We’ve recently made a few changes to the economy, and it felt like a good time to step back and explain our rationale. Our goal is to give a clear, high-level view of what’s been changing, why we’ve been doing it, and where we’re trying to take things.

Over the past month, we’ve been gradually shaping how the economy behaves in IdleMMO. One of the first steps was increasing the vendor price of membership scrolls, with more adjustments planned further down the line. That approach was very deliberate. We wanted to move carefully, make small changes, and see how things settled before pushing further.

More recently, we also increased the vendor value of items. You’ll probably notice this didn’t follow the same slow, incremental approach as the membership changes. That was intentional, and there’s a specific reason for handling it differently, which we’ll get into later in this post.

Before diving deeper, it’s worth taking a moment to explain what vendor pricing actually is and how it influences the game. This will be a fairly detailed, high-level breakdown of the current issues and how they connect, but we think it’s important to be open about it so everything makes sense from your side.

Item Vendor Value

The vendor value of an item is the single most important levers in the entire economy. It sits underneath a lot of the core systems that control how gold moves and how players assign value to items, even if it’s not always obvious on the surface.

Selling items to the vendor is one of the main ways gold is created. Outside of a few exceptions, most gold entering the game comes from this route. That means vendor values directly influence how much gold is being injected into the economy over time, and how quickly that pool of gold grows.

That same value is also used when calculating trade tax. Every player-to-player trade references the vendor value to determine how much gold is removed from the game. So the exact same number that controls gold coming in is also controlling how much goes out, which makes it one of the key tools for keeping the economy stable.

On top of that, vendor value sets the minimum price an item can be listed for on the market. This acts as a safety net to stop items being listed below what they’re worth to the game itself, but it also quietly anchors how players think about an item’s value. If that baseline is too low, it pulls market expectations down with it. If it’s higher, it gives items a stronger starting point. It also helps support healthier pricing across the board.

All three of these systems are tied to the same baseline, which means changes to vendor value don’t just affect one area. They ripple through gold generation, gold removal, and market behaviour all at once. That’s what makes it such a powerful lever, but also why it needs to be handled carefully.

The challenge is that many of these values were originally set before the market had really formed so they were really low. At that stage, there wasn’t enough data to understand what items should actually be worth in a live economy. Rare items in particular were difficult to evaluate, because their scarcity meant there wasn’t much trading activity to learn from.

Why This Is a Problem

Because vendor value has such a powerful, direct, and wide-reaching impact on the game and its economy, it introduces a number of challenges, some of which are more subtle than others.

Problem #1 - Trade Taxes

Because the amount of tax on a direct trade is directly tied to the vendor value of the item, it meant the true value of the trade wasn’t being taken into account when items were transferred between players. As a result, direct player trading became far more attractive for both buyers and sellers, especially when it came to rarer items, for two main reasons:

• The rare items often had a very low vendor value attached to it, so transferring it to another player would cost almost nothing.
• Membership scrolls became the de facto currency due to their constant demand, so it became the norm for players to trade items using memberships rather than gold, which meant no gold was being removed from the game.

This ends up being a much larger problem, as it shows up in several different areas that we’ll cover in the following sections. But purely in terms of gold being removed from the game, none was actually being taken out.

When we looked into how many membership scrolls were being traded through the system, over 5,000 were transferred in the 30 days before the vendor price change. That’s 5,000 instances where gold could have been removed from the game. At the time, there were only around 9,000 membership scrolls in circulation.

This is a significant issue. Not only does it mean gold isn’t being removed from the game, which is critical for controlling inflation, but it also suggests the same membership scrolls are likely being passed between multiple players with very little tax applied each time. In theory, a relatively small pool of scrolls could be reused repeatedly for high-value trades, without contributing much back to the game in terms of gold sinks.

By increasing the vendor value of membership scrolls, each transfer now carries a meaningful tax. This ensures that every time the item changes hands, a portion of gold is consistently removed from the game.

