Gold and minting

Gold, the biggest mystery of any Role Playing Game out there.
It may be called different in your game, be it rupees, zeny, nuyen, platinum, cred, ryo or simply Gold, Silver and Copper as we have here in WoW. Your local mystery currency.


Gold fever

Where does gold come from?
Or silver, or copper for that matter. Only NPCS and monsters seem to know.

Sure, we can make weapons and armor, even rings and trinkets of rare and epic quality. Yet nobody seems to have put things together and invented a "minting" skill.

So, where are all these monsters and NPCs getting their gold from?

Of course, it's a fantasy RPG and money has to be "worth" something in order for it to be able to function as a currency. But still, one gold bar sells for 6 silver to the npc. 6 SILVER?! Talk about getting ripped off. How many gold coins do you suppose that NPC will create out of one bar of gold? The "standard" trading gold bar according to wikipedia is 12.4 kg (400 oz). Even if a standard sized Ingot is what we're using in WoW, that's still an equivalent of over 400 gold coins (1 oz) in weight. And all we get is SIX SILVER???

At least a bar of silver sells for one silver... You're still getting ripped off, don't you forget it, but not to the scale of gold.

The copper bar is perhaps the most simple example. Depending on the size of a single bar, you get ten copper for a bar. Take the average coin size, labor, time involved in minting and ok, ten copper for one bar seems reasonable. That is, if a single bar is the size of about ten coins. Which I somehow doubt it is.


The Source!

But then, where do monsters get their gold?
Well, they rob NPCs obviously. You never hear about it, but a large part of all that gold you spend at the blacksmith to repair your precious epic armor goes straight back to the monsters.

It's true, really. Ask any local NPC how often people have failed that escort quest.


New poll

Old poll result (You guys slack at voting):
* No, where do I find them?! - 8 (28%)
* Yes, looks awesome! - 7 (25%)
* Yeah, but more of the same... - 7 (25%)
* No, I'll see it when it goes live. - 6 (21%)

New poll:
* What do you think of the new LFG system introduced in 3.3?