Until this morning, every account on the realm got 20 gold a day for logging in, 10 for a daily quest and 100 for a weekly boss. It sounded generous, and it was. On 28 October alone the realm handed out 238,160 gold.
It also broke the gold market.
You cannot sell what everybody has
On the morning of the 29th the gold exchange looked like this: more than 32,000 gold for sale at 3,000 coins each, and not a single buy order. Everybody had gold, so nobody needed to buy any. The sellers had all drifted down to the same price, and nobody bought there either.
The residents themselves showed the other half of the problem. When gold costs nothing, anything looks worth buying. We looked at what they actually bought with it: in about a day some 63,000 gold went into the shop, and a good part of it went on refine attempts that, by the residents' own estimate of their time, were worth a median of about 485 coins per gold spent. Nobody would pay that if gold had a price. With free gold, nobody had to think.
A currency that everyone receives for showing up is not a currency. It is a participation trophy.
What changed today
The free gold is mostly gone, for everyone, AI residents and people alike:
| Before | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Logging in | 20 gold a day | nothing |
| One daily quest | 10 gold, from about level 20 | 1 gold, from level 40 (Crazy Stone, Bounty Hunter III, the Cube of Fate reward) |
| One weekly boss | 100 gold, from the level 29 dungeons | 10 gold, from level 60 (dungeon bosses from 59 up, Hiding Dragon Seal, Jade Dragon Order) |
That is roughly a 99 % cut. Gold earned by playing is now a reward for doing something, not for logging in, and it no longer pays to keep ten accounts that only log in.
Gold still is never sold for real money. That has not changed and it will not.
So where does gold come from now?
From the Treasury. It is a character, literally named Treasury, standing next to the Auctioneer in Archosaur. You will not find it in a party or in chat. It does one thing: four times a day it puts gold up for sale on the gold exchange, for coins, under one published rule.
The rule took a few tries to get right, and the first try is the interesting part.
Try one: follow the market. The obvious design is a Treasury that watches recent trades and keeps the price near them, selling when the price runs up. Before switching anything on, we ran the whole realm forward 180 days in a simulation, with the real Treasury rule and a model of the residents' buying. It went wrong in a way that is obvious only afterwards. Sellers on the exchange ask a little over the last trade. A few buyers who really want something pay it. The "market price" creeps up, the Treasury follows it, sellers ask a little over that... In the simulation gold went from 3,000 to 300,000 coins in 60 days, and almost nobody could afford anything. A treasury that follows the market follows its mistakes.
Try two: anchor gold to time. In a world where gold cannot be bought for real money, there is only one honest unit of value: how long you play for it. So the Treasury's target is now about half an hour of play per gold: half of what a typical resident of level 20 or more earns in coins in an hour. Today that is about 17,000 coins an hour, so the target is about 8,700 coins a gold.
"Typical" means the middle resident, not the average. A few level-90s earning a fortune would drag an average up and price gold out of reach for someone at level 25. The middle does not move for them.
Around that target the Treasury keeps a corridor:
- it always sells gold at a quarter above the target, so the price cannot run away;
- it buys gold back a fifth below it, with coins it took in earlier, so it cannot collapse either. It never creates coins;
- between the two, players set the price among themselves;
- coins it takes in, beyond a reserve it keeps for buying back, are removed from the game. This world creates far more coins than it destroys, and this is the first big drain on them.
The target does not jump. It moves at most 10 % a day, so today it starts at 3,072 and walks up toward 8,700 over the next week or two. Right now the Treasury has 2,500 gold up for sale at its ceiling, 3,900 coins each. It will not sell much until the 32,000 gold that is already for sale has found buyers. That is fine. It is supposed to be the seller of last resort, not the only seller.
In the simulation, the anchored rule kept gold at about 35 minutes of play throughout, and the coins it removed came to about a fifth of all the coins the residents made over those 180 days. That is a model with guessed buying habits, not a promise, but it shows the shape we want.
Residents who know what gold is worth
The other half of the change is in the residents themselves, and it is rolling out today, to half of them first so we can compare.
- Gold has a price for them now. A resident will not spend gold on something worth less to it than what the gold would sell for. So long, cheap refine attempts.
- They buy gold when it is a good deal for them. If a resident needs gold for something genuinely worth it (a bag upgrade, a charm, a goal it is saving for), it buys gold on the exchange, but only up to what that thing is worth to it. A level-90 pays more for the same item than a level-20, because its time is worth more.
- They buy from you. If a player puts a shop item on the auction cheaper than buying the gold for it would cost, residents who want that item will take it. Until now they only bought from each other.
- Some shopkeepers resell shop goods. A few trader residents stock a handful of shop goods (Source of Force, Phoenix Feathers, Tienkang stones, Silver charms) and sell them in their catshops for coins, 6 % above what the same goods cost through gold. If you never want to touch the exchange, there is a shop for that.
What this means if you play
- A gold is meant to cost about half an hour of play, at any point in the world's life.
- A big shop goal (180 gold or so) becomes a goal you save for over weeks, not something you get at the end of your first week.
- Dailies and weekly bosses past level 40 and 60 matter again. One gold is a lot more than it was yesterday.
- Coins matter again too: you can always turn coins into gold at the Treasury's price.
What we do not know yet is how this feels. Scarce gold can make a world feel serious and worth investing in, or it can feel stingy. The residents will tell us part of that in numbers over the next days. People will tell us the rest. If you are testing and gold feels wrong, too cheap, too dear, too slow, write to me at max@livingpw.com or in the community.
The player updates have the short version.