Hi, I'm Chris Wilson. I was going to  start the video by joking "if you're  

an average viewer of mine, you're  probably running an online RPG and  

have questions about how to maintain the  integrity of its economy", but honestly,  

looking at the emails I get, I'm beginning  to suspect this might actually be true.

Don't you hate it when  you're playing an online RPG,  

trying your hardest to level up and  find good items, but it feels like  

all the other players are miles ahead of  you because they're not playing fairly?

In this video, I'm going to talk about economic  integrity. Put simply, this is the ability for  

players to fairly earn progress and items through  in-game actions, on a level playing field, without  

outside influence or cheating. Basically, that the  game doesn't let people unfairly get ahead of you.

I'll discuss why it's important for developers  of online RPGs to prioritise economic integrity,  

what policies they should consider,  how they should deal with cheating,  

real money trading, and even their  own customer support departments.

As some of you may know, I was one of  the original creators of Path of Exile,  

and ran it until late 2023. From  the very first day of development,  

we prioritised the economic integrity of its  online realm. We wanted to make sure that  

progression and items were meaningful. Players  needed to know that other people couldn't just  

cheat their way to the top. I think we did  a good job with this overall, and learnt  

a lot along the way. As more and more games  launch with secure online servers these days,  

I felt it was important to make a video about what  I've learned over my career. The suggestions in  

this video are my personal opinions after a couple  of decades of thinking about this every day.

When some people hear you talking about  competitive games, they assume you mean games  

like Overwatch or League of Legends, but online  RPGs can also be highly competitive, just in a  

different way. In these games, the economy is the  competitive part. Players compete to make faster  

progress, get to higher levels, find better items  and complete harder content before everyone else.

Each Path of Exile league launch is highly  competitive. A lot of players schedule  

considerable time off work and stay up overnight  to play as much as they can while the economy is  

fresh. Players come out of the woodwork, bringing  their friends, whenever a new league starts. The  

seasonal ladder reset model pioneered by  Blizzard North after the launch of Lord of  

Destruction is an absolutely critical part of the  way that many modern Action RPGs retain players,  

but it hinges on players feeling that the  economy they're playing in has integrity.  

These players are trading a lot of time and  effort to get the feeling that they're making  

real progress that matters, and finding real  items that have value. If something happens to  

the integrity of the economy that causes them to  doubt this, then they quickly stop playing. This  

is why it is so catastrophic when a game launches  and then there's some bad exploit soon after  

launch, wrecking the economy and everyone's  interest in continuing to play that season.

As a developer, if you're paying the significant  cost of server-authoritative multiplayer for your  

game, it’s worth finishing the job: protect  the economy those servers exist to validate.

Online RPGs are also an escape from societal class  issues. Players expect a level playing field where  

wealth doesn't matter. Playing an online RPG  lets you outplay and outsmart the other players  

to become more successful than them regardless of  their real world wealth. And the economy needs to  

have integrity for you to feel this way. You don't  want to be playing a game where some millionaire  

can buy his way in and get better items than  you just because he's rich in real life. 

Now sure, if the game doesn't have an  online mode and is just single player,  

there is no server-validated competitive  economy and hence no integrity considerations  

are needed. But people in single player  games can just arbitrarily cheat as all  

the data is local. Many players want  to play on secure multiplayer servers  

because it validates that progress is real. Some games have a Solo Self-found mode,  

where players are unable to party with or trade  with each other. In this mode, their progression  

is still validated serverside so they have  bragging rights about what they have achieved,  

but there's no way for them to trade with a  greater economy so they aren't affected by  

many integrity issues. While that's exactly what  some players are looking for, an overwhelming  

majority of other players like to play together  and trade. If you limit or remove trade from your  

game to sidestep economic integrity issues,  you certainly miss out on a lot of potential.

In this video, I'll be primarily talking  about economic integrity for games with  

trade, but many of the issues still  apply to online RPGs without trade.

