I didn’t mention that the wealth is per individual but rather per account. Multiple accounts can belong to single individuals. By “average joe”, this does not define the average user but the average wealth spread across the server vis-a-vis the population. If you have a better idea of how to start a more defined metric, then by all means, let me know.

Age of the server and “churn” defines the demand for certain items. Items do not always move around and sometimes also stagnate or get replaced by other things. Sometimes the acquisition of such no longer justifies the cost in a stagnant economy.

World Powers announce and change their interest rates to maintain a healthy economy and money trading. An online gaming company with a virtual world could theoretically do the same.

How? Maybe change the valuation of item mall currency versus real money. But that’s a double edged sword - you can’t make “currency” more expensive because people will hoard real money or save it for a rainy day and making things cheaper encourages inflation of other in-game items. Also, it detrimentally affects your targets.

“Screwing with the drop rate” is another solution. It will sometimes encourage hoarding but overall things become more accessible and certain “obsolete” items become once more acceptable alternatives (because of VFM) spreading out game activity rather than concentrating it. It can also attract newbies because decent items become cheaper for someone starting out from scratch.

“the average wealth spread across the server vis-a-vis the population” is where I find a problem in properly monitoring a game economy. Here are the steps as I understand it:

1. Determine an “average” wealth per unit (account, characters, etc.) - This is a crucial one. Do you really determine a sort of a “middle class” population? What’s the metric for this?

2. Next you multiply that average wealth to the number of units to come up with the “correct” in-game economy. Depending on your threshold, you determine whether the drift from the middle is acceptable or not, and adjust accordingly. How do you adjust? You can tweak the drop rates, so that premiums lose a bit of their value, and commons become a bit more rare. Or you do one-time in-game events to redistribute wealth, sort of.

In the F2P setup, that’s where I find some problems. For example, if there is a tendency for players to create dummy accounts, you inflate the number of “players”, you inflatae the total economy, and the inflation may go unnoticed and you continue to manage the game as if this situation isn’t happening. In a mature economy with lots of high-level players, the middle class should have a higher income than a new economy, owing to the more expensive requirements of their quests and upgrades.

Here are some thoughts I have in terms of metrics and better economy monitoring:

1. Make NPC prices non-fixed, even making items for sale non-infinite. Ever thought of having NPCs create even your armors from hunted items?

2. Metric of wealth should consider the level of characters in-game, as well as their activities, rather than just the number. Dummy accounts which are usually low levels shouldn’t distort the metric.

3. Reduce the ability to convert real-money mall items to in-game currency, by making some mall items untradeable.

I am a newbie in all of these. I hope I am making sense