Econ-Friday Ranting 07/24/26

If you put a Gear Ladder in front of an MMORPG player in the modern era, and little else, they will aim to climb it. If you do this in a PvP game where much of the PvP content is more than 2/3 of the way up the ladder, they will aim to climb it as fast as possible.

Game Designers know how to make ladders that players don’t immediately need to climb. We’ve discussed at length how to theoretically provide content at different ‘rungs’ of the ladder, or perhaps different ‘floors’ that the Ladder takes you past. What Designers have more trouble with these days are the three aspects of Communication, Economy, and Toxicity.

Communication

Teamwork-based ‘Classic’ MMORPGs need to communicate the intended method of enjoying content to players more clearly.

Throne and Liberty is a PvPvE MMORPG with most of its PvP either locked behind a long progression path (even with the current Handouts) or unclamped in a way that means low-level players can encounter fully-experienced, high-level players with great gear. It’s difficult for someone like me, trying to ‘recruit’ or explain to a PvP-lover friend who doesn’t play ‘why this is fun’. A PvP-hopeful who doesn’t know how to do it well yet, just always feels like they can’t do anything.

Their new Watermark system slightly fixes this, by keeping the strength of players closer for longer, but the communication on exactly how it is doing this is not there, leading players to search for Shortcuts that they expect to be there because that’s how MMORPGs have trended for a while.

My old ‘Tier 3 Epic’ Wand is now a ‘Level 50’ Wand. At level 50, it is suitable for almost all Content. It does more Base damage than my new Level 51 wand. It does more Base Damage than that new wand will do at Level 80 when I engage properly with the Watermark system. Their DPS will probably be similar (different damage profiles). This is fine. This is good. This is not even innately confusing if you play the game a bit. It’s just difficult to communicate to players ‘you should consider also working to obtain this level 50 wand even though you have access to higher level wands’, in the current game ‘ecosystem’. (Note that if they are working on any sort of Level Sync system, this communication issue will change drastically and maybe even disappear, but they haven’t communicated anything about that yet either).

So there are players now who think ‘Watermark is the most important thing’ even when Handouts are letting you ignore or bypass it (the Heroic Wand has only 1 more Base Damage, but again, better damage profiles for most Weapon Combinations, particularly for PvE, whereas my main wand is a PvP wand for some). This is not the same as a journey of self-discovery, it is ‘a space where a player might be misled about something’. The little indicator that tries to tell me ‘you have a stronger weapon you can equip’ activates, and it’s half-right. Not wrong enough that someone who is paying attention wouldn’t at least compare them, but wrong enough that a player might work much harder than they need to, or become frustrated, especially since the current implementation doesn’t give them any clear, consistent ways to earn the Wand I have (this is another long story, for another day, and is again something that is only true because of Content Invalidation of old Dungeons and similar).

I’ve spent a lot of time this last week explaining to my Guild Members how certain things in the current implementation of Progression, in Throne and Liberty, aren’t actually bad. The communication within the game, and from the Development Team, is sometimes unintentionally misleading about the importance of things, and also about the experience they intend players like us to enjoy. This is not because the actual design has these problems, it’s mostly just the communication, and the fact that we are not yet at the fully-realized version of the design implementation.

Economy

Well-balanced Economic MMORPGs like FF11 or Throne and Liberty can have multiple complex systems, but can’t have strongly disparate reward structures.

Players are extremely picky about their Reward Structures and almost always on the lookout for Niche Inequality, to a frankly ‘obsessive’ degree. I’ll quote the latest “Resistance Report” from TL:

“The completion time across Field Events vary significantly, up to 9x longer for some. We are making adjustments to reduce the gap across all events to prevent fatigue on specific encounters. In-event guidance for objectives will also be improved to make required actions easier to follow.”

One might assume that ‘just making the rewards much better for completion of the longer ones’ would be enough, but it doesn’t work that simply for many, many reasons. Their intended changes are probably fine, this is only brought up to illustrate the inevitability of this type of complaint. Even if your content is fun people will notice and complain about the Niche Inequality.

