Economy Balance Deep Dive
Greetings, Adventurers!
Join Lead Seasons Designer Patrick Smedley, Senior Systems Designer Joel Clift, and Senior Systems Designer Tony Morton for a technical overview of the New World economy. From key resources to challenges, here’s how we analyze economic health. Let us know if you’d like to know more and we can cover additional specifics in a future dev blog.
New World is a unique player in the MMO space in that we’re a player driven economy. That means we do not have vendors for players to sell their gear and there’s no artificial floor or ceiling set on the cost of goods—you the players determine that! A player driven economy is really exciting, but it comes with its own challenges.
The economy in New World has a lot of similarities to the real world economy. Things like wealth distribution and inflation need to be carefully managed. We also need to understand where wealth comes from and leaves the economy. New World in particular faces a handful of real world economic issues: wealth disparity, stored wealth, inflation, and managed coin faucets vs coin sinks. These are all concerns we look at when we gauge the overall economic health of the game.
Wealth disparity we’ll cover in more depth below, but we want players to be as equal as possible in terms of wealth in correlation to how much they play. We don’t want a small conglomerate of the wealthy significantly outpacing all other players.
Stored wealth is a trickier issue where players hoard tens of thousands of items (such as Iron Hide) waiting for the day when they become more valuable. They then flood the market with those items, dropping their value.
Inflation is the increase in cost of goods over a period of time as a result of players having more gold on
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