Econ-Friday Ranting 08/07/26

Economically speaking, any diverse and Dynamic MMORPG wants a structure where there is no single, consistent winner. There are multiple reasons for this, and today our aim is to discuss them and the various ways they affect games with strong Economic focus, big Guilds, and PvP.

The way ‘Winners’ are handled in MMORPGs can anywhere on a spectrum of ‘Emergent’ to ‘Managed’, with ‘Designed’ being harder to place. There are successful games all along the spectrum, because the pitfalls of each method (marked in red like this as we go) can be mitigated, just not all in the same way. I’ll jump straight to the usual examples, with a reference to Ashes of Creation as the example of a game without an actual fleshed-out approach, at the end. Familiar readers and true MMORPG enthusiasts, just skip around to the parts around any red text, you already know the drill here from your years of playing many MMORPGs.

Older PvP MMORPGs

I’ve been taught a lot about Lineage and Lineage II over the last few years, and it’s easy to understand why that game succeeded at this for a while and continues to ‘succeed’ most of the times that someone spins up a new Private Server. Winning in that game is largely Emergent, and the Economy isn’t very complex in the terms we are usually talking about. Designers of these types of games can expect to attract players who are there for the human drama, social interactions, and emotional friction. As a brief aside, this part of Throne and Liberty, Ashes of Creation, etc, works. It works precisely because there are no requirements. That subset of players needs almost nothing, the issue is only that the subset itself can sometimes be ‘small’ if you can’t rely on Nostalgia.

Basically, the Winner rotates based on which player group fractures, who is mad at who, etc. The money held by those players moves around. People steal resources and drops, or get what they want and then ditch. Bots and RMT replace lost cash because some players feel entitled to do this, etc.

Older PvPvE MMORPGs

The definition of the above for the purposes of this rant is ‘games where meaningful PvE skill was required to obtain certain progression rewards or Economic Progression’, often in groups. Depending on your perspective, Classic WoW fits in here, as do some iterations of Runescape, and depending on your view of ‘difficulty’, Dark Age of Camelot.

These games didn’t usually have much ‘clamp’ on how much a PvE player could progress, but often understood that they needed to limit the PvP player in whatever way prevented ‘the one with the most time or RMT capacity’ from basically winning automatically. After that, they could rely somewhat on the subset mentioned in the previous section. PvPvE players would often have the advantage of ‘whatever could be Economically converted to PvP power’ from their PvE gains. These games often went down the path of ‘resets’ and ‘full loot drops on character death’ and ‘PvP-only gear’. Immediate meta-shakeups that simply told the current winner “You’re not winner anymore, start over.”

Without this, or ‘between shakeups’ they often faced two problems: Snowballing and single focus Economy. The first of those is hopefully well-understood. The second I’ll get to later for brevity, this is already shaping up to be a long rant.

Older EconPvP MMORPGs

Defined as games where either only PvE really matters/is available, or PvP is a tool that is used almost exclusively to deny other players access to Scarcer resources in the same way that resources are denied in PvE-only type games. Note that in this case, ‘a market to sell to’ counts as a Scarce resource.

Controlling spawns, Monster-Player-Killing, training mobs onto rivals during fights, zerging/flooding an area to lock down spawns of even larger populations of mobs, and of course, shutting players out of whatever Player Based Markets by undercutting and resource flooding, are all the name of the game here. Winners are often whoever has the most time and organization, but not necessarily RMT until the RMT becomes so organized and skilled that it can act like top players. If the main Economy of this type of game is just ‘farming/grinding’ lots of relatively simple mobs, eventually the RMT would become the winners because that was the most profitable outcome for them. Making lots of money they can sell is one thing. Making sure other players don’t even have money without interacting with them is a better thing, for them.

On the other side, for example in FF11, where skill matters more for getting valuable rewards than ‘time’, or where rewards are basically clamped in some way and the process for getting started is not easy to just bot your way through cheaply, the winner-type mostly depends on who is organized best or understands the meta best. A game with bad balance or overpowered classes in it would have to constantly shake this up in whatever way, with bigger issues appearing whenever the paths to success are limited either by too little variation in rewarding PvE content, homogeny, or the aforementioned obvious overpowered classes.

Ashes of Creation

Ashes of Creation isn’t really ‘defined’, because at the stage of development it actually reached, it was aiming to be all of those things above, and came with all the flaws at once. The PvP part of the game was most appealing to that subset of players who plays for human drama and clashing. No real clamp on how much a PvE player could progress other than that exact PvP. No strong counterincentives or management of RMT. No obvious path to meta-shakeups that wouldn’t lead to Snowballing or Single Focus Economy.

Ashes hoped to surpass these, via the ‘Node System’, a way to get away from the Single Focus Economy issues that would probably plague any halfassed version of this game type (we can see this in Throne and Liberty right now, as the game advances more and more, the Focus of its Economy narrows drastically, it’s holding up for a bit longer due to not being as ‘bad’ as Ashes, but so did New World…).

To explain therefore ‘why they were not on a path that anyone could look at and see succeeding’, I’ll ‘change gears’ and go into more detail about New World, TL’s current state, and a certain period in FF11.