Problem #2 - Services

Services have been a long-standing issue in the game. They are a way for players to obtain end-game items without meeting the requirements tied to them, particularly forging level. On the surface, that sounds fine. Players helping players is generally a good thing. The issue is that it breaks the link between progression and access, which is a core part of how the economy is supposed to function.

The issue is more about what that does to progression and how easy it is to bypass it. Right now, the cost of transferring items is so low that the barrier between “I’ve earned this” and “I can access this” is very small. That makes it harder to tell how much of the economy is being driven by actual progression, and how much is being driven by players effectively skipping it.

From an economic perspective, this has a knock-on effect across the entire item ladder. If players can access high-end items early through services, they skip over the items they would normally need along the way. That removes demand from lower and mid-tier items, which then sit on the market with fewer buyers. At the same time, items are still being created and entering the game, but without the usual constraints that would slow that process down. That imbalance between supply and demand is where problems start to show up.

We’re not against services existing. The larger issue is that the system currently places very little weight on the progression that’s meant to gate them. By increasing the cost of moving items, we’re not trying to remove services, but to give that progression more meaning and reduce how easily it can be bypassed. That, in turn, gives us a clearer view of how players engage with forging when that shortcut carries a more noticeable cost.

A fair argument is that this doesn’t address a core issue, which is the skill itself being fairly poor. We agree with that. But even if forge is improved, this will still be a problem if players can continue to bypass it entirely without any cost or restriction. At that point, the skill loses its purpose altogether. Improvements to the forging system itself need to be addressed on a seperate occasion.

Problem #3 - Item Loaning

Item loaning builds on top of problem #2 by allowing a relatively small pool of items to be reused across a much larger number of players, often with very little cost involved.

The challenge here isn’t just that items are being shared, but that it also makes it harder to tell how much demand actually exists for those items. If the same set of gear is being passed around repeatedly, players who would normally need to buy or work toward their own equipment no longer have to. From the outside, that can look like low demand, but in reality, that demand may just be getting absorbed by reuse instead.

Over time, this can blur the signal the market gives us. Items may sit on the market with fewer buyers, while a smaller pool of high-end items continues circulating between players. It becomes difficult to separate whether items aren’t moving because they’re not valuable, or because they’re already being shared efficiently elsewhere.

By increasing the cost of transferring items, repeated movement becomes more difficult. Our goal isn’t to stop players from helping each other, but to reduce how easily items can be reused at scale. That helps ensure more decisions are being made around ownership rather than access. We want a better understanding of how items actually move through the economy before making any firm decisions, and it's hard to do that when item loaning is overly accessible.

Problem #4 - Stale Items

The issue with stale items is that they’re usually a sign something isn’t lining up properly between supply, demand, and what an item is actually worth. When items sit on the market for long periods without selling, it tends to mean one of two things. Either the price doesn’t match the effort it takes to get them, or players just don’t have much reason to buy them in the first place. Vendor value plays a big role here, because it acts as the baseline for an item’s worth. If that baseline is too low, it pulls everything else down with it, and even high-tier items can end up sitting at prices that don’t really reflect how rare or powerful they’re meant to be.

What that leads to is a growing number of items that technically exist in the economy, but aren’t really doing anything. You’ll see legendary items sitting at very low prices, not because they’re functionally useless, but because there’s just not enough demand to move them. Meanwhile, new items keep coming into the game through normal gameplay. When demand is already being weakened by things like item loaning, services, and low transfer costs, those items just pile up over time and gradually lose relevance.

From an economic point of view, this is basically item inflation. Just like gold needs sinks to keep its value, items need ways to be removed from the game or reasons for players to actually use them up. If that doesn’t happen, the total number of items keeps growing while their usefulness keeps dropping, which leads to a market that looks active on the surface but doesn’t actually move.

