Econ-Friday Ranting 07/31/26

“Anyone know if you can seal Crafted Weapons?”

Nothing captures the current Econ Knowledge Path issues in Throne and Liberty for me lately better than this (slightly paraphrased) line from World Chat.

It would be easy to assume ‘well obviously you can, and if you can’t, you should be able to’, but MMORPG economies don’t work like that. For some games, being able to sell anything you make (through some path, mildly Clamped) is always fine, and for some others, you have to be careful. For the unfamiliar, I’m about to skip a lot of context, but will do my best to link the posts with that context whenever I can.

Throne and Liberty, Ashes of Creation, and to some extent FF11, can all define themselves as ‘MMORPGs with a dynamic world with large scale PvP and PvE’ (even FF11 Ballista matches can have up to 144 total players in them). All three games delivered well on their ‘basic sub-promises’ (in the case of Ashes, ‘for as long as it lasted’). Each has different priorities for which content they want to make sure players have the capacity to access or focus on, which is correct. They each faltered at some point in their development relative to communicating their content, and in some cases did not properly deliver their Knowledge Paths to players.

We’ll review/cover some relatively universal and obvious things first, which apply to all these types of games with 10K style Economies. If you’ve read the old Econ-Rants, you know all this already:

  1. Taking an ingame action that is either challenging or a Niche (farming/grinding for items or crafting) and getting a Reward for your success or knowledge, is fun.
  2. Being able to sell that reward some of the time so you can buy things that you don’t naturally obtain yourself from people who undertake other Challenges or have different Niches, is fun.
  3. Being able to take an ingame action that is not actually Challenging, not a Niche, and not Clamped, and then receive a reward that can be sold easily, no matter how fun, is bad for the Economy.
  4. Being unable to buy items obtained by others who do things you don’t want to do in the game, diminishes fun.
  5. Being able to snowball due to gaining power much faster than others, even though this is technically a Niche and often indirectly Clamped, and receive an easily sellable reward, no matter how fun this is, is bad for the Economy over the long term.
  6. Being unable to understand where to go to find your Niche, unable to compete in any ‘Tier’ of a particular Niche because of a large power/Knowledge gap between you and higher level players, or being unable to make sense of a Knowledge Path, is not fun.
  7. Being unable to find anything enjoyable in the game to do Economically despite clear Knowledge Paths and decent balance, specifically because one’s goal is to get rewarded more than others (or always equal to the top players), is not a Developer’s responsibility.

Even though these points above are focused around 10K Style Economy games, they can be referenced to figure out when certain things are okay for games that don’t aim for this model too. Apply the ‘opposite’, see how the flows work or how the players feel about it, decide what to do as Developers. Not every ‘sin’ I’m about to list below is a ‘sin’ for every game.

Serious Auto-Crafting/Automatic Resource Acquisition

Here’s why Gardening in FF11 works and Amitoi Expeditions in Throne and Liberty don’t quite match up. In FF11, you have to get Seeds from somewhere. Most modern players would expect this to be easy. Just go to a shop and buy them, right?

You couldn’t do this. You had to get them from mobs, which meant you needed someone to collect them, even if you did it yourself. Even though it was basically not difficult, and the mobs that dropped them were fairly abundant across the game as a whole. You couldn’t ‘just log in, plant things, and log out, and come back later for profit’. At some point, you were going to think about either ‘the world you were playing in’, or ‘the people playing in that world with you’. Those seeds had the same Opportunity Cost as everything else, and once you planted and harvested them, you didn’t get seeds ‘back’. You ‘paid something in’ as startup for these resources, even if it was only time. It could be anything, it just needed to cost something, because that kept it from being ‘everyone’s chore’ and made it into ‘many people’s Niche’.

