Econ-Friday Ranting 09/04/26

“Human Brains always subconsciously strive to dump whatever information they can, so sometimes you must make things stand out in specific ways to avoid wasting Dev work.”

Today’s Rant is going to be technical and number-concept heavy compared to the usual, and focused on the specifics, particularly toward the end. The first section is the mental primer part for those who aren’t familiar with previous rants from the old Ashes of Creation forums. Familiar readers can skip to the second section ‘Predictability Of Prices’.

Homogeny’s Effects On Player Behaviour

In an MMORPG meant to be played socially for a long time, that also has an interconnected Economy and/or Crafting System, Homogeny eventually causes players to do things that don’t make sense economically. My experience is that this happens because of a combination of emergent factors. Homogeny in almost any sanely designed MMORPG leads directly to oversupply of the items obtained from either the easiest activity or the most fun activity. This obviously can’t be solved by ‘trying to make everything equally challenging’ nor ‘making everything equally fun. Players differ, builds differ, and Opportunity Cost eventually takes over World Chat discourse.

Trying to solve this by making everything have similar or interchangeable rewards, a different form of Homogeny, works right up until the Developers hit the wall of ‘Respecting Player Time’. Two simple examples below, the first is about a thing that one might think I am arguing against but I am not (economically) despite my bias against it (as a play experience outside of Econ). The second is the example closer to a ‘true failure’. Both examples are from Throne and Liberty this time, since we still have to wait a while for new examples from other MMORPGs, and FF11 avoided this problem for a long time.

Example #1 is Homogeny in Rewards for Time Spent in TL’s “Personalized Random Daily Spawn Rift Rebellions” (because there is another separate thing also called Rift Rebellions, and I shouldn’t call these ‘Memorials’ either, I will use the short term “PRifts”). PRifts drop Special Resistance Medals, which can be traded at a vendor for various progression items and specific Food Ingredients. They usually involve fighting a mob/mob group that might be challenging to progressing players or some not-yet-perfected builds, but can also be just a jumping or flying ‘puzzle’. They are perfect for imaginative Roleplayers who can use them as ‘inspiration’ for their day, and not obtrusive to others. Special Resistance Medals are almost ignorable and don’t generally lead to any sellable reward.

Some might think it would be ‘better’ or ‘more interesting’ if the PRift for fighting the Hammerhead Shark ‘always dropped a Beast Fang’ (food ingredient generally obtained from certain Sharks) but this is a thing you can buy with the Resistance Medals. If you want to ‘perceive that you fought a Shark and got a Fang’, you can do that yourself. This form of Homogeny is not going to lead to the problem even if you could sell the items except if one item you could buy was very obviously better and in massively more demand than others. The choice is what protects this, we will get back to the specifics later in another section.

Example #2 is Homogeny in Rewards for most Nix Content. Here, the RedFrost system actually does a good job in keeping this from being quite bad for the overall economy but relies too much on player understanding. Roughly speaking, most content in Nix drops the same things, i.e. ‘almost everything’, an implementation I think is quite uncommon even in recent MMORPGs. Everything from Sneblings to giant Golems all drop the same potential piles of RedFrost gear, and the player chooses which things to Purify. Your odds of ‘good gear’ are contained entirely in the rarity of the item as far as most players know (this is basically unverifiable, droprates are the sort of thing that players spend years arguing about when not provided). If there are too many of a specific Ring on the Auction House, it’s probably because it has a higher droprate or a lower demand (this is easy to check since TL gives the number of recent sales and you can calculate which one from that). The oversupply is a result of the fact that the more players you have, the more drops they will generate, and with the old Traiting System gone, the item sink situation is quite bad for less desirable items. If the problem with this isn’t clear yet, here we go…

Predictability Of Prices

In a 10K Style game, Prices are almost automatically predictable for everything but the rarest items (and even these have a specific formula). If the prices are off in some way, I literally guarantee Econ Designers can use that to determine that something needs adjustment about some system or droprate or item. In TL, where Auction House has a specific floor interaction, 10 Lucent, the strongest possible connection to 10K Style itself, anything that costs 10 Lucent but still has oversupply is ‘wrong’. Not necessarily ‘must be fixed’, but definitely ‘should be examined’ (it might be a system, not the item, causing it). If these systems are not managed with even this minimal effort, the result is Slow Economic Collapse.

