I do not think that increasing the upkeep would increase the gold spent upkeeping tbh. If you increase upkeep, people will react and wear less equipment, possibly even reducing the total amount of gold lost due to upkeep in the end.
I think we need to offer new possibilities in order to slow down the inflation. Maybe 4th heirloom levels that can only be crafted from the +3 version with a shitload of gold (like... 5 million ?). Of course as the inflation continues, 5 million will probably become not so much, so we will have to invent yet another thing for players to spend their gold. But that's how inflation is regulated in all the games I know of. Another good idea is fiddling with the marketplace fees. By increasing them, you make people that use the marketplace pay for a part of the inflation. Even better, the amount of gold they loose through it depends on how extensively they use the marketplace, so this actually means that it directly takes most of it's money out of the trader's profit.
Finally, there should be more incentives towards retirement. Pretending that heirloom prices go up because the few very rich people that together make for a marginal part of the whole money in the game decide to spend a lot isn't just going to be true because people say it. Prices go up because ,in this case a the same time, the offer goes down because people stop retiring, and the demand goes up because the same people that stopped offering heirlooms to the market now want to buy some for themselves ! Thing is, the heirloom buyers that still wish to buy with current "crazy" prices have the majority of the money in their hands, not because they are very rich, but because they are many.
Exactly. On average, players will always tend to use a level of equipment that lets them make some gold through play.
However, that doesn't have anything to do with inflation. For inflation to arise from "insufficient" upkeep, it would have to mean that the average upkeep level is so low that people can earn more gold each generation than is the value of the heirloom point they also gain. Of course this is affected by the gold injected into the system by players who have stopped retiring, and thus continue to gain gold but not heirlooms.
Still, for that inflation then to be sustainable over a long period of time, that trend would also have to continue, which isn't really possible unless the average level of upkeep is also constantly decreasing and/or the amount being injected by non-retirees increasing at a fast enough rate to keep up with rising market prices.
Now, here's a bit of a thought experiment: assuming you're gen 1 and pay absolutely zero upkeep the whole time, then retire as soon as you hit 31, the maximum amount of gold you can gain in one generation of play is about 436k. Each generation decreases this amount, because the XP bonus reduces your gold gain relative to XP gain, eventually going as low as 300k per gen at gen16.
Now subtract upkeep. Depending on your gen bonus, each retirement will take between 6000 and 8700 ticks at x1. Assuming an average multiplier of 2 you can cut those in half to 3000 and 4350. You'll probably be paying upkeep every five ticks or so. Think how much upkeep you pay on an average round and do the math on that. How much do you think the average player really gains from each gen, at the end of the day? I'm pretty sure that even with all the gold coming in from the people who have stopped retiring, it'll be a lot less than 600k.
Something else is driving the inflation.
