Gold sink
Video game mechanic
Gold sink is an economic process by which a video game's ingame currency ('gold'), or any item that can be valued against it, is removed. This process is comparable to financial repression in real economies. Most commonly the genres are role-playing game or massively multiplayer online game. The term is comparable to timesink, but usually used in reference to game design and balance, commonly to reduce inflation when commodities and wealth are continuously fed to players through sources such as gold taps; such as quests, looting monsters, or minigames.
Overview
The economy of such games typically involves players gathering gold from playing the game, which they then use to purchase items or services, or trade with other players. Gold sinks serve to decrease the total amount of gold players have, since without sinks, there will be inflation. Gold sinks are commonly called drains or gold drains. They can also be associated with item drains. For example, in Ultima Online, items that were placed on the ground would be gathered by the server. This form is referred to as decay or garbage collection.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gold sink” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.