An example, is that TL introduced “Seal Keys” to replace “Enchanted Ink”, with their new system. The only things you need to know about this item is that some number of them allows a player to take specific gear that drops and make it sellable, and that they can be bought for either 100 Lu, or with Contract Coins for playing the game once per week. Many people hearing this would immediately think ‘that’s P2W!’ but this is a 10K Style game, so the outcome is quite different.

A piece of Armor requires 3 Seal Keys. Taxes are usually around 22%. The price of almost all ‘baseline’ armor is therefore just over 400 Lu. A ‘P2W’ player takes 300 Lu, buys 3 keys, seals a random item, sells it for 400ish, and gets 310 Lu or so back. Process repeats. A ‘F2P’ Player buys one Seal Key per week and either ‘decides to just do the same’ because they ‘know’ that a Key is worth 100 Lu, or because they don’t get lucky enough with Potential Abilities on their items to get any more than that. This is all a reasonable economic response. The ‘value’ of a Seal Key is known. If the Developers notice that some item is selling for under 400 Lu, it immediately indicates that this item is oversupplied or too easy to get, because it means that some unfortunate group of ‘F2P casuals’ is taking a relative loss on this item. It’s not a real loss. It won’t necessarily cause them to be mad. It doesn’t require an immediate fix, it’s just ‘this drops too often and players have no choice in the matter’.

Players undercutting things because of being in a rush, or due to a lack of understanding, is a tale as old as MMORPGs themselves. The number of common items on FFXIAH with downvoted comments in the comments section which are just ‘complaining about people undercutting below even NPC price’ is quite high, and this is in a game that only truly had this problem once.

This is where the Choice matters, because it breaks up the Homogeny. The Special Resistance Medal ‘shopping’ options still cause players to specialize even though everyone gets 4-10 per day. The differences in yield from the Famous Fishing Spots that appear also has this effect. If the price of Cold Jellyfish Salad drops a bit in TL with the new Expansion it’s because Developers for some reason made it possible to catch Mushroom Jellyfish in Nix (and again this isn’t a true complaint other than that it would be ‘better’ to have two different Jellyfish and both be able to make it). Price of Ardent Jelly slowly crawls upward because its main ingredient is randomly not in the list of similar ingredients (like the Beast Fang) that you can buy with Special Resistance Medals? I’d bet on it, though the process for that one would probably be very slow. If Cold Jellyfish Salad prices are down, I fish somewhere else, I have that option, I don’t ‘complain because I catch the same fish basically everywhere’ (yet).

By contrast, every lower-Watermark Accessory that drops pre-sealed in some side content that players can repeat? Price will be 10 Lu, almost without exception, and there will be dozens up. Even the price of Trait Enhancement Stones is predictable in its fluctuations. It ‘should’ be 16~20, it ‘will’ be closer to 20 when new gear comes out, and drop back to teeter exactly below 16 (this is the equivalent of the ‘NPC price’ if you calculate for everything else) as each content cycle ends, and will also determine the cost of all other Progression System Items from here on (and it is Inevitable that there will be more systems, we can just hope for good ones or the partial return-integration of Trait Enhancement from dropped Gear). Without those, we will almost certainly see a Slow Economic Collapse, though the better a game’s underlying design is, the slower the collapse is. This isn’t an excuse to leave things, because the specific effort required to keep track of the problem is the same all the time, just watch the Predicted numbers relative to the Real ones, and it will work. This is all because 10K Style games all have the same Relative Advancement Cost.

Relative Advancement Cost

This concept is directly understandable as “a player is willing to spend exactly this much time to make this much progress” and is, in aggregate, basically unchanging across all of the game. Possibly across all games. The 10K in the description doesn’t matter, it’s just ‘a number that represents the reward from a single reasonably dedicated ingame activity’. Players normally measure this ‘per hour’, but they don’t have to (TL, for example, can measure it in ‘Events’ or ‘Dungeons’ or maybe even ‘Activities’ by now). This aspect of TL is helpful when explaining relative to, say, BDO, because BDO tricks players by letting them get ‘used to’ making 280 million per hour and then an expansion raises it to 460 million per hour and the player feels ‘wow I am so rich now’, but then the prices go up (or anything from the new expansion is just 2x more expensive) and they’re back where they started.

