Econ-Friday Ranting 07/17/26

A simple principle applies to these games. For there to be new content, there must be new systems, even in Single Player games. New Systems mean more total complexity for a new user.

Most MMORPGs over the last few decades have attempted to reach a wider audience by simplifying, but the complexity always comes because progression is part of these games, so, finding the sweet spot where that complexity should theoretically start, would probably be a good thing for the genre.

Ashes of Creation did not reach the point of development where observers/fans could get a larger dataset from ‘less interested’ players. It was not ‘live’ long enough on Steam to see what the dropoff would have been. Throne and Liberty hasn’t added all of its potential complexity yet, but the data we are getting from that game does, in my opinion, teach a specific lesson.

“Attempting to reduce complexity fails beyond a certain point, with that complexity re-added later or changed in its form.”

Let’s look at three systems, two of them new to the Nix Expansion, to see why I think this is true. We’ll start with the first one to set the tone, since it doesn’t actually involve much Economics, and isn’t the new one. If you only care about Economy, skip to the second.

Weapon Mastery

This is a complex system in TL, requiring players to make entire decisions (the horror!). They originally had a more rudimentary form of this content that was basically three ‘lines’ similar to Neverwinter, but their new ‘Sphere Grid’ style is much better. Inevitably there will be players who complain that this system is complex, but without it, we will have homogeny, and quite a bit of the game’s appeal as a ‘classic-style’ MMO will be lost.

A more relevant argument from most players would be ‘Why is this a timesink? Why, as a new player, don’t you just give me all the choices immediately?’. Setting aside the fact that this is overwhelming and would inevitably lead us back to more complaints that it is too complex, the main reason for this complaint isn’t actually based on Inevitable #2 (“This game’s systems are too confusing/obscure”). Originally, players would have been focused on other things, or ignoring it, there wouldn’t be ‘requirements from guilds’ or anything like that. Those who enjoy Complexity see it as a feature, those who don’t wouldn’t have been focused on it at that time, but they would be moreso focused on it now.

The Inevitable Complaints here are actually stemming largely from #1 and #3. Leveling Mastery is slower than most progressions in quick-leveling games, and even if you find it fun, there’s currently less content for players who don’t have high Mastery. The Character Boost being sold ‘only’ gives 170/220, and the game doesn’t (yet) implement Level Synced/Stat Clamped content, because that, no matter how useful or necessary, will be seen as more Complexity. At minimum, a designer would need to spend a lot of time ensuring that the system works very cleanly with minimal points of confusion, and also that it is communicated incredibly well to new players ‘what happens to your Masteries during any Clamped Content’. This borders on impossible, even with the relative simplicity of any potential systems for those who are already familiar. As usual, this is obviously not an argument against it, I always argue for it, I’m simply noting that complaints are inevitable, no matter how much effort is put in.

I’ll give a simple example, and if this doesn’t sound simple to you, reader, then that is 100% the demonstration of the point. For the ‘lowest’ content tier, the ‘cap’ for Mastery could be set to 130, because this is the point where a player can reasonably activate their Epic Masteries on the ‘Sphere Grid’, and put them both at Max. Setting it to higher than 130 means that the system which ‘checks your totals’ and tries to ‘prune’ some of your Masteries down, now has to make too many decisions. Setting it lower than 130 again requires the system to make decisions, and also more players would try to min-max and trip up the system. There are processes that could be used for these decisions that are not too difficult to design, but the question is if they would be difficult to understand.

“First, Nodes on the Grid that are not being used to activate Achievement Effects are deactivated first, automatically prioritizing reductions in ‘stray’ Nodes on the outermost ring. Second, if necessary, nodes in Quadrants that have less investment are deactivated until the numbers are reduced to the amount required to ‘unlock the next ring’. Finally, Nodes that grant only Hit Chance or Evasion are deactivated to make up the difference until the correct value is reached.”

To understand any of the above, you need to already be somewhat Expert, but this is not an indicator that it wouldn’t work, just a demonstration of how complex a relatively simple structure/system looks, for unfamiliar players. ‘Worse’ yet, even the above would still not work as a ‘sequence’, but more as a ‘shuffling priority list to assign relevance scores to nodes’ or something like that. YouTube Video Worthy.

