Dev Log 07 — Inside the Economy Sim
Before a single real token moves, our economy has already lived ten thousand seasons. This log covers how — and what broke along the way.
Why simulate?
Every failed play-to-earn game died the same way: emissions designed for the players devs imagined, exploited by the players who actually showed up. Bot rings, multi-account farms, whale extraction, mercenary churn. We decided the economy had to survive those players before launch, not after.
The setup
The sim runs the full emission and sink model — seasonal caps, skill-weighted payouts, daily limits, crafting burns, marketplace fees — against agent populations drawn from the ugliest distributions we could justify: 5% bot operators, whales holding 40% of liquid supply, churn spikes after payout nerfs, coordinated win-trading cells.
What broke (and what we changed)
- Flat per-kill payouts collapsed instantly to kill-trading bots. That's why payouts are MMR-normalised — farming low lobbies pays marginally.
- Uncapped daily earnings let one botted account drain a meaningful slice of a season. Hence the per-account daily cap, enforced twice: server-side and in the emissions contract itself.
- Rollover emissions (unspent season budget carrying forward) created a "quiet season, then dump" attack. Now unspent budget sweeps to treasury, never forward.
The number that matters
In the final tuning, sink volume overtakes emission volume when concurrent players cross a threshold we can reach with a mid-size beta population — meaning the economy tightens as the game grows, instead of inflating. The methodology publishes alongside the audit.