Your idea of a wealth tax seems to have completely missed the reason for inflation and deflation. It has nothing to do with the availability of disposable wealth. The prices are driven entirely by supply and demand. There is no set value of any item, simply the value an individual places upon it, both buyer and seller. Which is how economies work. I may believe that the item I’m selling on the TP is worth 10K, but if no buyer feels the same way, it won’t sell. And if I post it for 10K, and someone else looking to sell the same item quickly posts theirs for 8K, mine will likely not sell unless there are only our two posted for sale and two or more buyers willing to pay that price.
Currently, there are plenty of items listed on the TP that I can afford to buy, but I don’t need or want them. And either taking some of my gold to give to another, or taking someone else’s gold to give to me won’t change that. Almost all markets are currently seeing a drop in list prices because as the majority of the player base levelled gear, gathering, crafting, etc., there has been a huge over supply of many items. If I level my Arcana skill by making 100K weak mana potions, which I can’t salvage and will never use personally, I’ll look for any return on them. So I’ll post them for as little as I think it takes to offload them. Massive supply with little to no demand will drive the prices down.
And as far as harvesting skills, you seem to be off point there too. A lot of the excess materials being sold cheap were not the result of people levelling the skills. They are the result of people trying to get rare drops, and offloading the common ones they didn’t want in the first place. Like void ore. Removing harvesting skills would actually make this even worse, since there would no longer even be a level requirement to try for those rare items in higher tiers.
The simple fact is that the prices on the TPs are fluctuating, like any good economy should, based on supply and demand. Gold and platinum are a good example. They aren’t needed for someone just levelling jewelcrafting (they impact gear score, but not XP earned). But the chance of getting higher tier gems from a platinum node is higher than from a silver node. So, people mine them for gems, post the unwanted ore on the TP, and jewelcrafters don’t need anywhere near the amount of available supply. Re-distributing people’s gold won’t change that.
Oh, and anyone can get out of paying said tax by donating wealth to their company. A smart company will allow any member to access the full amount of what they donate, or a set percentage. Even if they don’t give all member access to directly withdraw it, a handful of treasury officers could easily keep track of how much each member donated and make withdrawals to give back to the member if they need it for a large purchase. This would mean many people will simply carry just under the minimum tax rate to always be on the receiving end and never on the paying end of the wealth tax.
@ smoke [quote=“smoke, post:51, topic:532702, full:true”]
they can make prices go up if they want. at one point in alpha you could grind lvl 40 mobs for about half an hour and get 2k gold just from drops. tannin was about 7g per.
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This does nothing to change the situation. If I have 1K gold and tannin sells for 0.01, or I have 10K gold and tannin sells for 0.1, or I have 100K gold and tannin sells for 1, the situation is the same. The buying power of my coin has not changed, and the perceived value of an item is still situationally the same.
Cheers