Econ-Friday Ranting 10/02/26

There IS a point where the Individual Error mentioned in the prior Rant has an impetus for the developer to solve it sooner rather than later, and by sooner I mean ‘in the design phase before they deploy anything to the live game at all’. Judging whether to release an unfinished thing with Individual Errors or delay potentially engaging Content to avoid having them in the live version of the game can actually be assessed by a development team, though.

This rant is about what that might look like.

Absence ‘Errors’

The Tumgir’s Scabbard area in the Nix Region of Throne and Liberty is an underground section, lava pools and cooled lava that the player can navigate through, but the only thing in this area, in the ‘Standard’ version of the Region (the non-Lawless Zone) are mobs, and this is ‘strange’ slightly because it would be a very understandable/normal place to put Gathering Points. The Lawless Zone version of this region doesn’t even have mobs there, but this makes some sense, and it’s this contrast that highlights exactly why this is an Absence. Obviously this is related to things like Knowledge Paths and Player Expectations, but there’s a bit more nuance to it than that.

Having no gatherables ‘concentrated’ even a bit in the ‘more dangerous’ parts of Nix means that there is an Absence of Incentives to interact with the world in the way it’s designed, and this lowers the number of Niches. It would be somewhat reasonable to do it this way if, for example ‘this area was intended to eventually be a source of occasional Epic-Grade Ore’, but because of how players pay attention to their games, designing this area without any Ore Gatherables in the meantime will cause less-invested players to remember it as an Absence.

Obviously sometimes this is unavoidable, but from the outside, it usually raises the question: “Why is it absent at all?”

Players don’t always understand ‘why a Developer doesn’t add or change something that they (the player) feel is an obvious requirement or improvement to some aspect of the game’, and this becomes especially problematic because of the number of times in the recent past where Developers have resisted adding or doing something until the point where the playerbase was so annoyed that they eventually had to ‘give in’, often not providing a nuanced outcome, but instead just ‘having to give the players what they say they want’ simply because they held out too long without intermediate adjustments.

For Economy things, though, this tends to work a little differently, because players have much more time than Designers to become familiar with all the outcomes of the design, and this compounds even more when players who come from games with Economic Design Style A, find a section of a game that matches this, even if the rest of the game doesn’t outright match. Those players often ‘know’ whether a thing can or cannot work. For changes to things like Combat Balance or Content Release Cadence, the situation is usually binary. At least in the case of ‘a game that doesn’t release new content or adjust the conditions for interacting with Old Content, most players can immediately define this as a problem, but for missing Economy ‘slots’, this isn’t so simple.

For 10K-Style Games specifically, Designers often have the option to just ‘trust the system’ for smaller adjustments and decisions, so smaller Absences are less common, if they are attentive. Larger ones are often tied directly to development milestones, once the Designer gets used to the system, but for the sort of Designer who is just getting used to this sort of thing, players may not be able to see that. Games like EVE Online have a whole pipeline of ‘methods for discussing Economic things with the playerbase’, and old classics that had good Economy Design ‘followed through’ hard enough that the player was already ‘used to it’.

In the end, thankfully, this means that an Error is just ‘an Expectation Mismatch’ (or an Expectation that someone forgot to write down and make a part of the design flow). This is doubly true in the 10K-Style of game, where the robustness of the system lets the Designer rely a lot more on Supply and Demand, and focus their thoughts on those aspects instead of worrying a huge amount, about specific values of things they need to add.

In general, my experience watching MMORPGs attempting Economic Design has been mostly ‘Designers hesitating to add something because they don’t want to break an already-fragile Economy’, which is a somewhat understandable reaction from Designers who aren’t usually used to these things, or whose levels of caution originate from things like Mint Cakes. The thing to understand, though, is that almost all MMORPG Economies are ‘trying to become’ the same thing, which is where the concept of the 10K-Style even comes from. I’ll avoid the sidetrack on that today and just leave it at:

“When you make a game without a specific function while having most or all of the expected functions around it, you create an Absence that some players can ‘feel’, and they try to fill it with something.”

That ‘something’ is not often ‘what the Devs would want them to fill it with, and when that happens, I’d say we can call it an Error.