I just woke up and my math will probably be as fuzzy as my vision. Let me know if I've figured any of this wrong.
IIRC, the tax went from 2% to 3% somewhere very close to that big spike.
So at that time and shortly after [the second flattened spike], the MP had 40 trillion gold flowing through it daily. 40,000,000,000,000.
The "bad" news: on those days, the 3% tax accounted for the deletion of 1,200,000,000,000 -- 1.2 trillion, or close to 300 times as much as we've funneled into the P:G guild account.
But to see if P:G is really ineffective, we need to look closer.
A blank search of the marketplace displayed 30,000 listings. [I'll just assume that's correct.] If we unrealistically assume there are no MP mules and each player has 10 items listed, that's 3,000 people in the MP. [I'd bet that the real figure is 6000 to 9000 people.]
We have a mere 200 guild members.
And the previous tax has accounted for .8 trillion of the marketplace's daunting 1.2t removals. Let's divide the new .4t tax gold loss against P:G's 2.1b and see how it stacks up per person.
Firstly, 400b / 3000 is 133 million, which is a hell of a lot more than 1% of my per capita MP sales [nevermind my net worth, borrowed items aside], so I strongly doubt my math. At the higher end figure of 9k MP sellers, it's 44.3 million each, which still seems a little weird for 1% of the average player's transactions, but I'm two months old, so whatever.
5b / 200 is 25 million donated per person. That's a figure I can understand.
Now I could divide by the number of days P:G has been open, to match a single day of the Marketplace, but we're just a handful of people. We don't have enough people to make daily transactions. P:G's "revenue" has instead gone up as other users have joined the guild. [Yes, this is the most fuzzy point, but we're dividing apples by oranges here either way. For example, the MP is now down to about 3t/day of deleted gold, not 4t.]
At 25 million gold per P:G member, it looks like we're doing as much per person as a 0.5% tax in the MP. [And never mind how most of our guild account's gold has come from a mere handful of members, because the marketplace is the same way!] That makes us -- per person, not overall! -- responsible for dealing half as much damage to the inflation as the MP tax increase.
And our efforts are not inflated by gold generators.
Since the MP is finally headed down -- probably with much credit due to the extra 1% tax to which I've compared P:G -- my final verdict is that Project: Goldsink is effective. There's no reason not to join and contribute, whether it's 50%+ of your liquid assets, 10%, or even less.
If you bring up P:G at Bill's Ranch or Towns, you'll probably meet someone who has at least heard of it. Tell them the good news: between efforts like P:G, the awesome anti-gold gens campaigns you've seen in Towns and signatures, and the new MP tax, we are solving the problem.
Now if only we could fix Towns' bugs and alchemy...