By increasing vendor values, we give items a stronger floor. There’s now a clear fallback value, which makes the decision to hold or sell more meaningful. It also means there’s a real trade-off to leaving items sitting there, because converting them into gold becomes a viable option. That helps get items moving again, reduces long-term buildup, and brings supply and demand back into a better balance.

Problem #5 - Cheaters

This is one that most players don’t really see, but it has a bigger impact than it might seem. A lot of cheating doesn’t come from automation. It comes from players running multiple accounts quietly in the background, moving items between them through chains of trades, and eventually funnelling everything back into a single main account. Because it looks like normal player behaviour on the surface, it’s much harder to spot and much easier to get away with.

This ties directly into how trade tax has been working. When the cost of transferring items is extremely low, it becomes trivial to move them across dozens or even hundreds of accounts without losing anything meaningful along the way. That allows players to scale this kind of behaviour far beyond what would normally be practical, because there’s no real downside to doing it.

By increasing the vendor value of key items, we increase the cost of moving them. Membership scrolls are the clearest example here, as they effectively became a stand-in currency and were heavily used in these setups. Now, every transfer carries a noticeable cost, which makes these chains much less efficient and much harder to justify at scale.

In most cases, these accounts still end up being banned and the items removed entirely, but any step that discourages this behaviour upfront is valuable. It reduces the need for ongoing investigation and lowers the overall impact these accounts have on the game.

Keeping Gold Meaningful

This naturally raises the question, why does tax matter at all? Or more broadly, why do gold sinks exist? From a player perspective, it’s not exactly exciting. No one likes the idea of gold being taken away, and that’s understandable.

The reality is that tax is the largest gold sink in the game because it sits across almost everything players do. Trades are taxed, market listings are taxed, and most forms of moving value from one player to another remove gold from circulation in some way. That steady removal is important because it keeps the overall value of gold from drifting over time.

If gold is entering the game faster than it’s being removed, it starts to lose its value. We’ve seen this happen before in SimpleMMO, where gold became so common that it stopped really influencing decisions. Prices creep up, progression becomes harder for newer players, and older players end up sitting on large amounts of gold that don’t feel particularly meaningful.

At the same time, inflation itself isn’t something that should be avoided completely. A healthy economy naturally grows and shifts. The challenge is managing that growth in a way that stays stable over time. In a live game, that’s especially difficult because player activity isn’t consistent. There are waves of new players joining, followed by quieter periods. That means gold can enter the game quickly during high activity, but demand doesn’t always keep up once things slow down.

This is where gold sinks come in. They give us a way to steadily remove gold regardless of how player activity changes. Instead of relying on player numbers to balance things out, the system can regulate itself over time. That consistency is what keeps gold feeling like a resource that matters, rather than just a number that keeps going up without consequence.

A Solution

The approach we’ve taken here is to increase the vendor value of items.

Vendor value sits at the centre of multiple systems at once. It controls how gold enters the game, how much is removed through tax, and where items sit on the market. Because of that, adjusting it allows us to influence several problem areas at the same time, rather than trying to solve each one in isolation.

By increasing item values, every trade now carries a meaningful cost. Gold is consistently removed from the game instead of being bypassed through low-value transfers or alternative currencies. At the same time, moving items between players becomes less frictionless, which reduces how effectively they can be loaned or reused across multiple accounts.

For example, before the changes, if someone picked up a recipe from a dungeon and both the recipe and the item were valued at 2,000 gold each, the total round-trip fee to trade it, get it forged, and have it sent back was only about ~400 gold (for members). That's barely anything for something that could be an extremely strong item.

Now compare that to the updated values. If the recipe sits at 900,000 gold and the item at 3,500,000, that same round-trip process ends up costing roughly ~440,000 gold. That’s a massive jump, and more importantly, it’s gold that really should be leaving the game at the point those items are being passed around in the first place.

