Reward inflation across a live game's whole lifetime

There is a ratchet built into live operations that almost nobody sets deliberately. Each new event needs to feel worth a player's time. The most reliable way to make it feel worth their time is to pay a little better than the last one. Do that fifty times and the game's reward rates have moved somewhere nobody chose.

The mechanism is not carelessness. It is that every individual decision to pay slightly more is correct in isolation.

Why the ratchet only turns one way

Rewards are a comparison. Players evaluate a new event against the last one they did, not against a fixed standard. An event paying the same as its predecessor reads as flat. An event paying less reads as a downgrade and gets treated as one publicly.

That asymmetry is the whole mechanism. Increasing rewards is invisible and well received. Holding them steady is neutral at best. Reducing them is a visible negative event that generates community response.

So the path of least resistance is always up. Not by much — a few percent here, a slightly better top prize there, an extra tier on the pass. Each increment is small enough that nobody calls it a change to the economy, because at the scale of one event it is not.

Two years of small increments is a different game. The rewards from a mid-tier event now exceed what a major event paid at launch, and the prices in the shop have generally not moved to match, because prices are more visible and raising them is a much harder conversation.

What it does to the game

The first effect is that older content becomes irrelevant. Content designed around launch-era earn rates is trivially cheap for a player earning at current rates. That is not always bad — some of it is intentional catch-up — but it happens without anyone deciding which parts should be trivialised.

The second is that the game's progression compresses. A new player arriving today earns at current rates, which means they move through content designed for slower earning much faster than intended. They reach the point where the game runs out of content sooner, and the pacing everyone playtested no longer describes anyone's experience.

The third is on purchases. If earning outpaces prices for long enough, the things worth buying become obtainable through play in a reasonable time. Purchases then stop being about access and start being only about speed, which is a much narrower proposition and converts to a much smaller group.

None of these arrives as an event. They arrive as a slow change in what the numbers mean, which is why the diagnosis usually happens a year late and gets attributed to something that happened recently.

Measuring the drift

The measurement that catches this is straightforward and almost never in place: what a typical engaged player earns per week, tracked as a series over the game's life.

That single number, plotted over two years, shows the ratchet plainly. It also shows something more useful — whether prices moved with it. If weekly earnings have doubled and the cost of the things worth buying has not, the economy has loosened by half regardless of what any individual change looked like.

The second measurement is the ratio between what a new event pays and what the previous comparable event paid. Tracked per event, this makes each increment visible as part of a series rather than as an isolated decision. A team that can see "this is the eleventh consecutive event that paid more than its predecessor" makes a different decision than one looking at a single event in isolation.

Neither of these requires new instrumentation if currency changes are being recorded with their cause, which is the base layer most economy questions rest on.

See how we track earn rates over a game's life →

Unwinding it without a takeaway

Once the drift has happened, the obvious fix — reduce rewards — is the one that generates the visible negative event the ratchet exists to avoid. There are gentler routes.

The first is to hold rates flat and let new content absorb the surplus. Adding things worth buying at prices set against current earn rates restores the relationship without touching what players receive. This is slower and considerably better received, and it has the advantage of giving high-balance players something to do.

The second is to shift reward composition rather than reward size. Paying the same total value but weighted toward items rather than general currency reduces the flexibility of what players earn without reducing the amount. Items are consumed where they are; currency accumulates and suppresses purchasing.

The third is to make the increment explicit as a one-off rather than a new baseline. An event described as an anniversary or a special occasion can pay more without setting the comparison point for the next one, because players understand it as exceptional. The ratchet turns on the implicit comparison, and naming an event as unusual breaks it.

What none of these do is fix the underlying pressure. That requires someone tracking the series and being willing to say that the eleventh consecutive increase is a decision about the economy rather than a decision about one event.

Talk to us about long-run economy health →