Traits, Potential Abilities and SkillCores

The system of Traits on gear is fundamental to Throne and Liberty, just as ‘Statlines’ on gear would have been in Ashes of Creation. Games with diversity must involve choices. TL does a ‘good’ job of removing the burden of this on new players by making it easier for them to find and reference other people’s builds so they can aim for them, so we aren’t talking about the existence of Traits themselves as a complex aspect of the game, only ‘the act of raising the traits’ (especially from the Economic standpoint).

Trait Enhancement has changed, Economically, but not in the same way for all gear. The old system allowed for Traits on all gear in the Economic Pyramid, and raising Traits was about ‘getting copies of the same or similar items’, through either specialization or purchase. More ‘powerful’ (actually just more in-demand) Traits cost more and were more rarely manifested on the Gear Drops. This led to the Extraction Stone imbalance referenced last week. It’s been replaced by a type of homogeny, which in turn required a Trading Clamp (this is moreso because the game didn’t maintain both systems side-by-side somehow). Not a terrible implementation, note, it’s goal seems to be to maintain a core Incentive and the related behaviours, but still homogeny.

Heroic Gear is allowed to retain at least some of that complexity, and now, ‘I got a good drop that I need to put into an item I already own’ has been shifted over to Potential Abilities (which won’t be explained in detail this week). Design-wise this is ‘fine’. It creates a prerequisite that the player ‘probably played enough to understand how to get Heroic Gear’, and has the potential (not implemented as of this writing) to shift the expectations around Traits for content that isn’t top-end (Unlocking Traits is now generally easier than raising the Traits, but if we got any sort of ‘Capped’ content, it’s probably easier both to code and for players to understand, for their gear to keep the chosen ones but only get 1/4 Trait levels in such content).

Other complexity exists in the fact that unlike ‘regular gear’, Heroic Gear has distinctions in ‘which items you use to raise which traits’ e.g. “Heroic Headgear Enhancement Stone: Defense”. Again, ‘fine’, because this is not ‘grind’, it is not easily ‘botted’, it does not ‘overwhelm a new player with confusing options’ (at least not the type of player who wants any Complexity in builds).

Unfortunately, this new overall approach will eventually ‘also fail’ in terms of Economic ‘gatekeeping’. More players will achieve ‘Heroic Gear with optimal SkillCores’ over time, and more importantly, more players rushing to endgame will probably feel that they need this gear, and hence more handouts (this isn’t entirely true, SkillCores are not directly defining in that way very often). We already have Handouts for Heroic Gear itself, for the rest of this month. If one must keep moving the complexity upward, it’s sometimes good to rethink how the information is presented and spend more time improving the lower level experience. The total amount of complexity in the game ‘for success’ often remains the same, so tuning when it is encountered is good, but tuning how it is encountered is often better.

Moving complexity upward constantly compresses the game’s economy, but most importantly it strips new players of Earning Power in ways that aren’t always necessary. Preventing bots from having Earning Power is often important, but as long as the ‘goals’ that most players ‘see’ are near the top, they will look at Prices within the top range, see their own extremely limited Earning Power, and probably have a negative experience. This is, indirectly, another reason for my bias about the absolute necessity of ‘Level Capped’ content (to give newer players smaller goals within their Economic Reach), and is the reason I say almost all games need it, because ‘adding higher goals to the top of the Pyramid’ without maintaining the focuses/earning power of the base, leads to problems. These problems are increased fivefold in a ‘Loot Grinder’ type game, particularly a PvX one, because there is much less capacity for the player to ‘encounter and see a thing they can sell on Auction’. Compare this to FF11, where players can almost immediately see ‘I defeated a thing and got a Crystal and it seems like everyone uses these so I can just do that until I find something else’. This path does exist in TL as well, and it’s probably doing its job there too, but in TL, finding the next ‘something else’ is more difficult, by necessity (the system FF11 uses to handle the distribution of Crystals is different and not something TL can implement without bots and similar problems appearing, so this is not an Econ Design problem, just a small Communication problem, if that).