The first step is treating your game’s  economy with respect inside your studio.

For example, let's say that a celebrity  approaches you and wants to do a promotion  

for your game. They're going to play it  on stream alongside your lead developer  

and it'll get a lot of attention. The  problem is, they're famous and busy and  

aren't going to play through the game to  get a character ready. They want you to  

pre-create a high level character for them to  play. This could be really good for marketing,  

but it could also completely undermine your  community's trust in the game economy if you're  

just going around making characters and items for  people. In a situation like this, you should play  

with them on a test server and to communicate to  the players that it's on a test server and not  

the live servers. I know it seems like it's just  one character and won't impact the larger economy,  

but it's about optics. If you are willing to break  the seal and start interfering with what's on the  

live servers, players will worry that's going on  to a much larger extent they don't know about.

In a similar way, you should be very careful  with who gets new information that isn't  

publicly disclosed in the patch notes.  For example, if you add a secret recipe  

that players are meant to go looking for,  and your development team knows about it,  

what's to stop them using it on the live servers  to get a large economic advantage themselves?  

You need to make sure there are policies  and rules in place that make them very  

aware which information can't be used  on the live servers until it's public.

The same applies to your alpha testers.  They may learn secret information that  

gives them an economic advantage on your live  servers. Make sure they not only understand  

what they're not allowed to do, but are given  an opportunity to skip testing a particular  

patch entirely if they want to be eligible  for things like winning prizes in events.

Economic integrity is about making sure  that players have equal opportunities  

to earn progression and items in your game.  You enforce this fairness with a combination  

of policies that you post and decisions that you  make in the cases where the policies don't cover  

a situation. When you have to make a decision,  be consistent and communicate your reasoning. If  

you make a decision for the sake of fairness  and players don't understand what happened,  

they may perceive it as unfair, which undermines  the entire point. If you explain the pros and  

cons of different approaches and why you  picked the one you did, then players will  

hopefully respect your transparency and that you  were trying to find the best overall solution.

Players remember precedents. If there's  compensation for an outage or a problem,  

then they will expect a similar outcome the next  time it happens. If you are giving compensation,  

you should do it in the form of something that  doesn't affect the progression economy, like  

credit for in-game cosmetics. I strongly recommend  not compensating players with actual game  

progression or game items, as while you may make  those players happy, everyone else will see this  

as interfering with the game's economic integrity. The next topic I want to talk about is players  

getting unfair economic advantage by just  outright cheating. This can come in many forms,  

from exploiting bugs in game logic to running  third party programs that reveal information  

they don't normally see, to running bots  that play for them while they're not there. 

Ideally you've constructed your game so that no  form of cheating is possible, but this is quite  

hard in practise. Online RPGs are typically run  as live services with new features and code going  

live frequently. These are often developed  under tight deadlines and may contain subtle  

logic mistakes if they haven't been fully tested.  I have previously posted a video on game protocol  

exploitation that is worth checking out for more  information. In addition, the architecture of the  

games themselves may make it necessary for the  game client to know certain information that  

you'd really rather the player didn't see, like  the entire map for the current area for example,  

so that's sitting in memory ripe for nefarious  programs to read it out and display it. Finally,  

stopping botting is fundamentally extremely hard  due to the nature of the bots being that they  

pretend to be real players. So as good as your  intentions are, you will likely need to have plans  

and policies about how to deal with cheaters. You should work out a legal definition of cheating  

for your terms of service, and a plain English  one for your community guidelines. Note that  

bad actors will do their best to "technically  not cheat", so make sure to specify that the  

guidelines will be updated over time and that  it's all at the developer's discretion anyway.  

There's often a fine line between efficient play  and cheating. Make sure to clearly define where  

the line is between a bannable exploit and just  regular smart play, especially for games that  

encourage players to think outside of the box. In terms of punishments for cheating,  

I recommend a zero-tolerance policy, with  permanent bans for intentionally exploiting  

or cheating. It may sound harsh to permanently  ban customers, but non-cheating players will  

greatly appreciate this as a signal that you  are putting the integrity of the game first.  