Auto-Crafting is similar, but not as bad, as long as one keeps the constant ‘Mobile Game Style’ menu minigame out of it (I have complained about this before in TL, but note that they’ve made great improvements to this since, so perhaps they really did have the guts to ‘rip out’ some of it). The other thing that makes TL’s Auto-Crafting less egregious is the fact that the player character must usually go out and get some materials themselves. The other aspect is the lack of Progression uses for the results, which brings us to…

Homogenous/Easy Gear Crafting

It’s understandable to want to avoid a long process for letting a player get started with crafting gear, especially in a faster-leveling game where the player will want to make their own gear, ‘casuals’ are expected to play quite a lot, etc. It’s less acceptable to everyone I know, for this process to be overly simple, Niche-less, and involve very little investment. ‘Unfortunately’ it’s still true that things must have some Challenge to be ‘worth doing’ in a 10K style game, even if many players don’t consider Challenging things to be ‘fun’. If you’ve chosen to make this game type (you can read that as 10K style but honestly I suggest just assuming I mean ‘MMORPG’, at this point), you will inevitably have to deal with players who don’t want any challenges or obstacles.

In a game where you must gather your own materials (no Auto-gathering/Passive Material input), Crafting often develops Niches even without restrictions on players having multiple crafts/artisanship professions available. More ‘social’ and ‘interdependent’ games allow people to sell Materials to each other. Properly Clamped, this leads to Economic Velocity. Unclamped, it leads to perverse incentives, and usually botting. Some players will want it to be unclamped if it is related to crafting gear, so that they can make lots of gear. These players often expect to be able to sell that gear, but without Niches, they will not get much sales (e.g. the difference between Vegetable Stir-Fry and Mushroom Stir-Fry in TL). Competition will be too high/universal, leading to many games discarding the idea altogether and becoming Loot Grinders.

Failing To Use Your Dynamic World/Content To Point To Niches

All the Niches in the world are no use if your players have no capacity to envision or recognize them. Even my own group, whose entire goal in many games is to find and enjoy this type of gameplay, can end up in situations where the lack of polish/execution in a game means they don’t recognize them. This happens because when an Econ-positive player encounters the things that most games put in front of new players first, they sometimes form opinions quickly before the depth can present itself.

This is the main reason why blatant, immediate ‘green flags’ such as a good Fishing System, Weather, and mobs that drop sensible crafting materials, help with retention. The player is primed to look for their Niche, instead of either disengaging, or just ‘looking for the Shortcut/Handout/Pity Drop system’. MMORPGs need a balance of ‘spectacle with homogenous rewards’, and ‘Dynamic Specialization’, to keep a strong Economy going. This is the key point of ‘failure’ in Throne and Liberty right now that leads to the first line in this Rant. The game presented the player with a ‘Gear Crafting System’, one that still slightly looks as if it could have some Specialization, one that previously actually contained this exact, minor Specialization. That player thought ‘Perhaps I can use Crafting to make money’ and the system/communication ‘failed them’.

My Guild Members would not have been able to answer that player. I’m not sure even I know the full answer, at this point. In a different game the question would probably have been ‘is it worth trying to craft things to sell them?’, . In yet another game it might have been ‘Is making money by Crafting just for top-level players?’.

Games don’t have to be this way, though. The old systems that contained Specialization and the new ‘Pity Drop’ Systems in Throne and Liberty can coexist, the same way they coexisted in FF11, and to some extent even Black Desert Online, and for a short time, even TL itself. The Inevitable Complaints from those who are impatient, or for whom the Knowledge Paths fall short or don’t make sense, aren’t actually reasons to remove or diminish your game’s ‘Econ Green Flags’. Nor is ‘fear of upsetting someone with Niche Inequality’ during a rough patch, because the only way most games avoid that outcome is the equally (if not more) painful Niche Invalidation or worse, Content Invalidation.

All game genres suffer from declines when they enter the period where the Developers become too scared of making mistakes in the process of trying to do something correctly, and therefore just avoid doing anything that might go wrong. We may be about to enter a new era, though, where the decline is so obvious that Developers are empowered to take a stand against that approach, so let’s just hold onto our hats and face the challenges head-on.

Next week, probably another deeper dive into Niches and Traiting, and how to apply the related principles to other games or Gear Progression styles.