The WaterMark System

With the reminders and discussion of ‘how the Economy changed relative to Traits’ out of the way, we get back to Watermark. This is the new ‘grind to get drops to progress’ that replaces Traits, and overall, the underlying functions of it from the perspective of a PvX game trying to hold at least some longevity, are working. The problems from Abyssal Events (previously familiar readers will remember this as a thing I used to call ‘Starfall’ back before at least two other things had that name) recur now though. Players are allowed to specialize in terms of what they like doing, but the drops are only loosely connected to the activities.

The result is many players just looping whatever is easiest to do ‘afk’ (not Economically a bad thing, actually), but there being no real ability to ‘focus’ on getting a specific thing. Originally the implementation was to massively lower droprates, and remove old Traiting methods so that the player didn’t need to get multiples of the same drop or deal with that Complexity, especially since the new system prevented players from buying the dropped items for Traiting purposes, but as outlined relative to Ashes, this slowly fails, and it fails harder in TL than it would have failed in Ashes.

If I go out to fight and I get less drops, even if those drops are making me ‘technically stronger’, I’m having less fun because I can’t ‘think through the problem’ economically. This leads to Inevitable Complaint #5 in a roundabout way, and will probably increase a specific type of complaint about P2W (and in games that don’t have systems like ‘Lucent’, RMT instead).

TL has, of course, already corrected for this by increasing the droprate again, but now that means it will be less fun for the other reason. Without even the option for Traits to work in the way they previously did, multiples of the same drop, or drops the player doesn’t personally want, will lose value as anything other than ‘Personal Watermark Progression Items’. This leads to a specific type of slow Economic Collapse where the only people who need to buy gear are new/casual players who don’t have enough money to buy gear because they can’t sell the drops they do get, for whatever reason. In a more Free Trade game, with different anti-bot measures this would work slightly differently, and the whole problem is right on the razor’s edge of Economic Design work, but that’s why the Economic Collapse would be so slow.

In a game like FF11 this works somewhat because that game relies on a deep ‘Artisanship’ System with progressions that allow players to do ‘different work’ for the top adventurers who can afford to get good gear. In BDO it’s somewhat similar. Without either this or Traits, we’re probably going to get a string of Handouts (and if it adds too accessible an Artisanship System then we will get bots, fortunately they already have a model for this in Food, so we don’t need to expect something too accessible, just something that some will call too Complex, again). Sadly, not even mild drop specialization (which we have slightly) will probably resolve this, because of Inevitable Complaint #4. ‘Gatekeeping’ on more valuable content. This Gatekeeping is part of MMOs for some though, and certainly a feature of PvP MMOs that seems to be important. We expect to see more drop specialization as step #1, Artisanship is not easy to implement, after all, but that also counts as Complexity for many players, and can often be a more esoteric Knowledge Path than Artisanship.

Simplicity and Complexity are the Yin and Yang of Econ Design, therefore. They must both exist in their correct places. For a PvX game, the same goes for Scarcity and Artisanship (the old form of Trait Farm/Grinding was only ever going to last so long as a functional system, even with better Ecology). Fortunately, TL is closer than Ashes was, by far. There are enough underlying things done correctly in the game’s design scaffolding to someday implement some form of Artisanship and elevate the game beyond a Random Loot Grinder, at which point the Devs will probably ‘rotate’ their concerns back to ‘handling bots’.

Players who want to buy SkillCores, etc., need to be able to sell some Traits in the old way to make money (we already know that making them rely on basic farming/purchasing of sufficient Trait Enhancement Materials will incentivize botting behaviour and repetitive gameplay, shown in the new Auction House per-player Clamp on these items). Players who don’t want to understand the complexity of getting Traits still need the new system where there is just a cheap universal item for raising them (and even if not, now that it has been built, why rip it out? It’s just another Knowledge Path) Players who just want to participate in content without having enough time to dedicate to either of the above need either constant Handouts or some form of Capped content (as a fraction of the game’s total content, for all you purists who dislike top-end Content being Capped, this isn’t referring to that).

Or the game will go full ‘Handout P2W Loot Grinder’ and you’ll hear about that from me too. Currently there are no such fears, often, our ‘fears’ are dispelled when we actually see whatever implementation, which is refreshing in the modern design era.

Next week, though, I expect to dive further into the current ‘mini failure’ of the new Simplified Traiting, from the Econ side, so I leave the ‘related reading’ on Knowledge Paths.