The loop that keeps a player economy alive.

Every action moved the economy.

In a decentralised economy there is no central bank. Every craft, trade, and reward is a player decision that creates or destroys value, and each of those decisions changes what the next player finds worth doing. Balancing by spreadsheet had produced the usual cycle: a dominant strategy, a patch, and a new dominant strategy.

The studio needed to understand the system before tuning it: which feedback loops kept many ways of playing viable, and which quietly collapsed them into one.

Write the economy down as a dynamical system.

We modelled resources, sinks, prices, and rewards as one coupled system, with player populations whose choices respond to what each mechanic pays. The model ran as millions of simulated player-days, calibrated against telemetry from the closed beta.

We measured richness directly—how many distinct strategies remain worth playing—and traced it to the loop driving it: player actions set resource abundance, abundance sets prices and rewards, and rewards decide which mechanics players choose next.

Balance by mechanism, not by patch.

Before launch, the design team could see which parameter changes would collapse the economy into a single strategy and which would keep it open. Tuning moved from reactive patches to a monitored band, with an early signal whenever live play drifted towards its edge.