Lithose
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Well, some of it has been implimented. WoW uses kind of a system I'm going to describe below. When I talk about tiered, badges are a type of tiered economy. I just think WoW executed in a shitty way. Rather than implimenting in a broad manner, and tying new tiers into every other facet of the game, they compartmentalized it and made it so the only interaction was simple Drop-->Vendor-->Item.
First though, to figure out a system, it depends what kind of game would someone be making, themepark, sandbox? I ask because how the currency enters the economy can shift. In some games, especially hybrids, you could use a combination of tiered economies, where the currency that drops of standard mobs is not the same as the kinds of currency you get from content that is more difficult than a bot can handle (And yeah, I understand how sophisticated bots can be, so that's a tall order--but this is all combined with things like instance locks ect).
It really depends how you want to set up your game. Also, no system is going to fight off inflation forever, so you'd want to set up a system that accounts for it, or even uses it. Inflation in real economies is handled, mostly, in a generational manner. New stuff comes out, old stuff gets cheaper due to oversupply, until it finally has very little value and is discontinued (This is very general, obviously some non-durable materials/commodities break this mold) or in the case of digital "stuff" is simply priced at the cost of processing+tiny profit.
In any system designed, you'd have to understand and accept that eventually your content will be so saturated with farmed items or currency, that it has lost value. And that's when you create a new "tier", of both currency and items. This is why the type of game is important. If you're a sandbox, creation of a new tier has to go through certain channels. And this is why I'd switch games over from "difficulty" models to efficiency models--you want to zerg the new boss for epics? Fine. But you only get access once a week and if you bring 60 people for one item of loot, and a little bit of the new currency, you're really going to fall behind guilds that can do it more efficiently. (And the point of killing the bosses would work in conjunction with crafting and PvP, ect. So effeciency would be displayed organically in the rest of the world.)
(And by new tier, I don't mean obsolescence of old tiers like WoW. Rather that as old tiers decay more in value terms and less because they are outright shit compared to new stuff.)
