The History Behind Ultima Online's Economy

In the beginning a million gold in Ultima Online was worth around 20 dollars. The valuable items people would fight over were all rares. Many of the players would consider themselves rares collectors. This value dramatically decreased as gold be came easier to acquire. As a result the game makers began to limit players ability to collect/farm gold. This led to the players farming items to get the gold they needed from existing in-game gold. However what the GM's didn't count on was hackers who were able to dupe a lot of fake gold and items.

Every mmo game that allows trading and auctions has its own in-game economy where prices rise and fall based on supply and demand. Gold has been over supplied for a long itme until recently where the influx of players has started to cause gold demand to succeed demand. This can lead to a shift in the marker where items end up being cheaper to buy because the value of gold is rising. There are still a few nafarious players who are able to dupe items and then vendor sell them to farm gold.

The anomaly has caused things in the game not to fuction property such as the vendors only allowing up to 175 mil for item pricing which is a clear sign of depreciated gold. Still the players are able to stabilize an economy around all of this where the the gold eventually makes it back around full cycle is it circulates through the economy. If gold begin to be more and more difficult to get one can expect the value of it to rise and possibly offsetting the item ratios the way the game intended them to be.

Due to the release of new content and items it ends up being the case that players farm new items. These in turn are traded so that they can acquire gold instead.

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