New World's Latest Forged In Aeternum Talks Player Economy And Foreshadows Pets, Maybe

mmorpg.com:

New World's latest Forged in Aeternum video highlights its player economy and how the devs both monitor its health and take action to fix things when they identify an issue. Also joining in on the discussion is a good boy dog, which the devs jokingly foreshadow as the coming of pets in Aeternum.

First off, no, the foreshadowing doesn't actually mean pets will finally make an appearance in New World. But one can hope, especially as the team rewrote the lore with Rise of the Angry Earth to explain mounts, specifically horses, and how they finally came to the Eternal Isle.

But the meat and potatoes of the video highlight the player economy, something that you can make the argument has seen some issues over the two years the dev team has been working on it live. Multiple bugs throughout the years have seen player trading completely halted, forcing the developers to grind everything to a halt to fix dupes and more. 

However, the New World developers look at a high-level brief of the economy, tackling everything from the wealth disparity in New World right down to the impacts the latest expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, has had on the economy. 

In fact, according to Senior Systems Designer Tony Morton, wealth disparity is one of the bigger issues the team faces. Morton describes a situation that real-world economists face, with a growing wealth gap, upward trending prices as a result, and inflation seeping into Aeternum. So the goal, according to Morton, is to help keep that gap smaller by looking at and tweaking various ways that wealth is distributed to players, especially when comparing those no-lifers who play hours and hours each day versus those who maybe have more limited time to log in.

«So we take a look at how wealth is