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Wanted to write a brief note on one of the myths about the economy that I keep seeing come up, namely, "RIGs cause inflation." I've mentioned before that Cash Shop is mostly anti-inflationary, but the RIG one keeps coming up with some regularity. Note that I know I will not convince 95% of the people that believe this; they are beholden to their position and cannot be swayed neither clever argument not reasoned analysis nor copious amounts of data, but there are some users that find this stuff interesting.

I've run this analysis before when we were looking at guidelines for balancing the economy, but I wanted to get recent data. So, what I did was took one of the Chance Items a month ago (Crystal Overdrive), and took every Crystal Overdrive that was purchased during a full day after release (namely, March 10th). I then walked through one month of history, and tracked every transformation of those original Crystal Overdrives:
- converted to another item via the choices presented when you clicked on it
- totaled up the amount if it was sold to someone else on the marketplace
- totaled up the amount if it was sold back to the store

Lifespan Of A Rig
Out of 100 Crystal Overdrives sold:
- 10 were kept
- 50 were sold to another user on the marketplace for a total of 14.1m (actually, some were sold multiple times)
- 40 were sold back to the store for a total of 1.1m

There was a 2% marketplace taken out, so the end result:
- 60 items generated
- 1.1m - 0.02 * 14.1m = 0.8m generated

(Actually, one thing to note is that those 60 items keep generating marketplace transactions; items that are sold back tend to be sold back very quickly, but the items that remain will show up on the marketplace outside of the one month span for the study).

Let's compare 100 Crystal overdrives vs. 120 dolphins (equivalent cash expenditures normalized / month), and furthermore let's assume that the dolphins are only making 50% of their money back, and take current bonus levels:

120 dolphins, normalized to one month:
- 120 items / 4 = 30 items generated
- (250k + 250k * 3.5) * 120 = 135m / 4 months = 33.75m

So, over a month, the dolphins will generate half as many items and more than a magnitude more gold.

You can see why we want try to drive the owner:player ratio to be more equal. Owners are the ones that invest the gold and the time and have the risk of failure; but, currently, anything we do to increase the gold given to them results in 3.5x that amount being distributed to the economy.

In the scheme of things, how much do RIGs generate per day? A little more than is generated by gold grants for OMGPOP, and (literally) over a magnitude less than the amount generated by BG and zOMG.