Sink (economy)

Sinks are methods of removing items and money from the system, usually to prevent inflation, and keep the price of items at a moderate level. Various methods of acquiring raw materials, such as Mining, Fishing, and Woodcutting exist, generating consistent amounts of money into the economy each day. Sinks are an attempt to keep the money that is being generated from creating unwanted and excess inflation.

There are 2 major types of sinks: money sinks, which remove coins from the game; and item sinks, which remove any other item.

Examples

 * Construction
 * Summoning, requires money spent on spirit shards
 * Degradation of armour such as Barrows armour, Nex armours and Chaotic equipment - requires a fair amount of money to be repaired and needs to be repaired regularly.
 * Mobilising Armies - Players must exchange raw materials and skill-related by-products to get investment points which can only be used in this activity.
 * Tolls - Such as boat rides
 * Bonds - require money to be converted to tradeable items
 * Well of Goodwill
 * Instance fees
 * Death - players pay a "reclaim fee" to Death

Shortfalls
Money sinks do not work as effectively as intended, shown by near constant inflation:
 * Players may consider training money sink skills to be wasteful and unrewarding for money spent.
 * Some methods may be unpopular or only available to higher-levelled players or members.
 * Changes have rendered some methods no longer effective, such as gravestones increasing the amount of time a player has to recover their items.
 * Many updates Jagex have implemented have reversed many of the methods they put in previously.
 * Some toll prices can be reduced or avoided through different methods.