Who wants to talk about money?! Amazon does, and the economy is indeed the subject of this week’s Forged in Aeternum video for New World. Amazon’s Patrick Smedley, Joel Clift, and Tony Morton deep-dive the last three months of the MMO’s in-game economic health and what they’re doing to study it (mostly data and player sentiment) and address it.
“The last time we did this episode, when we were looking at our data ahead of time, stuff was looking pretty decent,” Smedley the Younger says. “[But] by the time [that] episode aired, players were not feeling so good” – entirely because the game had flipped from a faucet economy to a sink economy, which is to say, way more money was leaving the game than entering it. To fix it, the devs added weekly craftable caches that function as a universal basic income of 1500 gold a week, removed a key faction vendor sink, and blasted more money into the economy thanks to seasonal events. It’s actually quite a nice deep-dive, complete with charts of the before and after.
Ultimately, the studio is trying to balance faucets and sinks; it doesn’t want an economy too heavy on sinks that the player experience suffers, but it doesn’t want “runaway inflation” from a faucet-dominated economy either (that drives off new players). Even if you don’t play New World, it’s worth a listen to get an idea for how MMO devs manage economies.