There's a study on anti-cheat enforcement  which is linked in the video's description,  

that shows that non-cheating players engage with  a game much more if they see that cheating players  

are being punished. This sounds like common  sense of course, but it's good to see it backed  

up scientifically. On a side note, if you're  operating in certain regions like Taiwan, get  

legal advice before permanently banning players. If you ban someone for gaining economic advantage  

through cheating, they may have used multiple  accounts, so you should detect and punish the  

associated accounts also. You should be  careful about banning innocent players who  

triggered the exploit unintentionally and didn't  purposefully gain advantage from it. You may need  

to define a threshold where guilty players are  defined as people who did it more than once,  

or who did it after a certain time threshold.  This can be very tricky to make fair. You will  

also need a robust procedure for handling  appeals, when players believe they have  

been banned unfairly. You need to be firm with  players who did cheat, so that they can't talk  

their way out of it, while being forgiving with  innocent players who were flagged by accident.  

This is very difficult to get right, but is  worth the time and effort to investigate fully.  

Players need to feel that this process is fair. Make it easy for players to report exploits,  

ideally with a command or window that is tied  to their play session so that you can examine  

logs for relevant information about where they  are and what they were doing. You should contact  

players who reported useful information to thank  them for their report. There's nothing worse than  

going to the effort of writing up a report of  a live exploit and then hearing nothing back.  

Consider a bug bounty program where you reward  them with a consistent and communicated reward,  

potentially including real money, for reporting  exploits. This would hopefully drive more people  

to take the path of disclosure rather than trying  to exploit a vulnerability for personal gain. 

If you decide to have a policy where you just  warn or temporarily suspend players for minor or  

first-time offenses, you still need to remove the  items or progress that they gained by cheating. If  

you permanently ban someone, it's tempting to just  leave their account as-is with the cheated items  

or progress intact, because they're permanently  banned and can never access it again. This comes  

back to hurt you when a few years later, they  manage to appeal the ban and get their account  

back, full of all their illegal wealth. It's  worth taking the time to clean up every account,  

even the ones you think you're banning forever. Cleaning up accounts after economic incidents or  

bugs is an extremely manual and fiddly process. It  usually involves a bunch of senior developer time,  

because even if you have good tooling in place,  the primary characteristic of a game exploit  

is that it involves abusing something new and  unexpected, so you'll likely need new or updated  

tools to repair the damage each time. This is all  worth it though, because if players see you taking  

it seriously, they will trust the game more and  value their progress and time spent playing it. 

Sometimes when an economic exploit is going on,  the exploiters will give the cheated items to  

random players, in an attempt to muddy the  water and make it less likely that you'll  

just ban everyone involved. This can involve  a lot of manual cleanup, but you don't want to  

let those exploited items get into the economy.  When you're cleaning up something like this, you  

should consider taking the game servers down so  that things don't get worse while you're working  

on it. Players will be disappointed that they  can't play, of course, but they will respect that  

you're putting the integrity of the game first. If you're in a situation where the economic damage  

is widespread and exploited items have reached  too many players, your only option may be a full  

database rollback. It's very important that this  is a game-wide rollback rather than a partial one  

that just affects some players. That way there  is no chance that any of the exploited items  

have gotten out into the wider economy. It's also  fairer that everyone suffers a progress setback  

rather than a subset of accounts that you may have  incorrectly associated with the exploit. Remember,  

you're doing the rollback because the situation  is not perfectly well-understood and fixable. 