This is related to the Rants of previous weeks though. The RedFrost Item system is a form of Complexity. It shouldn’t necessarily be removed, but recognizing that it is Complexity and not simplicity allows a better development conversation, about whether it is the right Complexity for the game or not. Ashes of Creation intended to put this through Nodes, and committed to that. FF11 puts its Complexity (in the Econ space) through the specifics of Professions, and committed to that for many years. Even if I would like Throne and Liberty to switch to Professions, I’m not even arguing that RedFrost Items are an incorrect Complexity form either. They have the data to know what their playerbase thinks of it (I just avoid it, for example).

The old Traiting System would interact slightly ‘better’ with the new RedFrost Item system in some ways, and worse in others. The new Traiting System has aspects that would bridge the gap and make this better. The Complexity never goes away, though. Good design is about giving your players options whenever you can (I won’t go into the ‘new Traiting System’ explanation this week because it’s yet another thing where the technical/potential quality of the current implementation depends really heavily on if/how they ever intend to introduce properly ‘Level Capped/Stat Clamped’ content in the future).

Obviously if Development things are at a midpoint, the Economy will also be at a ‘midpoint’, in any game. This is a thing we saw for many months in the development of Ashes of Creation. Developers don’t have those same hours to devote to these explanations, especially when they are midway through a process and improvements are coming. Community Managers or websites do their part, and in modern MMORPGs, Guild Leaders/Content Creators do their part, and people like me explain to their friends ‘it might be better soon, I’ll let you know’. Without this, Engagement declines.

Toxicity

Changes to an Economy, no matter how good for the longterm health of the game, require good Communication to avoid Toxicity. (sometimes, this is also true for changes that haven’t been made yet).

For this, I do need to go into the new Traiting system a little and compare to some other games.

Old Traiting was: Get item drop with Trait you want or use Unlockstones. Abundant gear was easy to Trait because someone would be selling Extracted Traits. Rare gear was harder to Trait, but you could save your Unlockstones for it.

This system could not have continued to be viable, because with the new expansion, how can you know what to do with new stronger gear? Or gear you can’t be sure is stronger? Can the game allow me to trait my ‘PvP’ wand more cheaply than my ‘Heroic’ Wand? What about my new super-lucky drop from an Equipment Selection Chest that I will probably never see another of and that costs over 9,000 Lucent right now?

There were other layers too, but I won’t go into them. Toxicity is about ‘what happens if I try to go into a Random Matchmaking Dungeon now as a healer with either the PvP wand or the new ‘level 51 currently but only gets strong at 80’ wand’. In FF11 it would be impossible for any ‘problem’ to occur because the Instanced ‘Dungeon’ (BCNM) would be ‘capped’ and I would know what wand to use, and most people would know what wands they could reasonably expect. If they did not, Communication could be between me and them, with me explaining something clear in the game and seeing how they react. Most importantly, for those less ‘abrasive’ than I, the expectation would be ‘happiness’ not ‘nervousness’. It wouldn’t be an implied ‘you are too weak or using the wrong weapon’, it would be closer to ‘I don’t understand how that is good, can you explain it?’. The difference is small, but it matters.

Good Communication from the Devs, combined with a good Economy, leads to better outcomes here because the player can explain their decisions more clearly knowing that the other person’s framework for understanding those decisions is better (or that they just don’t seem to be able to understand it). The player can explain ‘I don’t have a fully traited X because it’s too expensive to trait it compared to this one which is almost as good for this specific content’, and maybe, just maybe, they won’t somehow get looked down on or kicked.

Many would encounter this problem anyway in TL as it is now due to the content drought and strange intermediate(?) state of the Growth System, but this is why I gave the FF11 example. Even without any Level Sync/Stat Clamp content, the new Traiting System in the game is too ‘singular’ to avoid Toxicity, because it shifts everything back to ‘having to grind hard enough on a thing everyone grinds in the same way’. The flaw in the system has changed, but not disappeared. Hopefully the developers will see how both systems can integrate and make it disappear, but I’d expect a few more ‘painful’ iterations, and that would, as always, become a question of faith in them.

Good faith is a vital part of cooperation in MMORPGs, whether that be between Leaders and Team Members, or Developers and Players.

Next week, after the other great Ice Dragon arrives, things will shift again, and perhaps even ‘lock in’. If not, I’ll go deeper into the current Traiting System’s issues and ‘why there are literally dozens of a Cloak that can only drop from an Archboss or be crafted from a large number of materials, on the Auction House’.