To be blunt, I’m a bit worried about the economy aspect of the game, mostly because of the nature of currency right now.
As of this writing, there’s only one currency, Silver, and you can only obtain it with three methods: killing monsters, selling loot to NPC, or selling loot in the AH. Now, having only one currency puts a lot of burden on said currency and that can, and will, cause problems in the long run. Price inflation is a very complex one of these problems, just to give one example most people have experienced.
This problem in particular goes hand-in-hand with the means of obtaning loot, and thus making a profit out of it. I know the game is in beta and lacks a lot of content and polish, so a lot of things in loot’s drop nature may change in the future. There’s items that can only be obtained once with the instanced Boss fights for example, this doesn’t necessarily cause inflation, but it could, because of supply and demand. At the same time, drops don’t seem very hard to obtain, so there’s that.
One solution I’ve seen you have a good grasp of is money sinks. The money sinks were plenty, and quite effective at lower levels. But money sinks are never enough, for you may never underestimate player dedication and greed. Why? Because in virtual worlds money often comes from thin air and time in an easy way, just like EXP. Money shouldn’t be treated like EXP. What I mean is, virtual money has this artificial cycle where it “spawns” from killing monsters (or doing quests, which is not the case in ToS) and then to remove it from the game and keeping economic balance you force players to spend it in vacuum voids in the shape of money sinks like equipment repairs. Money sinks, however, are flat values, so they’re easy to jump-over by dedicating more time to farming money at early levels (which is legitimate) or just by getting to the endgame where it’s when players have more disposable income to spend and the money sinks start to get smaller and less significant in their tasks of sucking money out of the system (some games just set bigger money sinks at this stage, but they have really smart systems where they make them very desirable for players to use). This design choice seems to come from trying to imitate real life economic behavior. But real life money doesn’t work like this at all, and real life money sinks are very different because money doesn’t just “spawn” from thin air then “disappear” into the void when spent. It just cycles through the environment, with bumps sometimes, but it does.
While not a direct cause, price inflation/deflation and such other economy unbalances can be fought very efficiently with one simple method that doesn’t hurt anybody in a virtual world: adding side-currencies that lessen the burden on the main currency. That’s right, you take value out from your main currency on purpose to make it less vulnerable. These optional currencies can be used to buy specific services that don’t break in-game balance. It’s a lot of work, but it pays off.
Since the game is in such an early stage I can’t come up with examples of what side-currencies could be or methods to obtain them, but I think an option would be to make quests reward a bit of a special currency to get a specific service. What service? That’s for you to decide. You know how anvils suck Silver in exponential quantities for every upgrade? It’s a really efficient money sink, it works wonders in the early levels, but attributes and buying pets, while efficient sinks too, are flat and finite so they stop being good at some point. These services for example could use another type of currency that you obtain from different sources. This naturally means players have more of their main currency to spend, but since the value is reduced it keeps unbalances in check.
This system also leads to equipment being obtainable with special currencies, like PvP tokens for specific PvP equipment, but that’s a sensitive topic I won’t touch, although most players have experienced it in some way or another, and thus have differing opinions about it.
Thanks for reading 
