The reason you sink gold is to make gold useful, not to de-inflate gold. It's not the same market as real money. Otherwise the currency holds no value. That's why gold selling in classic works: 5k for flying, 5k for another flying, 1k for cold weather, and so on.
The reason you sink gold is to not devalue the purchasing power of gold especially if its created from thin air. This is exactly the same as fiat money. Study Bitcoin and in time you will see what I see.
I think most efective gold sink are raids. On avarage repairing close to max lvl items of that expansion cost around 150-200g to repair from one death. When the season is fresh at least one raid is wiping per second 7/24 constantly. Impossible to throw real numbers or do math but i think raids play good role at keeping the economy alive :D
You are correct repairs, the 5% auction house tax and many others all attribute to a overall gold sink. The problem is the bots fundamentally - printing too much gold sounds familiar doesn't it.
@@Goldzen_tv Bots also make getting money through farming materials just completely not worth it in many cases (at least that's been my experience). The hours you have to put in to even get meaningful amount of gold (like 20-30k which can be burnt fast) is insane. Buying a token is just far better use of time at that point.
Bots and multiboxers are still a massive problem, even today. But blizz cant be arsed about it. They no longer farm somewhere hard to spot they are botting openly in broad daylight laughing at faces of normal players and blizzard.
Maybe blizzard are putting in these new systems like delves to be the major gold intake for the game and flick the switch and turn off gold from mobs. Just a theory but that will slow them down considerably