#1 - Feb. 23, 2016, 2:12 p.m.
As many of you know, inflation is an increasing problem with every expansion. The gold cap was initially 214,748g - this was pretty much impossible to achieve in vanilla, achievable by the selected few in TBC and definitely achievable by some people in WOTLK.
Blizzard saw this and increased the gold cap to 999,999g in Cataclysm. They did this because they realised that some items are (or will be) worth more than the gold cap (214k) and so it restricts the natural flow of the economy.
Let me create an analogy as to why this is a problem: Imagine you go to a shop where the maximum amount you can spend is £100, yet you are interested in buying a £150 item. The shop cannot possibly list that item (because it can only accept £100 max) and you cannot possibly buy that item either, even if you have that much money in total (for example 2 bank accounts).
The 999,999g gold cap solved this situation for the whole duration of Cataclysm because there was no single item worth even close to the 999,999g. All was fine at this point.
MoP came and BMAH was introduced. The idea of BMAH is that the 'super rich' players can buy stuff that they normally can't get ingame anymore (or don't want to spend the time farming them). This idea is great, because not only it gives something to work forwards to for the rich players (as they can buy everything else ingame already), it also serves as a gold sink. When a player buys the item, that gold is gone from the economy. The problem was that towards the end of MoP there were a handful of items whose value surpassed 500k mark (TCG mounts for example).
This is the same point as was in WotLK, where some items could cost 100k (ie. half the gold cap) and so this should be the point where Blizzard increased the gold cap again in order to not artificially restrict the economy.
Now we have WoD where gold inflated (due to garrisons) at the highest rate so far (probably) and many people have gold cap now. Then Blizzard introduced WoW token where you essentially buy gold for money from the store. This idea is great as it combats the gold sellers, yet they forgot that it would mean that there are a few wealthy individuals who will just buy 20 wow tokens in order to get that gold cap for that specific mount they want at BMAH.
Therefore, instead of BMAH being 'who can bid the most', it became 'who can bid the first'. That being said, the most dangerous of it all is that there are items now that are regularly being sold for more than a gold cap (TCG items). When you have Spectral Tiger these days, you cannot just go to AH and list it for its real value simply because the real value is above gold cap.
However, I do not like the idea of blindly increasing the gold cap again. Trading 2 million gold just seems silly to me and hence I propose implementing a new coin - platinum.
Therefore our money will work in the following way:
100c > 1s
100s > 1g
100g > 1p
The gold cap would simply get turned to a 'platinum cap' of 999,999p - or 100 million gold, while at the same time would preserve the non-retarded amount of 'money' you pay for items (ie. paying 10 000 p makes more sense than paying 1 000 000g from the long term perspective as items get more and more valuable due to inflation).
P.S.: Rising gold cap to 100m gold is currently most definitely possible. When the gold cap was at 214k it was due to it being 2^32-1 wheras it is almost certain that the new value is capped at 2^64-1, meaning around 900 trillion gold (unless my math is off).
