What I learned from Game Economies Part 2 - Boredom, Money, and Inflation

I used to play runescape quite a bit. Inflation was just a fact of life in that game, whether it be by bots or just regular players. People only ever really needed one of each weapon, set of armour, tool, etc, but they kept being dropped by enemies. Eventually everyone with a high enough level would have these items and the game would be boring. Nothing left to achieve for anyone and no sense of satisfaction for achieving it because it is just essential and not a bonus. This wasn't the main problem though, the main problem was for lower or mid level players. When high level players don't have any use for low level items and a small group of people use an even smaller amount of them, they become useless to make. When they are useless to make lower and mid level users can't really even profit off of making them and it restricts almost all progress in that area to those who already have thousands of hours in the game.

They did realize their mistakes though, and eventually added a skill called invention. This allows people to turn things like unused bows into untradable parts that you can make upgrade kits for your items with. This helped with a lot of lower level items, but didn’t do all too much to higher level items (besides push the power creep forward as usual). The amount of high level items wasn’t as big of a problem as the low level items, so they achieved their goals nicely.

Durability is a pain to keep track of (luckily it isn’t too common in rs), and items being destroyed in random events isn’t very fair either (I lost too many pickaxe heads smh, although this doesn’t really exist much in rs either). In games like CS;GO items are tied to a real world value. In runescape you lose a bit of game money, but at least you had fun. In CS;GO you lose real money, and the same situation is repeated in card games too. When people buy card packs for that chance of that rare and expensive card it will almost always push the value of the other cards in the pack down over time. This is why a game system where the core items of a game are used up permanently while playing the game is more appropriate on a blockchain, where games are both an investment and a form of entertainment.