There was no lending but there is a strong correlation. The game creators decided to start giving away what was once worth time, effort, and money. That ultim

There was no lending but there is a strong correlation. The game creators decided to start giving away what was once worth time, effort, and money. That ultimately destroyed the OP's process. In a similar fashion, giving away money as a bank does with a loan, destroys the economy's process. This is done under many guises of course. Loans can actually help the economy, just as in OP's case, a free character given to someone who was a merchant would have helped the gameplay because more competition and production of goods would have resulted, but free characters for any and all destroyed the system. tl:dr I believe that loans from banks should only be legal as investments into a business and loans to individuals (even for houses) should be financed from private companies so that the total risk to the economy is evenly dispersed. EDIT: My apologies for the way-too-long scenario and explanation, but it seemed remarkably similar to the banking crisis (to me at least) and I thought it might make for an interesting discussion.