Econ-Friday Ranting 09/11/26

“Detrimental Hoarding is an economic Phenomenon that occurs when an Exchangeable Resource with a Time-Limited Fixed Continuous Supply is subject to a Demand Spike based entirely on player Meta-Knowledge of an upcoming single-point change in the Economic aspect of a game.”

This is another technical Rant, it may require some understanding of Macro-Slot Theory for the unfamiliar. If you are familiar with either Final Fantasy 11 or Throne and Liberty, you may only need the Examples below. If you are already extremely familiar with these Rants, to the point where the terms in the ‘thesis statement’ above immediately made sense to you, you can skip two Examples straight to Example #3.

Example #1: Meta-Detrimental Hoarding

I’ll start with a type of Hoarding that is only detrimental if one of the goals/reward structures of your game is interpersonal competition, whether that is for ‘spaces in top-performing groups’, or direct PvP. It is still absolutely worth avoiding even in games that aren’t like this, even if just to keep the ‘noise’ down. This example will be mostly from Throne and Liberty, since that game makes a large effort to avoid this type of hoarding.

In most games with systems for Enhancing Gear, especially when those Enhancements are specific to the gear piece and not the slot, there is some readily obtainable Resource used for this progression. We will simply call these “Progression Stones” because that covers most games, and TL removed theirs in favor of something else in the last big update/overhaul to the gearing system.

When players know that a new expansion to the gear available is coming, they stockpile Progression Stones if they think that it will be possible to enhance the new gear with the current ones and that new, different ones won’t be introduced. The way in which this is problematic is very specific. Progression Stones are not designed to actually be difficult to get. They are a common, if time-consuming ‘reward for general play’ in almost every game, because MMORPG players like progression, and they like being able to make lots of different progression. A player who correctly assumes that the new gear will accept the currently available Progression Stones and stockpiles 2000 of them, has still spent all the time required, so from the Econ perspective, that player is still acting in a non-disruptive way. They spent time, and got a future reward. The problem with this type of hoarding is that being able to use Meta-Knowledge to guarantee a future advantage over others in competition is a Knowledge Check, and sometimes also breeds unnecessary Toxicity, but hopefully one can see how this might be intended gameplay or even considered a form of ‘fun’ in a single-player or smallgroup-lobby style game. To illustrate further, the next example is a distinction/contrast.

Example #2: A Thing That Looks Like Detrimental Hoarding But Isn’t

The reason that Example #1 isn’t a direct Economy problem can be illustrated through two things done by Throne and Liberty. The first is that their new system ‘resets’ the progression of an item when you ‘Seal’ it to place it on Auction (in the old system, aiming to sell an item enhanced by Progression Stones would not also be selling that progression). The second, unrelated thing is that items which are directly part of a player’s Economic Engine being Hoarded does not directly count as a Knowledge Check (or at least not one outside the natural unavoidable aspects of MMORPG Economy play).

Examples of items like this in TL are Food, Divine Beast Crystals, and Refining Catalysts. Each matters in a different way, so they get their own subsections:

Food: If a player knows that there will be new content soon and they will want to spend all their time grinding that new content instead of following whatever play loops result in them making the food they use for the content, they will Stockpile it. If they expect many others to also be doing the same thing, and that some of those people don’t make their own food, but only buy it, they will Hoard the sellable food they make. Economically, the price on the food will probably go up a little before the new content releases, and players who are unaware of this concept will still make more money, maybe not as much as the Hoarders, but it still won’t matter. This is almost impossible to stop either way, even if new, ‘more powerful’ Food was released at the same time as the other new Content, the previous food is extremely unlikely to be invalidated entirely (this would be a bad Economic design as well as being a terrible way to interact with players, the actual ‘Best Practices’ would be to release the new Food items either months before, or months after, new alternate content). A player whose Economic Engine is food production can do this without the outcome being actual Detrimental Hoarding even in a game like FF11 where you can sometimes control territories to make it easier to get ingredients to quickly make more of a specific food. In most such games, the competition is the point, and materials are abundant enough that sparking that competition through the players’ Meta-Knowledge will not result in lockouts most of the time, at least none that couldn’t be equally easily triggered by ‘whim’.

