I can’t do dungeons, because the wear and tear on my gear costs MORE THAN I GET FROM RUNNING THE DUNGEON. Plus, I need to re-spec my stats for tanking which means it costs me 1000 coins before I even START the dungeon.
Someone told me, “Oh, go farm mobs in this area, they drop huge amounts of cash”. So I did. End result of 20 minutes of killing as fast as I could? I LOST 10 coins. I started with 6993 and fully-repaired gear. After salvaging the minimal loot I got and the coin drops I got from killing mobs, I had 6883 coins.
And, no, the daily bonus awards from the first 3 faction quests are NOT enough to keep my house, because my tax is over $1000. Hmm, let’s see, 150 times 5 days, hmm, that’s, wait, 750 coin. Which means I still need to make 250 coin JUST TO PAY THE TAX FOR ONE HOUSE. That’s 5+ hours of additional play just to keep my EXISTING house, much less start saving toward a NEW house.
And, no, it’s not reasonable to expect people to play 40 hours a week exclusively grinding cash and have ONE house to show for it.
Those who don’t have severe money problems because they play the auction house are simply leeching cash off lower-level players who can still get cash at a relatively reasonable rate. When the supply of low-level players dries up (as it inevitably does in any MMO), you will be absolutely broke.
The ONLY reason there is more money coming in to the economy than going out right now is because there are large numbers of still-low-level characters doing money-generating stuff. Once they level up and the population goes down (as it will, it’s ALREADY dropped by over 50%), the whole game economy is going to crash.
The ONLY solution is to anticipate the problem and fix it BEFORE it becomes a crisis and you lose not just the typical attrition portion of the playerbase but the ENTIRE playerbase because nobody can afford to upkeep their characters.