Guild Wars 2

I’ve always wondered what the gold goes towards when we’re taxed a certain amount on our trade post transactions. In real life, taxes are paid to build roads, pay gov’t employees, teachers, etc. What could ANet possibly do with fake in-game taxed gold? Or is it just to prevent more people from playing the market to earn the majority of their gold?

1) Prevents people for constantly canceling/reposting products for sale
2) Adds another gold sink in the game to prevent inflantion

Part of the tax money goes to the poor NPC vendors who need to buy your green runes and sigills. Another part is donated to the event rewarding association and the last bit is mysteriously stolen by bandits, mordrem and the like.

The gold just disappears. Same with the gold paid for waypoint fees and gold you pay to merchants.

It seems weird, but it’s necessary to counter the gold which appears from no where whenever you loot it from an enemy or get it from an event.

That’s how it works in MMOs, they don’t have complete economies. That troll didn’t have 2 silver and some cooking mats because he’s on the way home from the shops, they were all created by the code behind the scenes when you killed him. Without matching gold sinks you just get a situation where more and more gold is pouring into the economy (which does exist between players), and that leads to uncontrolled inflation.

I used to play Ultima Online in the early days, before all this had been figured out. Even relatively common, ‘cheap’ items sold for hundreds or thousands of gold, and gold wasn’t any easier to get than in this game.