Just about the economy, the main thing that runs an economy is character progression, almost the only thing. Consumables, materials to make gear, or to make something you need to get more progression, or to do something that’ll somehow reward you progress e.g. gypsum to get "expertise, and a green item, which makes me laugh at the devs every single time I turn in gypsum for 3 shards and like 2 gold from dismantle.
Anyway, the way that a game splits up the end game “power” of different avenues of progression by the way, for example, that it creates and chooses perk pools on different levels of gear, on a scale of weak to powerful, with niche items being balanced in there, makes the game well-rounded and fair or stupid and frustrating.
New World did well on the item distribution and I believe if crafting DID NOT exist in the game, that the rewards for PvE content (PvP just has faction gear and it’s trash compared to what you can buy for like 900g at this point from TP) are fairly balanced and quite fun, but still too grinding, which speaks directly at how they split up their loot tables, and their loot tables are the main thing causing level 60s to quit.
The contents of the perks and stat systems that they created are both weak and poorly distributed. The way this destroys the already unpolished “economy” is through CRAFTING. In NW, you can craft an optimal item (incomparable, except for PvP musket/bow). This means that through crafting, you can obtain an item that 10000000 hours of PvP or PvE or gathering cannot match. I don’t mind this concept at all.
However, the “economy” of the game, meaning the entire input-to-progression formula, is so bad, that it leaves the end-game player with nothing to do for progression, except for run dungeons for the optimal items they haven’t yet found. How stupid and dead is this game? Well, the devs decided to make a mutation system that doesn’t even reward players for INSANE amounts of work to get to 625 GS, even on a single set of items.
They literally tell you that the reward for your grinding is the permission to grind more. By upgrading your item’s gear-score, you somehow take less damage when the boss slaps you? Ok cool, I’ll get optimal gear-sets every week, and do the hardest difficulties to upgrade more. Except, why would I do that, if it gives me virtually nothing back at the end of the day? Let’s say I got a full set of PvP gear to 625…what now? OPR with 39 VG players?
Back to the point, by fucking up the most complex part of the game, the “distribution of wealth and power”, players are left crafting expensive gear to progress, which is like a 90% loss with the current state of the economy (because of terrible charting and bad perk-design, it was always a massive loss to roll items), with no real way to make money, because there is virtually nothing in dungeons that sells, see the price of timeless shards dropping like 85% over the span of 1 week. Everyone is stagnant, because the market is ruined, and there’s nothing to do.
It’s not a fed up “fuck this game, I’m leaving” in most cases. Most of us played since launch, and that was a while ago. There’s just nothing to do, and when the PTR notes come out, unless there is a LOT more in there than there historically has been, the attraction gets weaker and weaker, until it gets replaced with something else.
This should be obvious. If you know anything about MMOs, they succeed when they have people consistently playing. The problem is, people consistently playing this game doesn’t profit anyone. All signs lead to Amazon throwing the game out there to make some money off of a dead-end game, in their eyes. They charged a lot of people for this game, and definitely succeeded with the price and the ease of using Amazon/Steam to buy and play the game. The game is just too empty to have me believe that they EVER believed in it to be a top MMO, let alone currently. The cosmetic shop is just sad, and they’ll be 6 months in after their “bug month” with an ever dwindling peak-base.
This leads me to believe there are two scenarios. First one is they keep a keen eye on the player numbers and release just enough content to keep from losing their whole base, while keeping decent content in a folder (with the added zones that have already been designed) and releasing it with an expansion, to level 70. Second, they know that a shitton of players have accounts, and start pumping in money and ideas, while adding in some actually nice cosmetic/whatever shop stuff so they can actually make money (even charging monthly to play), knowing that they did a stellar job of marketing getting us to buy their unfinished game at launch. I think the first one’s most likely.