History Main / MoneySink

* In the early days of ''KingdomOfLoathing'', there was a rather nasty period of bug exploitation known as "Black Sunday" that resulted in some people gaining ludicrous amounts of meat, the game's GlobalCurrency. Thus, "meatsinks" were created, such as the Penguin Mafia raffles and the "Save the Yeti" fundraisers. Ironically enough, the problem arose from an item that was actually itself a money sink--well, when used outside of combat, that is--called a "meat vortex." It was intended to be used in combat to take some meat from an enemy, and just for fun the dev team made it take 30 or so meat from you when you used it outside of combat. Unfortunately, using it without any meat in your inventory caused the problem, as your meat total [[UsefulNotes/PowersOfTwoMinusOne went below zero and all the way up to the top]].

* The online game ''HoboWars'' has several examples of this, some including buying food and alcohol, recovering life at the hospital, and purchasing parts for your hobo's cart.
* There is a form of RareCandy in ''SkiesOfArcadia'' called Seeds, and there is one of each that will increase one's stats by a small amount. If you recruit a certain character for your crew, he will sell you an infinite amount of these seeds, but each one sells for 50,000 gold each. By the end of the game, though, money can become over-abundant, so it's possible to give your party a large stat boost if you have enough.

* In ''CityOfHeroes'', there used to be very few money-sinks at high levels. With the introduction of Super-Groups, one could choose to earn Prestige for one's group instead of the regular Influence/Infamy for one's character, which partially solved the problem. But when Inventions came out, suddenly, the high-level characters with lots of Inf were buying low-level salvage that only low-level characters could get for huge sums, effectively redistributing a lot of money from high to low.

** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion Oblivion]]'' has houses the player can buy and upgrade in each town, but aside from looking pretty, giving you a place to sleep, and offering a safe spot to store items (the latter two of which can be done in many other places), it seems that their only function is to make you feel like a big shot. Additionally, enchanting items and creating spells also cost a huge amount of gold if you use more powerful effects, but at least these tend to be fun to play around with due to the game's [[WideOpenSandbox sandbox]] nature.

* Forging and refining weapons and armor is a money sink for many players of ''RohanOnline''. Forging entails combining two weapons or pieces of armor into a rare weapon or armor, and you can do the same with two rare weapons or pieces of rare armor to get a unique weapon or armor. Refining involves lowering an attribute or level on a weapon, piece of armor or other item so that you can equip it. Both forging and refining have its problems both of which stem from the fact that success is not assured and the chance for failure increases when you try to forge higher-level stuff, particularly uniques. If you fail at a forge attempt, you lose both items you were using for the attempt (which can be REALLY aggravating if you were trying to combine two good weapons or pieces of armor into a better weapon or piece of armor), and if you fail at a refine attempt, in the case of weapons and armor, the item you were trying to de-level instead goes ''up'' by a number of levels equal to what you were trying to lower it by (though never above the level of the original), and if you de-level a given weapon or piece of armor enough and fail on a refine, you can actually ''destroy'' it. All this serves to gobble up whatever crones you have, and the only way to save whatever weapons or armor you have on a forge attempt is to get a preservation stone, which can only be obtained in a Consignment Auction for a good amount of crones or in [[AllegedlyFreeGame the Item Mall or Exchange Market for real money]], and which only protects your items against one failed forge attempt per stone.

* ''PhantasyStarUniverse'' has a few (most of which are found only in online mode), but the most notable is the Photon Charger, which restores the Photon Points of your weapons. Not having any PP is okay for Hunters (who use melee weapons), but Rangers (guns and other ranged weapons) and Forces (spell casters) cannot use their weapons if they don't have enough PP. There are two (expensive) items that restore PP (one affects one weapon slot, the other affects all weapons slots) and PP regenerates at a slow rate (which can be boosted by (even more expensive) armor upgrades), but recharging a full pallet of S-rank, fully ground (upgraded) weapons will cost a good chunk of cash. Of course, by the time you get anywhere near that sort of gear, you won't be worrying about 1000-2000 meseta a mission...