Beyond this, the change to vendor values also gives items a stronger baseline. Instead of sitting on the market with little to no perceived value, they now have a clear fallback that reflects their role in the game. That creates pressure for items to either move or be converted into gold, which helps clear out long-standing listings and keeps the market active.

There are also some secondary benefits. Increasing transfer cost makes large-scale item movement, including behaviour tied to alt accounts, much less efficient. It doesn’t replace enforcement, but it adds friction in the right places and reduces how much impact that behaviour can have.

This isn’t a perfect solution, and it’s not intended to be. There’s no single change that fixes everything in a system this interconnected. What this does do is give us a strong, central adjustment point that influences multiple systems at once, while also giving us clearer data on how the economy responds.

Some of these changes may feel heavy, and that’s intentional. Smaller adjustments can not only get lost in the noise, but may actually make things worse. By making a more noticeable change, we can observe real behaviour, understand where things settle, and then refine from there.

Perception of Change

In our Balancing Approach post, we talked a lot about starting cautiously, which is how we handle most changes. That usually means things might feel a bit underwhelming at first, and then we gradually bring them into a better state through small, iterative adjustments over time. We believe that trade-off is worth it if it leads to a more stable game long term, even if it means missing out on that immediate “wow” factor.

However, that same post also touches on how the perception of change can have a much wider impact than expected. In an ideal world, we would take the same slow, incremental approach here by adjusting vendor prices over time. But there’s a strong argument that doing so could actually make things worse for two main reasons. First, it prolongs uncertainty. While fine in isolation, a slow rollout can stretch over months, which isn’t ideal for a system so closely tied to a player-driven market. Second, and more importantly, the perception of repeated increases can leave players feeling like they’re being short-changed, which can negatively affect their willingness to keep playing.

Take this situation: instead of making larger adjustments to vendor values, we roll them out in small increments. One day, item A might be worth 10,000 gold. The next, 15,000. And so on. If a player sells that item to the vendor for 15,000, and then the following day it jumps to 30,000, it can start to feel like the game is constantly short-changing them. That perception can end up outweighing any actual benefit from the change itself.

In other words, this is one of those cases where the context of the change matters more than the change itself. What we do is important, but how it’s perceived can have an even bigger impact.

We’ve increased item values quite generously because, arguably, it was the safest approach. Even with over two years’ worth of items sitting across player inventories, if every single legendary and mythic item were sold at the new vendor values, the total gold generated would still be overtaken by regular skill items, like ores, in around 10 to 20 days. And realistically, a scenario where every mythic and legendary item gets sold like that just isn’t going to happen.

Being Patient

We’ve emphasised many times that we take an aggressively pragmatic approach. Most of our decisions are driven by data, and because of that, it’s difficult to label something like this as an immediate success or failure given how it’s been rolled out. We’ve intentionally set vendor values higher as a calculated risk, knowing that even if those items were sold, the gold generated would still be a relatively small drop in the overall economy.

We’re actually in a pretty solid spot here, mainly because the game already has a lot of strong gold sinks in place. That takes a lot of pressure off, as it means there are already systems actively pulling gold out of the economy in a consistent way.

Because of that, the overall risk of these changes is fairly low. It gives us some breathing room to let things settle properly, watch how players interact with the new values, and make more informed decisions rather than rushing into further adjustments.

As things do begin to settle, we’ll have a much clearer picture of how things are actually behaving and where to go next. So it’s worth keeping in mind that while these changes are intentional, we don’t have all the answers upfront. The goal here is to create the conditions that allow those answers to emerge.

The Downsides

With the changes to vendor item values, there are some downsides that come with it. We identified two main issues that are important to address, as they have already resulted, or will result, in further changes. One of these is bartering experience. Because item values increased significantly, some items were able to grant up to 300k experience from a single turn-in, which started to incentivise players to discard mythic items purely for experience.

Admittedly, bartering itself was a mistake. If we could go back, it’s not something we would have added to the game. But at this point, it exists, and our approach is to keep it contained rather than letting it grow further in power.

