The Economic System Is on the Brink of Collapse

I have clocked 383.3 hours playing this game. As I kept diving into the beta version, I could tell that the development team intended to design such a gameplay loop: explore the map to gather resources → craft weapons and apply enchantments → lack resources for further crafting → explore the map again to gather resources. On the surface, this loop seems perfectly sound, yet it overlooks several critical flaws.

The first issue is the role of in-game currency. Money serves clear and vital purposes in the early and mid-game stages—buying houses, equipment, enchantments, repairs, and so on. However, as players progress to the late game, they accumulate massive amounts of currency by selling unwanted gear. When they head to merchants to spend this money, they find that only a handful of items are available for purchase each day. Worse still, they won’t buy anything if the offered items don’t meet their needs. At this point, the game’s economic system starts to collapse. The merchant refresh mechanic—limited to once per day—and the scarcity of available goods leave players stuck with piles of money but no way to buy the items they want, resulting in a complete mismatch between supplies and wealth.

Therefore, I have the following suggestions:

  1. Add a “restock” mechanic. Allow players to spend currency to refresh merchant items within a set time frame—preferably within 10 minutes—and impose a reasonable daily limit on the number of restocks.

  2. Give blacksmiths a “deconstruct” function. Let players pay a fee to break down all unwanted pieces of equipment and get a proportional amount of the original crafting materials in return. Due to the limited number of maps, animal-sourced materials are extremely scarce, so a deconstruct function would effectively ease the pressure on players when crafting new gear.

  3. Increase the purchase limit per item for general merchants. Does it really make sense that players can only buy one piece of meat or one piece of wood at a time?

2 Likes

How would this mechanic affect Co-op?

+1 for these.

My suggestions:

  • restock costs an increasing amount of gold (Hellclock does this very well), which could reset after 5-10 minutes
  • Vendor should sell multiple of the same resource. While I’d personally like an infinite amount (like D2 health pots), I think having 5-10 at a time (depending on rarity) would fit well in Wicked. These should also be restocked when the restock fee is paid
  • Deconstruct/salvage should indeed be a thing. After a while you have enough currency but not enough materials, it’s make sense to have more agency over this balance.

I think coop wouldn’t make a big difference to the above: right now the merchant inventory is already shared, I think that can continue even with the above adjustments.

This would make the a lot more enjoyable, as it lets us choose between “pay with time or pay with currency”. Right now, 99% of the time we can only pay with our time