** Recently released in ''Cataclysm'', there's this one alchemy recipe known as "Vial of the Sands". It turns you into a dragon, able to fly super-fast and carry a friend on your back. Cool, right? Unfortunately, one of the reagents is the Sands of Time, which is only sold by one NPC for 3,000 gold. And you need ''eight'' of these.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' has gear durability that goes down after a battle and you suffer massive stat penalties if your gear breaks. You can repair the gear yourself, though depending on the type of gear, you'll need to be in a specific job class and level to repair the item. Alternatively, you can just find an NPC mender who can repair your items all at once for a small fee. The game also has housing for free companies (player formed groups) that are nothing more than a place to hang out, but even the smallest plot of land can run you for several ''million'' gil.
* ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' has the random hat crafting - 4 refined metal will craft a new [[MundaneMadeAwesome hat]]. But since craft hats are sold for a third of that, it doesn't quite serve its purpose, and in 2014, keys went from 5 or 6 refined metal to 11. Since refined metal being traded for keys is a [[{{Pun}} key]] part of the economy, this means it takes longer (from 3 or 4 weeks) to make a key (now 11).

* In ''{{Runescape}}'', the entire construction skill is one big MoneySink. They really shouldn't have made money the resource needed to build a room by yourself. The player is not made out of money, are they? And if they were, where's their golden room? (The rest of the MoneySink makes more sense, though.)

*** You can also buy stuff with Dragon Coins, an in-game currency which costs real money. Plus you need a Dragon Amulet to own the house in the first place, which also costs real money. So it's not just a MoneySink for virtual gold...

** In ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'', you could ''build'' a house complete with items and servants (!) upon reaching a certain high rank in one of the three local noble houses. Thankfully, the disappearing item glitch has been fixed since ''Daggerfall'' and since you can't sell most of the expensive loot to regular vendors, your personal chambers very soon turn into a TrophyRoom that'd make Queen of Sheba jealous.

* ''FallenEarth'' has an economy built almost entirely on ItemCrafting, but with a constant stream of chips (game currency) flowing in from quests and sales to NPC merchants. As a result, some ubiquitous crafting components (such as fasteners) are difficult to find anywhere except merchants, to help drain money out of the economy. There are also several services such as fast-travel, mail, and towing vehicles, all of which have service fees that steadily add up. Scavenging is also just tedious enough that once you get a few levels and some extra cash, it's far more tempting to just buy low-end and hard-to-find materials in bulk from NPC merchants and make up the lost cash somewhere else.

* In the early days of ''KingdomOfLoathing'', there was a rather nasty period of bug exploitation known as "Black Sunday" that resulted in some people gaining ludicrous amounts of meat, the game's GlobalCurrency. Thus, "meatsinks" were created, such as the Penguin Mafia raffles and the "Save the Yeti" fundraisers. Ironically enough, the problem arose from an item that was actually itself a money sink--well, when used outside of combat, that is--called a "meat vortex." It was intended to be used in combat to take some meat from an enemy, and just for fun the dev team made it take 30 or so meat from you when you used it outside of combat. Unfortunately, using it without any meat in your inventory caused the problem, as your meat total went below zero and all the way up to the top.

** There is also Uncle P's Antiques, which is [[BlatantLies definitely not a front for the Penguin Mafia]]. Everything there is mediocre and expensive, existing mostly to prove that you can waste that much meat.

Money sinks are important in many virtual economies as a method to control inflation. When currency is constantly being added to the economy from monster drops, quests, etc., if there weren't a method of getting rid of it for good, prices for player-traded goods and services would theoretically grow without limit. New players and those without large amounts of time to devote to acquiring money would be unable to compete. Hence, as a game goes on, developers will often introduce more and more expensive ways for players to dispose of excess cash. It also saves your money from becoming useless once you have bought everything there is to buy.

** Seemingly averted with Miscellenia, the kingdom the player character gains control over after completing a quest. If you stock money into it, you'll lose 10% of the money deposited every day, to a maximum of 75k every day. However, if you make sure you have at least 750k there every day, and have ten workers in herbs, you'll get a load of herbs which can be sold. PROFIT! However, upon deeper thinking, the money that you put into your Kingdom leaves the game, while the money that you make from selling what it produces comes from players, so there is a net flow of money out of the game's economy.