The second issue, and the main one, is dungeons. With the increase in vendor value, dungeons have become much more rewarding, as it’s now possible to recover the full gold cost from a single drop. That creates a problem, because dungeons are also one of the largest gold sinks in the game. If they start becoming net positive, we’re not only weakening a major gold sink, but also introducing a new way to generate gold, which creates a compounding effect.

We’re aware of this, but again, it’s a calculated risk. We’re not making any immediate changes, as we want to give the market time to settle and properly review how things play out. Going back to the idea that context matters, increasing both dungeon costs and vendor values at the same time would likely feel worse from a player perspective than any benefit it might bring, especially if it’s based on a purely theoretical outcome, which isn’t how we tend to operate.

There’s also a lot of uncertainty here. It’s entirely possible that items obtained from dungeons end up holding more value on the market due to knock-on effects elsewhere. Vendor values tie into so many systems that it’s not realistic to predict every outcome ahead of time. This approach allows us to take the initial step, observe how the market responds, and then make more informed adjustments once things have stabilised.

Future Changes

Because our approach relies on letting the data come in, we can’t rule out further changes. This could include things like increasing dungeon entry costs, lowering the chance of item drops, or reducing the item values if that ends up being the simplest option.

At this stage, we just don’t know. Things need time to settle before we have a clearer picture of what’s actually happening. It’s also entirely possible that no further changes will be needed, but we need to wait before making that call.

Further reviews will also be made on other areas of the game, such as egg drops, alchemy items, and Dragon Soulstones, so consider this our heads-up.

We also recognise there’s an argument to be made that lowering item values or increasing dungeon entry costs could change how people perceive the game which loops back to the Perception of Change section, which is understandable.

The goal is to find the right balance with as little disruption as possible. If making a larger adjustment upfront and then fine-tuning from there leads to a better outcome, that’s the approach we’ll take. If it doesn’t, we’ll take that on board and use it to shape how we handle these changes going forward.

Preliminary Results

It’s far too early to draw any real conclusions, but the initial results have been fairly surprising. Even with the large increases, gold generated from vendors has barely moved the needle in the grand scheme of things. There was a spike when the change went live, but it still didn’t surpass figures we saw just a few days prior. This really highlights how much gold is being generated from other areas of the game. From a pure gold generation standpoint, increasing equipment values is still just a drop in the ocean, which is why it felt safer to push values up now and then review later if they need to be dialled back.

On top of that, tax from direct trades has doubled on some days and even tripled on others. It’s still too early to read too much into this, especially with the market going through a fairly turbulent period, but it has definitely been higher than we originally expected. That said, we’ll need more time before we can say anything with confidence.

Going Forward

Admittedly, where we fell short was in how we handled the change. The changes came as a surprise to many, and it led to situations where players had items on the market bought at vendor value when they could have received more elsewhere. We initially thought updating market listings to match the new vendor prices would be enough, but it wasn’t.

Going forward, we’ll be more mindful about communicating these kinds of changes in advance. On top of that, for any future price increases, we’ll remove affected listings from the market entirely rather than adjusting them in place, which avoids this issue altogether.

(On that note, consider this an early heads-up that further changes may be coming over the next few weeks.)

Conclusion

These changes have been on our radar for a while, but we only really acted on them after recently taking a deeper look into how these items behave and the overall impact they’re having on the market and the game as a whole.

The market over the next few weeks may feel a bit turbulent as things adjust, especially with the possibility of further changes. These updates are designed to let data emerge so we can make more informed decisions about where values should sit, and then continue refining things from there. We’re not just winging it. The approach is cautious in the sense that it’s driven by data. By increasing vendor values with relatively low risk, given that gold from this source is still a small part of the overall economy and the only clear concern so far is dungeons, we can observe how the game and market respond once everything settles.

Hopefully, once things stabilise, we can put this behind us and start looking ahead to features like Village Management and Farming!