You're hopefully using a database system  with write-ahead-logs, which means that  

you can do a point-in-time rollback to just  before the damage started to occur. If not,  

you may have to restore one of your backups, which  may be hours or days before the damage occurred,  

dramatically increasing the amount of  progression loss that regular players  

suffer as a result of the incident. While  game-wide progression loss is very bad,  

it is less bad than ruining the integrity of the  economy, which is potentially the entire reason  

why people are playing in the first place.  If you do roll back significant progression,  

players will expect a very detailed  explanation of what happened and why. 

Rollbacks aren't always bad though. A quarter  of a century ago, I was playing Diablo II online  

and I accidentally sold my favourite bow to the  vendor in town while their inventory was full,  

so I couldn't buy it back. It was permanently  gone, and I felt terrible. An hour later,  

there was a realm-wide rollback to fix some  unrelated problem, and I got my bow back. 

You should be aware that rolling back the database  may have unintended side effects, like allowing  

players to profit from deterministic unknown  information they had revealed after the point the  

server is being rolled back to. For example, if  a player identifies an item, then it gets rolled  

back to unidentified, they know what that item  is now and may gain a small amount of economic  

advantage from this. There are of course ways to  mitigate this, such as scrambling this type of  

unknown information, or lazily evaluating it in a  non-deterministic way, but this requires thinking  

about it in advance when developing those systems. In addition to the types of cheating we just  

discussed, some players may cheat by botting,  either to farm additional items for themselves,  

or to sell for real money. You should absolutely  take this seriously and ban all accounts involved  

also. The subtleties of how to detect and root out  bot networks are outside the scope of this video,  

but you'll likely end up with a multi-person  department inside your studio doing this fulltime.  

Let me know in the comments if you'd like me to  talk about this area in more detail in the future. 

Next up I'd like to talk about keeping players'  economic progression contained in the economy  

they're playing in, free from influence from  outside economies such as the real world.

This is going to sound pretty obvious,  but any pay-for-advantage features in your  

game are going to have an effect on economic  integrity. If players can pay real-life money  

to alter something that alters the speed  of their progression or item acquisition,  

then this undermines the level playing field that  you are offering as your core value proposition.  

While selling pay-for-advantage stuff clearly  makes money in the short term, you are choosing a  

long-term play by focusing on offering a fair game  that players feel good about their progress in.

What counts as pay-for-advantage  isn't always clear. For example,  

it's common these days for games to offer a head  start of a few days or a week for players who  

purchase a more expensive pre-order package.  Players getting to reach the game's highest  

content before people who paid less is a huge  violation of the game's economic integrity.

If you do operate some kind of early access  period for your game, make sure to wipe player  

progress at the end of it. Also consider that  early access is meant to be about iterating on  

and smoothing out the game experience for the  real launch. In this bad funding climate, a lot  

of studios are using early access as a cash grab  to get the funds they need to finish the game's  

development. If this comes at the expense of the  game's economic integrity, that's a big problem.

The fantasy of playing an online RPG is to win  based on skill, intelligence and time spent,  

and if other players can just leverage  their real world situation and just buy in,  

that's absolutely not fair and will  undermine players' interest in playing  

the game properly. Also, the tolerance of real  money transactions encourages account theft,  

botting and exploitation, which damage the game  in other ways. You should explicitly disallow  

real money trading game-wide. Players should  not be allowed to trade items or progress for  

things outside of the economy they're in.  But that doesn't just include real money!

What many developers don't realise initially  is that trading between separate economies  

in game is actually very similar to real  money trading. If you start a new season,  

and a player arranges a trade where  they give up some of the best items  

from the previous season in exchange  for getting ahead in the new season,  

that's them getting an unfair advantage in this  fresh season based on something they did in the  

past. Exactly the same as working longer  hours at work last week and spending the  

money on those same items. Your level playing  field needs to apply on a per-economy basis.

But if you keep thinking about this,  you realise there are other things that  

commonly happen in online RPGs that have the same  consequences as real money trading. For example,  

if a popular streamer gets donations of in-game  items or assistance from their community,  

that's basically the same thing as  them paying money for that advantage,  

but in this case they're paying in public  recognition because they're famous. This type  

of transaction is super hard to police,  of course. Where do you draw the line?  

