EBANK saw around 8.6% (http://www.engadget. com/2009/07/02/new-perspective-on-eveonlines-latest-bank-embezzlement-part-tw/) of its deposits simply vanish. Coupled with the pressure of a run on funds, liquidity problems, and financial uncertainty, this sort of criminal behavior can have an adverse impact on any virtual economy. The incidents in EvE are particularly troubling as stolen funds never returned to the economy through other channels. Stolen ISK was converted into dollars by the offending parties and removed from the game entirely. Recent global financial crises, in the real world, saw huge losses appear on just a few institutions books and stalling entire financial systems. This was capable of destroying entire economies overnight. These examples demonstrate that a large enough single loss and a fragile enough system can end up costing far more to resolve than the initial loss. Unfortunately, virtual economies do not have vast stocks of government liquidity to fall back on. (http://www. economist.com/news/schoolsbrief/21584534effects-financial-crisis-are-still-being-feltfive-years-article and http://www.treasury. gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/ Documents/20120413_FinancialCrisisResponse. pdf ) . Despite potentially unlimited liquidity, from dungeons that never close, developers cannot simply dump gold into a market on a whim. Changes to a game are subject to development procedures where adding new quests or currencies can take a protracted period. With clear evidence that badly controlled financial structures can collapse overnight, good forward planning is a necessity in controlling these problems. This can include the use of systems like gold sinks and trading post fees, which can act like a tax. In the real world cash in hand trading, the sale of illicit goods and other illegal services are problematic for Governments as they can be difficult to tax. Tax is used, by governments, to provide facilities to their population, but in a virtual
economy equivalent systems are used to funnel money out of player’s pockets. Gold sinks act as a virtual counterbalance to inflationary pressures by removing currency from the virtual world. By engaging in black market activity players can place additional inflationary pressure on the economic systems they use regularly. As players circumvent measures to remove currency from the market, less gold is lost to gold sinks and the increasing volume of currency in the market can create an inflationary crescendo if left unchecked. Inflation can become detrimental to an economy when unnaturally large injections of cash have an unexpected impact on the availability of goods or the average value of a unit of currency is decreased. Resulting goods become prohibitively expensive to a significant section of players with all sorts of catastrophic results, creating an economic underclass and resulting in massive hyperinflation if not managed. Gold farmers can particularly undermine an economy and pose a severe inflationary risk. Using an array of methods, commercial gold farmers generate considerable levels of unintended currency in the virtual world. In its simplest form, gold farmers repeatedly and systematically kill, loot, and repeat for protracted lengths of time in order to generate unintended wealth. This can result in unforeseen fluctuations across virtual economies, driving up prices as large deposits of currency come crashing into the market without any significant balancing forces in place. Recipients of this unforeseen wealth can go on to inflict massive swings in the markets behavior, driving up prices and causing low consumer confidence. Gold farmers clearly pose a major risk to online economies and can be compared to criminal counterfeiters in the real world, who introduce fake cash into an economy, generating artificial wealth. Even with billions of gold swirling around a virtual world, a handful of credits is not particularly useful at a local market. As online 35