Economy Integrity

I wanted to speak to you all about how important the integrity of the economy is to you, in the games you play.

To me, it's the absolute core of an MMORPG. I remember thinking Fallout 76 could be fun, thinking about finding those rare items, trading them online to others, having a feeling of accomplishment when you saved up enough money to eventually buy a top tier weapon and destroy anything in your path.

Then it was clear the Bethesda fallout developers didn't have a clue and just poorly hooked multiplayer into it with very little server-side validation, leaving it riddled with dupes and glitches they didn't try to fix in a timely matter. I think the first week there was a glitch that allowed you to basically spend 2 hours abusing this bug and took you to level 100+ along with 50k+ grenades. EMERGENCY right? someone should have woke up in the middle of the night, shut down the game, patched, either rolled back or properly removed those items.

But nah, they took a week to fix it and didn't roll back or clean up anything. same deal with the dupes, what an absolute joke, everyone running around with duped best weapons in the game and Bethesda not giving a damn. this turned the game into a single player game to me, you know the ones where you hook up your trainer and spawn anything you want. The worst part is that majority of players didn't even care about this, it was clear they were mainly single player people who weren't used to the value of a global multiplayer economy with strong integrity.

This example is just Fallout 76. There are a lot of MMORPGs over the years that had dupes, and whilst they were quite quick to fix these, they send a generic message saying 'we will ban everyone with duped items and will be fixing everything and removing everyone's stuff' but in reality no rollbacks happen, maybe a few get banned but the damage gets done and does not get cleaned up nearly enough.

If a game had a dupe/glitch that can heavily impact the economy, I personally believe if the devs catch this within a day or 2, there should be a full rollback, with some sort of bonus to XP rates/items etc for a couple of days.

Another issue I have is when you have developers making a multiplayer game with a global economy and just not putting enough effort into testing/programming areas with item handling. The last thing you want to see is a dupe shortly after your game. however a dupe isn't the end of the world with a rollback, but it certainly goes a long way to fuck things up if you fix it and act like everything will be fine, when really you just sweep it under the rug.

I heard Wild Terra 2 that just launched has already been hacked and duped like crazy due to having basically no anti cheat anywhere on it, and using off the shelf multiplayer systems like uMMORPG.

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tl;dr multiplayer games these days aren't doing enough to ensure their economy has good integrity.