Divine Beast Crystals: In TL, the Supply of this item is much more limited and competitive, but it’s so Competitive in the way you get it that the static, time-limited supply is almost always entirely gathered. When the supply is one where ‘all of it is always taken’, it can be frustrating when new content sparks a Meta-Knowledge chase and increases competition for the item, but that’s an individual experience, nothing is negatively affected Economically. Contrast this to the Progression Stones, which are limited usually moreso by ‘the number of players involved’, and not meaningfully limited by time. Players have time and ‘Token Resources’ to spend Stockpiling these even without as much Competition, and individual players all get their own ‘pool’ of Tokens. Stockpiling Divine Beast Crystals takes roughly the same amount of time, each time that they become available, but this activity therefore also has a relatively fixed Opportunity Cost. So a player who has been stockpiling hundreds of these over a year of play because of their expectation that some future content will require them, has, in fact, lost out, Economically, relative to others, in the near-term. They paid an Opportunity Cost to have a stockpile, so the stockpile is an investment. It is basically ‘correct’ to reward this player rather than invalidating their Stockpile because of this difference in Opportunity Cost. In short, they could have spent the time making more money doing something else, but did the thing they liked or saw future value in, and the difference is subtle precisely because it’s difficult to be reactionary to Competitive items (especially static-supply ones) due to Meta-Knowledge of upcoming content. If anything, the player with the Stockpile from their natural Economic Engine is more likely to avoid the activity to compete in collecting these when others become aware of it, but even then, it’s still not ‘a Knowledge Check Payoff’. The player already paid an Opportunity Cost and therefore ‘deserves’ whatever reward, the other players scrambling are failing at ‘recognizing that the Opportunity Cost has temporarily gone up’. They are attempting to engage in Detrimental Hoarding on a resource type that is ‘immune’ to it.

Refining Catalysts: This item replaced Extraction Stones in TL, basically, but it is generally better because the sources are different, much more closely and correctly tied to Fixed Duration activities, usually Events. This is also somewhat Competitive, so it’s not perfect, but the reason it isn’t perfect is related to performance differences between players, i.e. a lack of Clamped Tiers of Competition. I talk enough about that, so I won’t today. Just know that you get these by general play, and choosing where to compete, out of a set of options that all become available at the same time. The main reason these are not truly subject to Detrimental Hoarding, though, is the combination of the other two above. Player Meta-Knowledge would imply that players should hoard these if they expect new items that will require them, but they can (as of this writing) only be used to process unsellable items into sellable ones, so they are much more like the Sellable Food than ‘general food’. I cannot use these to make myself more effective in a fight without selling something to someone else and using the money. The only advantage they can offer, is directly Market Dependent, and like the Divine Beast Crystals, the ‘easy’ sources of these are automatically Competitive (or would be, in a perfect game). If everyone maximizes their Refining Catalyst supply before new content, they will all pay roughly the same Opportunity Cost, and increase Supply, but cannot use that Supply to gain advantage without Demand, and in almost every case, this leads to a race which results in undercutting the value (this is actually why Refining Catalysts are distinctly better than Extraction Stones even if they were also capable of the same function, because the system that Refining Catalysts are involved in has a built in ‘baseline value’ that can be tuned relative to items they would theoretically be used on, and Extraction Stones did not have any true Baseline Value, certainly not a tuneable one). The sensible thing is to hold them longer and wait for the initial volatility to change, if the Supply is too high relative to the Demand, but this is where the crack in the system that most Designers have to care about, actually appears…

Example #3: Emergent Detrimental Hoarding

Hopefully the first two examples indicated why this isn’t so clear-cut as it might initially seem, but this example aims to pin it down more precisely, and also to show some nuance in when it makes sense to put effort into avoiding this, vs increase Inevitable Complexity.

