I recently read that ever-so-slightly-enlightening thread about the Economist's View on D3, and that got me thinking about what a real, good way to sustain the economy would be. There is a conceivably endless supply of items in the game, and the standard quality of items that people use is slowly rising, which will eventually and inevitably end in the collapse of the economy, when all of the dedicated players have near-perfect items.

While it's easy to understand the issue here - that the item hunt is slowly leading to a ceiling that will crash the economy - it's not so easy to come up with a permanent solution that will be both viable and acceptable. The 'easiest' solution would be to do what we see in other video games, and even in real life - introduce new and better items in a cycle to slowly make old items obsolete. But this can't be the only solution, because people will simply max out their items every new cycle and wait for the next one.

No, we need to take into account another facet of items in real life that the game doesn't - things break. It's a sad truth in life that even if you take care of a car, or a computer, or a shovel or rake or knife or axe, it will wear down and eventually break, no matter how much money you put into it. You can repair and repair all you want, but even that can't stop the item from eventually breaking.

My suggestion is to incorporate this system of slow wear-and-tear to items so that, eventually, they just aren't as good as they used to be and eventually need to get replaced. It could be something as unnoticeable as having an item lose 0.002% of their stat permanently for every point of durability it loses (in other words, it would take 167 points of durability loss for a chest armor with 300 vit to lose 1 vit), but it has to be permanent, and it can't be the only thing that changes.

Along with a permanent degrading of the item, there has to be a new high - and not just "Oh, let me go find the same exact item with the same exact stats, just without the wear and tear." New items, with slightly better stats or rate of decay and (most importantly) a significant difference from the current crop of items, need to be added to the game. So a month after the current-best-sword-in-the-game gets released, a new sword needs to come out. Different visuals, maybe a point or two better max stats, but it has to be an improvement over the old item.

Now of course, this idea would need a lot of very fine tuning. Items would need to decay at a rate that wouldn't let the market get over-saturated with items, but not too quickly that they become useless before you can find a replacement and especially not before the new items are released. On the cycle of new item releases, they need to come out frequently enough to not let the old item stagnate, but they can't be too greatly improved over the old items, otherwise in a few cycles the items will be completely and utterly overpowered.

It's not the most popular idea, I understand that, but it's one that would keep the economy from being over-saturated and would allow for the best items to slowly be phased out, and eventually replaced by different (if not exactly better) items.

TL;DR - The economy is on a path to hit a ceiling and crash with over-saturation of perfect items - There needs to be a way for the best items to eventually be removed from the economy in a self-sustaining way - I suggest creating a system where items slowly wear down and lose their stats, but have a cycle of new/different items introduced to the economy often enough to be a replacement for the old items