Assault Rewards in Treasures of Aht Urhgan

Before anything else let me be clear that this is purely about Economic Impact. No matter what I say later on, know that Assault overall is fun, the rewards feel good, groups enjoyed it, and any negative reaction to it was largely from the PvP subset of players who are only happy when they are progressing faster than others, In FF11, as this was a PvE game, this was a very small subset (but it did have its impact, and I’ll touch on why in a bit).

Assault is split into five ‘regions’, and each mission gives points according to some completion conditions. For the most part, these end up roughly equal. You can ‘spam a specific one you like (about 3x a day), vary your goals, whatever. The points are spent on things ‘specific to the region’, so the usual ‘I want X therefore I go to Y’ is preserved. There’s a sense of progression and advancement built in, you can’t buy certain items until you reach a particular rank, by doing enough missions. I give this explanation in this way because trying to read the wiki for this may be misleading. With all that preamble though I can now simply link one of the Assault Mission Givers and on her page you can see ‘items you can spend Assault Points on’, with the understanding that there are more like her, and they don’t sell the same things.

One item in particular there is probably the archetypal item that any MMORPG fan will ‘understand’, the Potent Belt. Strength and Accuracy. Every melee who doesn’t have something stronger wants one. Every character, melee or not, can wear it. You aren’t restricted in how many of these you can hold at once in your inventory. You can sell these on the Auction House.

The outcome was exactly what most of you would probably expect, and yet it worked. I can ask a group member who isn’t even familiar with the item ‘what do you think this costed on AH?’ and they will work it out from first principles, given the information above. It worked because FF11 happens to have everything in place for it to work, but even one missing concept and it would have failed. For the ‘level 60 Ballista PvP player who just wanted the best gear to take to PvP’, it ‘did fail’. To illustrate why, let’s look at something that can be equated…

Contract/Mission Item Rewards in Nix

The first difference is obvious. In FF11 you knew what you were getting. You did work, got points, traded those points for things. In Throne and Liberty you get a random box. The most likely reason for the random box is because otherwise ‘everyone targets the thing that is most desired’ at the beginning, to sell that. Getting what you want (or want to sell) is always ‘better’ than ‘maybe’ getting what you want, to a player’s psychology, and this applies to ‘time spent’, especially on activities like Assault and Nix Contracts, where you do them at your own pace and aren’t competing with others.

For this ‘work to get points and spend them’ to be effective, the game requires that the world contain bigger challenges with better rewards, and not just a few of them either. There is a critical threshold of ‘different rewarding things that a person could do instead but doesn’t control’, before ‘Earn Points, Get Thing’ doesn’t cause complaints by comparison. Those rewards then sometimes must be random too.

The second difference is the lack of Artisanship, and this one is minor. FF11 had paths of ‘work to get materials and craft them’ to go with that time, and Specialization within that could match Specialization within Assault Regions. TL doesn’t even offer specialization within Contract Regions anymore, and this is reasonable because of the same issue as before slightly. Each Assault Region would eventually offer 10+ Missions as options. Even if you didn’t like or do well at some of them, you could rank up in a region with one you were good at, and then do the ‘suitable’ one that opened up later. This isn’t really ‘Artisanship’ but in a way, when designing games, it’s very similar, a thing I will expand on some other time.

In this way, FF11’s Assault was actually a departure from the previous way, which was ‘do this thing, get materials, sell those and buy other materials you need’, because it was a Free Trade game and therefore EconPvP, leading to balance complaints instead of progression complaints. New World, and TL, don’t work this way, for opposite reasons. In New World, artisanship itself is a weirdly unbalanced space, and in TL, there is no Artisanship or Artisanship-like activity anymore to complement or balance out the way Nix feels.

The third and final difference is the ‘big one’. No matter how fun any given TL: Nix activity is (and most people can find at least ONE fun one), Nix itself basically only offers this option, and ‘solo grinder gameplay’, often with just as much RNG on the rewards. The player cannot ‘aim for’ anything. The game says ‘do whatever you find fun and hope RNG favors you’, but that’s largely the only thing you can do, to an extent that is actually not even that common among MMORPGs.

Post-amble

Assault Points worked in FF11 as cleanly as they did because the game had other fundamental Economic Systems to fall back on. Players could just focus on how much Fun the Assaults were adding, as long as they also offered roughly reasonable Economic Progression. Assault itself did not become the Single Economic Focus of every player, which eased a lot of the pressure on the Developers to make everything about it stand up to scrutiny from every angle. “Winning” at Assaults didn’t make you ‘The consistent Winner’ at the game. People weren’t crying about ‘RNG Carried’ (or rather, it was a different RNG they were talking about). Your Fun Factor’s second layer for the day didn’t come down to ‘did I get the good drop from this random box?’.

Modern games might have to someday acknowledge what Ashes of Creation attempted to: That building a Loot Grinder with no Incentive Foundation doesn’t mean you will get good reactions all the time even if the moment-to-moment enjoyability of the gameplay/content you add is quite high. Human brains automatically track their ‘status’ within communities/competitions obsessively, so even when they are enjoying every moment of your new content, that little goblin in their head is still ‘looking out for everyone who is getting slightly better stuff than them’. They’re still looking for that ‘Consistent Winner’ and getting slowly dissatisfied if the Devs don’t either ‘do something about that winner’ or ‘create multiple separate places to win, that don’t automatically get won by the person with the best RNG’.