* ''{{Neopets}}'' has these in the form of shops run by [=NPCs=]. Their biggest money sink was the "Save the Wheels" event, in which donating a certain amount of Neopoints in order to upgrade the wheels in Neopia gave you an item in exchange, from toys to a painted Petpet to new background used for customizing your pet. The price of several of these items have gone down compared the amount you needed to donate in order to earn them but the stamp and background are still INSANELY expensive, costing at least one million Neopoints to buy from another Neopian who was willing to donate enough to get one.
** Their latest money sink is the Wheel of Extravagance. Most wheels have an average fee of 100 Neopoints or so, but this one charges a whopping 100,000 just to spin. Some of the prizes can be sold at multiple times that much, but the wheel can also give you exactly a fraction of what you just payed, or even ''nothing at all''.

->"''If there was no way for us to "destroy" [[GlobalCurrency Neopoints]], inflation would be even worse than it is now. There would be so many Neopoints in the economy that they would practically be worthless. It would cost players more and more Neopoints to purchase things, because each Neopoint would have so little value. Could you imagine a [[LootDrama Krawk Morphing Potion]] costing '''[[AdamSmithHatesYourGuts 150,000,000 NP]]'''? That's what it would possibly cost if all the Neopoints that have been created by Flash games and other areas of the site were never removed. For players who make their Neopoints by [[LevelGrinding playing games to earn]] '''1,000 NP''' at a time, it would seem like an impossible goal.''"

** Perhaps because of the above, Valve introduced another sink in the form of Chemistry Sets, dropped items that require using up a large number of regular items to get a CosmeticReward. Either you spend about a half dozen regular items plus one Strange weapons to get a Strangifier (which makes a specific item count kills while you're wearing it) or spend '''200''' of a regular item to get a "Collector's" version.

** Demonstrating the economics behind this, metal's value in keys has dropped considerably from what it once was because it's trade value was much higher than the items you're likely to get crafting it, meaning extremely few people actually used it. Add in a large number of people having numerous dummy accounts just to sit in place on idle servers for extra drops to craft into metal[[hottip:*:So much that Valve change the drop system, making it require manual acknowledgement of one item dropping before more will drop, so you can't get more than one item at a time by idling.]], and you get quite a lot of inflation.

* ''TheLordOfTheRingsOnline'' has a number of money sinks. The most obvious in-game are crafting materials (cheap, but they add up) and player houses. The cheapest player house is 1.5 gold. The largest amount of gold free-to-play characters are allowed to have is 2 gold. House owners must also pay a "maintenance fee" of 0.15 gold per week. If this isn't paid for long enough, you get locked out of your house and it's put back on the market. Other money sinks are auction fees (which you have to pay to put an item up for auction, and is based roughly on the item's vendor price) and the commission (which you pay only if the item sells, and is a percentage of the winning bid). Higher level players who might want to switch back and forth between two or more sets of traits depending on what they're doing are forced to pay a fee for this as well. Training new skills costs game currency too. That said, unless you're a free-to-play account, all of these are pretty trivial.

* In the 1.10 update to ''DiabloII'', Blizzard added a special encounter with a "Diablo Clone" (who drops a very powerful item) if and only if enough Stones of Jordan are sold to vendors in the game. The SOJ was a powerful ring that was duped to such ridiculous levels that it served as the de facto currency in the game, and the Diablo Clone was Blizzard's way of getting rid of excess [=SoJs=].

* ''Eve Online'' has many of the usual money sinks, though some go to obscene levels - blueprints for a Titan cost the equivalent of several thousand dollars, and the skill to fly one costs several hundred. Also notable is that player-owned structures (necessary for gaining control of player-owned space) are all bought from [=NPCs=], and require fuel that is also bought from [=NPCs=].

* The online game Hobowars has several examples of this, some including buying food and alcohol, recovering life at the hospital, and purchasing parts for your hobo's cart.