Id like to share my views about the economics of sapience and the cause
of the high priced credits.

First Let me give a very obvious answer to the question why do people
sell credits? Well to get gold of course. They need this gold to acquire
various goods.

An important thing to note is that most items did not raise in price
recently. This means the amount of gold needed on an annual basis by
those that sell credits did not change thus they need to sell less
credits and make less offerings to the gods. Fortunatly becuase you get
more gold for a credit more people will sell it for gold instead of
converting them to lessons, they might even purchace more credits by
offering to the good because they can get more for their credits.

Its is very hard to tell what the effect of the increased credit price
is on both the amount of credits for sale on the credit market and the
amount of credits gained by offerings. I think the later is quite
independant from the price on the credits market but that the amount of
credits on the credits market does indeed decrease as people need to
sell less credits to get the gold they need.

Now its a long time before I had economics put I remember one of the
most importent things that influenced the inflation was basicly the
amount money in the system compared to the amount of goods.

If you look at the amount of gold in the achaean economy you will see
that is alot of gold is generated either from gold dropped by monsters
or by quests like ratting, lets call this gold the input.

Alot of the gold people get from selling credits is used to buy herbs,
armour, weapons, refills or enchantments. The problem with most of the
things they spend it on is that a large portion of the gold it costs to
buy them stays in the system. True enchantments and armour cost
commodities and the gold spend on it is moved out of the system but as
far as I know all gold spend on herbs and refills stay in the system.

In General only the gold spend on commodities, steeds, seasone and clans
are moved out of the systems lets call this the output.

To warp it up if the amount of gold in the system increases the price of
the credits will increase. This will continue untill the input equals
the output.

When the output exceeds the input two things will happen, the input will
lower because people will concentrate more on getting experience while
bashing and questing instead of getting gold, and secondly as gold is
easier to come by people are more likely to buy clan and steeds thus
increasing the output.

The problem is as follows, as new areas are added the input is
increased, for example the new discovered underworld raised the daily
input by 10k to 15k. This is ok as long as the output increases too due
to the fact more people start to live in Sapience. Secondly both the
input decrease as the output increase change slowly and are rather
stiff, so a sudden increase of one of these will have a large effect on
the credit price.

Another cuase of the input increase is that the avarage knowlege on how
to bash and quest aswell the ability to do so has increased over time
causing the bashing areas or quests to be more frequently cleaned. This
also due to the larger amount of people in Sapience, but this does not
matter much as the outputalso increases with the number of people in
Sapience.

Now what can we do against the high credits prices? Of course only
people who buy credits with gold shoud worry about this

As was suggested earlier more uses could be thought of on what to do
with gold. Of course only things that increase the output help starting
a massage service will not lower the credit price but selling lifestones
will as they cost over 3k on commodities thus lowering the amout of gold
in the system. Maybe we could think of news ways to spend gold and ask
the gods for example they could let us hire some artifacts for one
single day. It should cost about ten times the creditcost of the
artifact. Would be reallly usefull to have a wand of illusions for one
day to use at a ritual for example.

Now there is one other thing we could do to increase output and that is
by refilling vials at Seasone. Currently forestals ask 250 for a mana or
health refill, meaning that unless they are transed you only get a
profit of 50 gold. Personally I go to seasone cause I dont like to wait
for a forestal to show up and when you get to seasone she refills
quicker, besides I like to run. Just keep in mind though that when you
refill at a forestal your gold is likely to be used to buy the same
credits you wanted to buy.

On the input side we cant expect people to stop bashing and earn gold
and the gods could lower the amount of gold we earn from bashing or
questing but the problem with that is it will mainly help those who have
alot of savings on their backaccounts, apart from this it will shrink
the economy meaning fewer people with high stat armour less new clans
and less public postings.

Penned by my hand on the 4th of Daedalan, in the year 343 AF.