Supply & Consumption
Last updated
Last updated
The economy is designed to curb over-supply of assets and deter farming through diminishing yields based on global and individual player activity and volume. The following measures are taken to prevent unsustainable power and item inflation:
Difficulty Curve
As is common to almost all game economies, the best items are only attainable in zones with the hardest to defeat enemies. The ability of lower power players to attain these items is therefore restricted by combat failure.
Diminishing Global Drop Rate Relative to Supply
The drop rate of any high quality server item for all players globally is reduced relative to the current supply of that item. This ensures that as the player base grows, the relative ratio/rarity of items to players is preserved.
Increasing $RIFT cost Relative to Supply
The cost of minting any item as an NFT increases in terms of $RIFT as the current circulating supply of that item increases, creating downward supply pressure towards an equilibrium.
Diminishing Individual Drop Rate Relative to Play Intensity
The drop rate for all items will reduce for an individual depending on the amount of time they have spent in a specific dungeon over the last 24 hours.
Global Cooldowns
The very highest quality items will be subject to global cooldowns either during the crafting process or subject to the appearance of certain temporary mini-bosses.
Diminishing Combat Effectiveness
Time-sickness reduces the combat effectiveness of a player the longer they spend in dungeons. Recovering from time sickness occurs at a slow fixed rate when players leave dungeons. Holding (staking) a fixed amount of the game-currency, or playing with a Generation 1 or 2 character, provides immunity against time-sickness.
We have carefully designed 'consumer and producer' pairings in our economy, such that for every supply of an item there is a consumption process that can be tuned to be more or less aggressive based on real-world economic conditions.
Upgrading / Crafting
The game routinely burns consumables during the crafting process such as weapons, armour, enchants and crafting ingredients
Deconstructing
Certain game items can be burnt to produce their primary ingredients, at a loss. For example if three rare NFTs contributed to making an epic NFT, that epic NFT could be burnt to produce a rare NFT and an uncommon NFT ingredient. Destructible NFTs of this nature include weapons and armour.
Consumed in Combat
Rare potions may take the form of NFTs and be uncorked prior to combat, at which point the NFT is destroyed and a soulbound potion is created that can be consumed instantly during combat.
Fusing NFTs
Character and pet NFTs can be fused (destroyed) in threes to create a single new NFT of superior cosmetic value and small combat ability increase. Certain combinations of NFT traits will be required to fuse NFTs of the same season, resulting over time in a deflating supply of NFTs of each season. Character level for non-fused NFTs will also be capped at the fusion level (e.g. level 15), providing greater incentive to fuse characters in order to unlock level progression.
Settlement Development
Building and upgrading structures in the settlement will consume crafting ingredients.
A small number of ‘gatekeeper’ or core resources are consistently used across the crafting of all NFTs (in addition to other resources). This produces positive supply-balancing and market-making effects.
Gatekeeping / Supply Balancing
By ensuring that all NFTs creation requires at minimum a one of a small pool of core resources it is easier for game economists to tune the inflation of NFTs in the game economy as a whole. By reducing the drop rate of these core resources, the production of NFTs as a whole across the game can be reduced.
Challenges to NFT Market-Making
Most blockchain-enabled games introduce a currency token, in addition to NFT tokens, partly because it is easier to find a buyer for a generic currency than a specific esoteric item (one reason why we moved away from barter economies).
For example, the secondary market for an epic bow NFT consists of players that have a hunter class over or near a certain minimum level (perhaps only 5%-10% of the player base), in addition to outside speculators. In contrast, a currency that is used by all classes at all levels has a maximum addressable market of 100% of the player base. However, a currency is not the only way to maximise the addressable market for each NFT.
Increasing Addressable Market of NFTs with Core Resources
Two approaches are employed to increase the range of players who would have immediate utility for any NFT on the market: All NFTs can be deconstructed into their original ingredient NFTs (with some loss), which includes a handful of core resources that are used in crafting items relevant to all classes. The core resource loss on deconstructing an NFT is minimal. Weapon and armour types have been designed so as to be usable by multiple classes - particularly armour of which there are just three broad categories. This ensures the maximum addressable market of players for any piece of armour is at least 33% of the player base.
