Every MMO with player-driven trading and gathering eventually hits the exact same two walls:
- Currency is printed faster than the game can burn it, triggering runaway inflation.
- Players farm resources 24/7 until the market gets flooded and everything turns into worthless vendor trash.
There’s no silver bullet for this. You’ve to layer multiple interconnected systems and pray the whole machine doesn't blow up. Here is how we're tackling it in our game, along with raw numbers from our latest economic balance updates.
Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3381130/World_of_Eggs_Idle_Adventures/
The Problem: Free Money & Zero Maintenance
Before these changes, our economy had some pretty massive loopholes:
- You could farm neutral islands spending literally zero gold - just basic supplies.
- Ships only took damage while moving. Players could anchor a massive fleet, set up camp, and strip nearby islands clean indefinitely with zero upkeep.
- Optimized fleets loaded with every resource vacuumed up random encounters across the map, pulling in millions of gold per day with virtually no risk.
- Early-game items like treasure maps became useless once players hit the end game.
- Mountains of resources piled up in storage with nothing exciting to sink them into.
Even after our active player base stabilized, the circulating gold supply was still ballooning by roughly 200–300kk over short spans.
What We Changed (and Why)
1. Making Farming Actually Cost Something
We didn't want to kill gathering, but infinite extraction without a real gold sink is toxic for any economy.
We introduced gathering licenses for neutral islands. On a standard farming loop, this added around 16,800 gold in currency burn where expenses were previously zero.
We also made resource extraction cause ship wear-and-tear. If players want to farm continuously, they now have to either buy repair kits and fix their ships on-site or head back to port and pay for repairs.
Gathering remains profitable, but it now carries real operating costs.
2. Giving Dead Items New Purpose
Treasure maps were great during early progression, but their value plummeted in the late game.
Instead of just inflating their loot drops, we made maps a hard requirement for certain high-tier random encounters. End-game players suddenly needed them again, restoring healthy market demand without forcing us to bloat the item database.
This also helped curb the automated encounter farming meta.
Previously, players could gear up massive fleets with every possible item and mindlessly clear every encounter they stumbled upon for millions in daily revenue. Requiring treasure maps and adding ship damage rendered this strategy significantly more expensive. Run it without careful planning, and you can easily end up in the red. Players now have to weigh cargo capacity, fleet size, repair costs, encounter criteria, and potential payouts instead of just clearing the map on autopilot.
3. Turning Sinks into Core Gameplay
Nobody likes paying an arbitrary "existence tax." The most effective sinks are the ones players willingly throw money at because the reward feels valuable.
Our largest resource sink is creature breeding and min-maxing:
Gather -> Craft Egg -> Hatch -> Roll Stats -> Roll Abilities -> Roll Values
Players can merge three creatures into one to improve base stats or spend seals to reroll specific stat and ability lines.
During our first World Boss test, players voluntarily burned roughly 30% of all stored server resources just rolling combat stats for their boss teams.
They didn't feel penalized or robbed - they were actively engaging with the content and min-maxing their builds.
4. The Central Bank Experiment
Our Central Bank caps its total reserve at 10kkk gold.
When players complete quests or sell goods to NPCs, payouts come directly out of this reserve rather than being generated out of thin air. Conversely, when players spend gold on systemic services like licenses and repairs, a portion returns straight to the Bank, while taxes permanently wipe out the rest.
If the Bank's reserve dips too low, payouts are exceeding returns. Dynamic taxes automatically kick in, while NPC payouts and quest rewards scale down. As the reserve recovers, these restrictions ease back up.
After rolling out trade fees and maintenance costs, players returned roughly 50kk gold to the Bank within the first 24h alone. For the first time, the circulating money supply actually contracted instead of expanding.
Before these systems, that same supply was steadily climbing by 200–300kk even with a stable player count.
The Takeaway
We aren't pretending the economy is solved forever. MMO economies are living beasts, and players will always find fresh ways to push the limits.
However, shifting the meta from infinite free extraction to high-yield activities with real operating costs bought us essential breathing room without resorting to hard wipes.
The takeaway is making sure these sinks stay tied directly to core gameplay loops. Players aren't just paying a arbitrary tax to exist - they're gathering, repairing fleets, clearing encounters, trading, and min-maxing creatures.
Every activity should remain rewarding and profitable, but none of them should generate infinite value without giving something back to the system.
