Thar's Gold in Them Thar Hills

I was about to post about how easy it is to get gold now that I have several daily quests I can do. I can fly over to Netherwing Ledge, I can fly over the jagged rock that surrounds Ogri'la and I can fly up the hill to Skettis. There's much gold to be found in doing daily quests and I don't feel like I'm farming. What more could you ask for? Then I remembered I have an epic flying mount which cost 5,200 gold to begin with.

The Sha'tari Skyguard/Ogri'la quests require a flying mount and the Netherwing quests require an epic flying mount, so unfortunately unless you have either you can't get access to these quests. I'm guessing if you managed to acquire the gold for an epic mount, making money isn't that much of an issue for you.

Still, while the epic mount is your biggest money sink, after you're flying high and fast there are still things to spend your hard earned gold on. And being able to make 120 gold from the quests alone, not including the coin and drops from the mobs you have to kill means if you decide to spend 300 gold on a rare smithing plan or something, you won't be broke for very long.

You'd think everyone would like ways to make gold outside of buying it from gold farmers, but no. Someone posted at length on the WoW forums that they should remove the gold reward from the quests and just give rep. Since I'm sure I fell asleep in Econ 101...I didn't follow all of the post either. But here is a snippet of it:

Hyperinflation is clearly a problem. Left unchecked, it can bring an economy crashing down very quickly, as money loses its function as a store of value and medium of exchange, it rapidly becomes worthless, and economies can devolve into a barter state.

As gold creation continues unabated through these daily quests, the threat of hyper-inflation is worrisome, though I should add it could have some benefits. As gold becomes less and less valuable, it should hurt the gold farmers (unless they are leading the way in new gold creation through these daily quests). But using hyper-inflation to combat the gold farmers is akin to shooting yourself in the foot to get rid of a fly that’s landed there. Sure, you hurt, and probably kill the fly, but you do a lot more damage to yourself to get rid of the pest.

Other side benefits (from a consumption standpoint) are that the fixed cost things within the game can and will become trivial. Purchasing mount skills or vendor items, or repairs will become trivial expenses within the game as gold is continually pumped into the economy. But the downside is that you can expect items on the auction houses to spiral upwards in terms of price with no end in sight.

Given all of this, I make a simple request, for the good of the game economies, and long term benefit to the players: Remove the gold rewards or greatly diminish them for the daily quests. Players will still complete them for faction rewards without the gold. And stopping the rapid influx of new gold into the economies will help stabilize the burgeoning inflation we are beginning to experience. Economic stability is good for everyone.

I hope they don't remove the gold rewards. I like knowing by investing a small amount of time I can put some extra coin in my pocket. But will there come a time when that gold means nothing on the AH? I can't say. I'm taking advantage of it while I can, and while I'm not bored to tears with doing so.