- Strict capital controls or simply, a lack of inter-game trade.
- Predictable inflation
- The gaming equivalent of selling government bonds: Gold sinks
Hyperinflation is interesting, but easily solved. You can either:
- Stop "printing money" by paying players less for the things they do (and watch the proletariat revolt)
- "Sell bonds" by putting in bigger sinks. (I'll trade you these new shiny pixels for that gold you're carrying)
- Seize select accounts and declare the funds illegal. Ahem, I mean "against the terms of service". When governments do this, it makes headlines.
- Player 1 spends real money to get credits.
- Player 1 lists these credits (in the form of REX) for sale in game.
- Player 2 has some excess plat and buys the credits
- Player 2 uses credits to buy items that could be sold to a vendor for even more in game currency. Magic inflation because now both players have lots of plat and they can double their plat indefinitely like this.
Most importantly - I believe it is the intention of the game developer's for REX to be deflationary, at least in the short term. The developers will work to keep a balance between encouraging people to spend real dollars to buy REX and sell it to others and keeping REX remains affordable to the vast majority of players. Currently on my server (Faeblight) the price of REX has stabilized between 950 and 1050 and there is some speculation that the price will start to inch up from here. I think if REX prices spike too high, you will see creative moves by the developers to bring it back down. One likely move is to add in valuable in-game items that must be purchased with plat instead of credits.
In other words, what we are seeing in Rift is an impressive move to shift the in game economy. These changes both give the developers more levers to adjust and make it easier for players to see the effects of those changes on the economy through a solid connection to real dollars. For those out there who follow game economies and their parallels in the real world, Rift is a story worth following.