TL currently ‘keeps the promise’ in a way by committing completely to the 10K Style. Those predictable prices are not a thing the Developers set in any way. Players are the ones that decide “A new Archboss Weapon that is good utility but not overwhelmingly powerful is worth 29,000 Lu”, and that “A specialist SkillCore that isn’t extremely popular for all content is worth 10,000 Lu” and even the precise value of Trait Enhancement Stone Boxes. The Developers didn’t need to ‘make sure’ anyone understood the Relative Advancement Cost, they just need to maintain the systems, which is much easier.

The existence of this ‘constant’ does allow for some things that games which don’t use this style can’t do, and I’ll end with a simple example using my favorite topic. Level Clamped Content.

If a game implements Clamped Content for something like Timed Events or Dungeons (of the type in TL where you eventually hit a limit of how often you can run the content), they can use the Relative Advancement Cost to quickly calculate the reward structure based on pre-existing values. Technical example follows:

TL Trait Enhances cost 70-80 Lu to go from Level 1 to Level 2 of a trait on all items currently. TL has basically two Tiers of item right now (but the best of the Lower Tier are about equal to the Average of the Upper) TL could make older, currently invalidated content drop items that advance the traits of Lower Tier Items and higher Tier Items differently (making them unable to advance the traits of higher Tier items would be one approach but an even more technical ‘equation’ below shows why this isn’t necessary).

1 Enhance Item gives 2500 Trait Exp. Advancing from Level 1 to Level 2 of a trait requires 12,500, 5 total, 80 Lu (this number goes up as the level does, to be clear) 1 “Level 50” (Lower Tier) enhance item could give 2500 to Lower Tier items and 500 to Upper Tier items, for example. A Clamped older dungeon could drop between 1 and 3 of the “Level 50” enhance items (the specifics of the drop don’t matter economically here, if you’re designing for a ‘deeper’ game, this sort of thing can be materials, if you are doing the ‘OG TL’ style, traited items like the old system, or if you’re just making a Loot Grinder, you can use the most bland boilerplate item, though people I know will obv complain about the last one) If players have any way to convert and sell these, they will just be worth almost exactly 1/5th of the current Enhance Items.

The result would be: New Player using ‘50 Cap/Watermark’ gear can raise the Trait from Level 1->2 for 15~20 Lu by going on the Auction House and buying 5x Enhance(50) Trait Enhance Items for probably exactly that much, or running each ‘Clamped Dungeon’ once. Advanced Players can accompany them to these ‘Clamped Dungeons’ and at least get ‘the equivalent of a Trait Enhance Item’ for helping them, by the end. All players can do Clamped versions of old dungeons for roughly 6 Lu per run (can vary by difficulty!). Players encounter the minimum amount of possible complexity that can support Clamped Content. Since any Clamped Dungeon would still probably take 10m or so to clear (assuming the Gear Clamp itself was working and the tuning was too), oversupply is not a primary concern During any period where something could be exploited, the guardrail of ‘limited amount of Dungeon Reward Tokens’ would still keep the Economy state stable. Devs could use different numbers or fractions now that the ‘Trait Exp’ concept is in the game, and the numbers would line up (the 1/5th is just simplest because of a separate part of the Scaffolding, the Refining Catalyst currently used to make the current Trait Enhancement Items sellable, I leave the ‘why’ as an exercise to the reader)

The main reason a Clamped Dungeon would be a concern design-wise (aside from the everpresent Toxicity) is the idea that it might end up more rewarding than higher-challenge content - my group members all report that they would not be willing to use up more than 5x Dungeon Runs per week on this, which is Predictable, as the result of 5x Dungeon Runs would be “Half of a Lv2 Trait on their upper Tier Items or 30-40 Lu”.

If you’re building a game like this, it’s hard to get meaningfully better than the current full form of the scaffolding available in Throne and Liberty as of this Rant. It’s been decades since I could say ‘there’s a game out there that only needs to change two things Economically’, but any game can do this, and it doesn’t have to just copy TL either. The principle itself is the thing that allows Econ Design work to be done, even by less experienced Developers, if they’re willing to take the Risk.

And remember, as long as the game is supposed to support Progression, things like ‘Level 90 Trait Enhance Items’ are Inevitable, no matter how much players might dislike the Complexity they perceive. The goal as Econ Designers is to make this as intuitive and painless as possible, just be careful about destroying things by trying to push past ‘possible’.

I’ll touch on this in even more detail next week by bringing it back to ‘World Bosses’ and ‘Ecology’, but I need one more week of data collection to be absolutely sure about the key part of the premise, so until then, may your content be fun and your RNG be lit, as JustVine says.