WoW Archivist: An expensive history of gold sinks.

These are pricey however, they look good and they are made of a good quality. I enjoyed them so much that I did not put them away.
Repairs, of course, have been in WoW from the beginning. People sometimes complain about them these days, but at the game's launch, repairs were considered the most forgiving death penalty in MMO history.
Respec costs not only act as a gold sink, but they were a deterrent in vanilla from swapping back and forth too often. Blizzard wanted you to commit to your spec. Many serious raiders did it anyway, changing specs to suit each encounter, but it was a tedious and expensive process. Today, the has made respec costs largely irrelevant. However, learning that ability used to be a gold sink itself. Prior to Cataclysm, it cost 1, 000g.
Even with all these sinks in place, inflation was inevitable. WoW's design generates an infinite amount of gold. Mobs die and drop money. When they respawn they drop more, over and over again. Every day brings a fresh batch of dailies that reward you with cash. So wow po the sinks themselves need to be potent to have any chance of keeping up.
Wrath's achievement system may actually rival the Auction house as the biggest gold sink in the game. The system gives players a very tangible reason to collect all those mounts and companion pets. Some achievements are little more than for dumping gold. (And let's not mention the repair costs that i personally incurred earning Firefighter. )
To the inflation boss, all of these measures were mere glancing blows. Blizzard was clearly just as concerned as Fox over the state of Azeroth's economy during the lead-up to Mists. They wanted to create a gold sink that was both compelling and as unlimited as the game's iwowgold own ability to generate gold.
Their solution was the Black market Auction house. It sets your realm's multimillionaires against each other in bidding wars for the game's most exclusive items. The only limit is the size of your realm's own economy, and 100% of the gold spent disappears from the game forever. While some players have concerns, I think it's as close to a perfect solution as we are likely to see -- that is, until Blizzard creates that transforming shredder-jet.