewhere, and it's a quite unique and incredible alignment of political and financial interests that has happened to declare the village of Gameville the site of what will be a famous battle, so there's all sorts of high value bipedals the likes of which Gameville's never seen before swarming around it - the windup to the "George Washington slept here" cultural phenomenon).
Usually people think you incompetent when you use less than the best examples, like calling Kenny G a jazz musician in front of Miles Davis.
Ehehe, good pic.
But yes, it's true, using less than the best example to make your own case is usually construed as incompetence ("he either doesn't know the field enough or doesn't understand the problem enough to pick the better example") whereas doing the same to represent the opposing case is usually construed as at best incompetence. Way of the world.
An RPG by design requires grinding, some force it by design. You can't beat a boss, you grind levels until you're strong enough to do so. Farming, (if you're defining it as the act of grinding mobs for the sole purpose of acquiring loot), on it's own accord doesn't inflate the economy. When it's combined with mass sell-offs, like anything else, then the economy in the game tanks due to inflationary reasons. This I completely understand. Final Fantasy XI suffered massive inflation due to Chinese farmers selling Gil as a business. The only option Square had was to delete some billion+ Gil to force deflation.
This is an intricate point, because it's made out of completely different things which you improperly conflate.
So, first off: a BAD design requires grinding. That's all. It has nothing to do with RPGs; a bad marriage design requires marriage grinding, a badly organized job requires job grinding, a badly designed RPG requires RPG grinding.
Second: farming is the act of playing half the game. If the flow of gameplay can be divided into two portions, portion A and portion B, where A is perceived by players as extraneous to their enjoyment of the game, then A will be outsourced (to Chinese businesses, of course) and the game is broken. This is exactly what farming
proves (to the hardheaded idiots who think "they solved currency" above): the game is badly designed.
Third: farming
always inflates the economy. It makes no difference if it is or if it isn't combined with mass sell-offs of anything, this is clueless voodooman blaming one of the symptoms, much akin to medieval minds thinking that the coughing is what makes phthisic patients lose weight and there's no such thing as Koch's bacillus. The presence of meaningless crap that's money in name only is the problem, and the game designer trying to apply Western welfarism to "make the game better" (or moreover, just because he's culturally immersed in welfarism and can't quite think outside of Weber for lack of any exposure to actual culture, or even to first hand Weber crap for that matter) fails for the same reason the same nonsense fails when applied by politicians (who often seem children who aspired to design games but never got anywhere, much like our friend usagi). IRL they tend to blame "speculators" (look at Venezuela) for the IRL equivalent of "massive sell-offs". Nonsense & poppycock, they broke it, not the Chinese businessmen providing the very valuable and very respectable service of making it plain how stupid Mr. Designerman was.
Lastly, the idea that deleting players' cash is even something game management may contemplate, let alone implement is fucking scandalous.
Bitcoin will definitely solve 2), and I assume you're going to limit 1) as you see fit.
Actually I'm told there's going to be a Design Document Highlights announcement later on, so commentary on this will have to wait for that.
Repeating the formula never works because the timing no longer exists. "Right place right time" sort of thing I suppose.
It'd seem it's not because of time, tho. It'd seem it's because "we already have that, ty".
Second Life?
Yeah, perhaps that also counts for "largest", depending how you look at things. Good point.