TL replaced its Progression Stone system with an Inheritance system, but by the nature of the game, doesn’t want players to ‘actually have to start from scratch’ when new items are made available. Instead they ‘insist that you pay a meaningful cost’. In the old system, this meant transferring the Progression of this type from Item A to Item B, but losing Item A, and in the new system, there are related ‘rules’ for inheriting Potential Abilities.

Let’s say I have an item with a powerful Potential Ability, a new function allowed on gear with levels 51-80. I raise this item to 80 and use it. If new, meaningfully more interesting/meta/powerful items are released in an update that go up to level 95, whether or not I can use the new weapon with the old Potential Ability comes down to a Complex system of how I got that ability onto the item in the first place. The specifics barely matter. The point is that it is best to stockpile items with these Potential Abilities like this to get as much OF a ‘head start’ as is possible when the new content is released, even though this is not extremely easy to do.

Normally ‘not easy to do’ is a strong indicator that this isn’t actually Detrimental Hoarding (the true specifics are related to where the supply point is for most of your playerbase). The player is probably spending a high Opportunity Cost to get this stockpile and therefore ‘should’ be rewarded later. It affects Supply, because those players are unwilling to sell these items, but the items themselves somewhat come from ‘events’ and other activities that have Token Clamps, so it’s still mostly reasonable. The item can’t be traded without resetting a lot of its capacity, so the stockpile isn’t as ‘advantageous’ (if the player enhances the item to use it in the meantime, any enhancement will be lost when selling it). This means that it isn’t really necessary for the Developers to conclude ‘we need to make level 80+ Items use a whole new complex System that isn’t compatible with level <80 Item Potential Abilities’. This might still be a good practice, especially if they want to keep certain new Potential Abilities only on 80+ gear, or it would have problems with any Level-Clamped Content they design, but Economically it’s not necessary, however there’s still one aspect of this that results in Inevitable Complexity that is beyond even what is seen in Example #1 and therefore is concerning.

It’s actually because players who can hoard better items and hard-set their values to deny them entirely to upcoming players, have no incentive not to do so. This didn’t apply in the first example because you can’t hoard Progression Stones away from lower-investment players, you can only ‘outcompete them’, and they simply choose a new space with more reasonable Opportunity Cost. You can hoard Divine Beast Crystals in Example #2, but the methods for genuinely doing this are esoteric and not based on a thing those higher-investment players truly control in the same way. You can only barely, through absolute borderline insanity, ‘hoard’ Potential Abilities on powerful gear enough to Economically affect less invested players… but you can do it, because this is a case where withholding as much power as possible from every other player, results in more success in all Competition.

This Is Where The Macro-Slots Come In

This is incredibly simple from here. If your game’s gameplay loops for less-invested players lose overall value, i.e. if the Macro-Slots keep getting devalued when new content is added, the Emergent problem is that while everyone still has all the options, only the upper ones are considered ‘worth it’. There are players who will Inevitably complain about/think this in any situation, so this is a space where player feedback is often guidance to ‘take a look’, at best. This can be viewed as yet another appeal from me to just make multi-tiered Level-Clamped content, but it’s moreso just an identification of when you care enough to actually start thinking about that.

When it becomes more difficult to add a new upper Complexity Layer (without frustrating the playerbase) than it is to maintain or devise a reasonable Level-Clamp system, Games tend to have problems, and Detrimental Hoarding becomes one of those large problems. Avoiding it requires either high Complexity, or Content Invalidation, a complaint commonly seen in games like World of Warcraft over the years. Ignoring it altogether results in Economic Collapses fairly often even if all other negative sentiment is avoided, and therefore that should be considered based on how big an Economic Playerbase you have, or generally how integral you consider the Economy experience to be, to the game in general.

If you add a whole new Macro-Slot layer and chop off the importance of the current bottom one(s) to do it, just be prepared for this outcome and make your design decisions accordingly.