OK, imagine you work for MA. You sit behind your desk in Gotenburg. The task is to fix the loot.
The virtual economy is a zero sum-game. As much as goes in comes out, minus the maintenace fees.
So, what will you do?
- Cut the salaries and switch off a few servers?
- Decrease the uplink bandwidth?
- No more new content, no more bug fixes?
- Rob the bank and donate all to the loot pool?
Hmmm...

Any other brilliant ideas?
Well, imagine for a moment that nothing of the above can be a solution to your problem.
Imagine the only way out is increasing the playerbase while leaving the maintenace fees (more or less) the same.
Imagine that's exactly what
could happen now, if MA implements the ideas described in OP right.
So, how about that? Seems legit?