Combatting Economic Inflation in a Long Running Game

When I joined the Dragons of Atlantis team the game’s economy had been warped by intense inflation. A lack of challenging PvE content meant that players rarely lost troops in their normal daily actions. On top of that, previous team leads’ point-blank refusal to fix a duplication bug on the premium Spectral Ruins outpost had meant that players with access to that location were able to resurrect some of their troops twice when they’d only died once. As you can imagine, this led to many players having far too many troops at their disposal, often numbering in the millions. This made designing new content difficult and seriously threatened the game’s future prospects. Two things needed to happen:

• Troop duplication needed to end

• Existing player troop count needed to decrease

Ending Troop Duplication: The Spectral Ruins Outpost Rebalance

The Spectral Ruins outpost was an older piece of premium content that allowed players to resurrect a portion of their troops lost in combat. However, at some point it had become possible for players to resurrect more troops than they lost under certain combat conditions. This duplication bug had gone unfixed for so long that it was common knowledge among the players and an accepted practice. Previous team leads had feared that if they reduced the perceived efficacy of a piece of content that many players had spent real money on, they’d cause a player revolt. So, the previous leads had simply turned a blind eye to the bug, despite its obvious consequences.

With the arrival of a new team lead, I took the opportunity to make a presentation on the depth of the problem, the issues it was causing, and how it was negatively effecting our ability to generate player excitement about new content. Why would anyone want to buy new content, when the old content would always be vastly superior due to the fact that it simply broke the game’s rules?

Our new lead understood the issue and let me move forward with a solution. With my previous experience as a community manager, I knew that fixing this bug would be perceived by our already touchy player base as an unfair ‘nerf’. So I personally crafted:

• A rework to the Spectral Ruins outpost that fixed the bug but maintained the original intended functionality.

• All the player messaging explaining the fix and why it was being made. This messaging focused on a spirit of transparency and fairness.

  • “None of the troops are supposed to have two souls. The world of Atlantis is magical, but it’s not that magical.”

• A small player gift to be distributed to every player to apologize for the inconvenience, even if they’d never had access to the Spectral Ruins outpost.

  • If you’re going to take something from the players, you should give them something as well. It’s important to maintain goodwill.

• A plan to roll back the change, if this update caused a true disaster.

The initial player reaction to this update was predictably hostile, as it goes with all rebalances. With my lead’s permission I put aside standing company communications policy and personally took to the forums and social media channels openly as the designer to answer player questions. I made sure that our fans understood why this was a necessary fix and not a scam or cash grab on our part. After a few weeks the rancor died down, and eventually it was accepted as a necessary improvement to the game’s competitive environment. There’s no skill in duplicating troops.

Lowering Player Troop Count: Rise of The Crimson Citadels

Now that players were no longer creating millions of troops out of thin air, we needed a way to reduce their massive existing stockpiles. Using admin tools to claw back previously duplicated troops was absolutely not an option. It would have felt like an arbitrary punishment and completely destroyed player goodwill. We needed three things:

• Players engaging in massive battles, with massive amounts of casualties

• These battles had to be regular occurrences, not one-offs or driven by live events

• A way to unite the community, healing any leftover bitterness from the rebalance

PvP battles in the game were large, but irregular occurrences, more driven by personal feuds than anything. The players could attack PvE tiles on the world map, but the number of NPC enemies on those tiles hadn’t kept up with years of inflation. As a result, their challenge was trivial to most veteran players. However, we couldn’t just 10x the number of enemies on those PvE tiles, because that would make them inaccessible to any new players.

The world of Dragons of Atlantis was a persistent tiled map, with the layout of tiles being limited and fixed, identical on every server instance. Changing the maps was very difficult, as it would mean displacing something else, it could even risk disrupting players who were already occupying those tiles on some servers. However, every map had several reserved tiles that were inaccessible to players, as they had been used to conduct bug tests in the game’s earlier years. Since those tiles no longer served a purpose, I got permission from the team to convert these old tiles into my newly designed Crimson Citadel tiles.

Crimson Citadels were extremely powerful PvE tiles that couldn’t be defeated by one player alone. Instead, groups of players needed to work in concert to launch waves of troops to wear them down and loot the unique rewards within. This dynamic encouraged player cooperation, increased the importance of player clans, and acted as a ‘troop sink’, where massive amount of casualties lowered the player stockpiles over time with regular gameplay instead of a singular event. Since Crimson Citadels were targeted at veteran players, we also had the ability to freely tinker with both the troop compositions and the rewards of the Crimson Citadels. This let us keep the challenge fresh and engaging without alienating newer players.

Players responded exceedingly well to the Crimson Citadels. They liked having a place to challenge themselves, ways to engage in cooperation in a normally competitively focused game, and having something that they could engage with at their own pace. After all, the Crimson Citadels would never act offensively, so players didn’t have to attack them if they didn’t want any of the unique rewards within.

By making the act of normalizing the game’s economy a fun activity that players wanted to participate in, we were able to keep Dragons of Atlantis going.