Are you going to outright ban players giving  items or favourable trades to their friends?

Speaking about streamers and free items, this  can flow the other way, too. If a streamer has a  

surplus of valuable items in game and wants their  stream to become more popular, because it's their  

career, they might choose to run lotteries or  giveaways, where people watching them can get free  

items. This also undermines the economic integrity  of the game because the viewers are getting  

economic progression in exchange for something  they did outside of the game world itself. 

One thing that people don't consider is that  one of the greatest potential threats to the  

economic integrity of an online RPG can  be the company's own customer support  

department. It's often their job to step in  and fix problems that have occurred, and that  

can result in unfair economic consequences for  other players if there aren't strict policies. 

I'll tell you a story. A number of years ago,  there was a popular online RPG that had a  

policy where if a player's account was hacked,  they could contact customer support to request  

that their items be restored. At face value, this  seemed like a helpful policy, because it wasn't  

the player's fault that they lost their items, and  restoring them would entirely solve their problem. 

The problem is, players worked out that they  could pretend to have their account hacked by  

loading it up with masses of valuable stuff,  having a friend log in and take the stuff,  

and then write in to support and report all  their items were stolen. Customer support  

would then helpfully restore all the items,  duplicating them. They didn't have the time  

or resources to track down where the potential  hackers had hidden all the original items,  

so the fake hacker friend went unpunished and the  conspirators successfully duplicated their gear. 

So, how should you go about dealing with  stolen items from a policy point of view? 

Well you could empower customer support with  heaps of tools that can track items between  

accounts and try to work out where the stolen  items have been laundered to, but note that  

these items may have been legitimately traded  between players. If a valuable sword was stolen,  

and it's currently held by someone who traded for  it fair and square without being able to tell that  

it was contentious, then it's very unfair on  them if it's ripped away to be given back to  

the original victim. That would undermine players'  trust in the trade system. It's also disastrous  

economically if there's a policy for the sword  to just be duplicated to solve the problem. 

As we saw in the duplication story before, the  issue isn't just that legitimately hacked items  

are duplicated, but that if restoration  is possible, then players have massive  

incentives to try to trick customer support  with fake stories. While it's possible that  

customer support could be given access to logs  of what occurred in-game, it's unlikely those  

logs contain enough granular detail to be able to  reconstruct exactly what occurred in all cases.  

It may also require specialist knowledge of  exactly how the game's architecture works,  

which customer support workers may not have. And  because a policy allowing restorations would cause  

the number of fake reports to go through the  roof, it'd certainly take far too much time to  

properly investigate each one with the depth  that would be required to make a fair call. 

Really the only practical policy for a game  that prioritises its economic integrity is  

to state that there are no character or item  restorations under any circumstances. This  

completely eliminates any chance of accidental  duplication through customer support. It does mean  

that players have to be responsible for securing  their own accounts, of course, with unique  

login credentials on their game account and any  associated login systems such as email addresses  

or platforms like Steam. A policy like this shows  utmost respect to the integrity of the economy,  

though it can of course be unfair if a theft  occurs that was not preventable by the player. And  

that's why, as the team running the game, you need  to also work to keep accounts secure on your end  

and prevent unauthorised access by other players. But preventing customer support from restoring  

characters or items isn't the end of the story.  Their job still involves helping players with  

other issues, and even those areas can touch on  economic integrity. For example, let's say that  

a player writes in and wants to change the  name of their character. That seems like a  

completely normal thing for customer support to  help with, but they still need to be careful. A  

potential reason for changing your character's  name is to escape a bad reputation in game. If  

someone scams other players, reneges on promises,  and generally becomes known as untrustworthy,  

then changing their name to a new identity  provides an economic advantage to them because  

they are able to resume their profitable bad  behaviour with a fresh slate. It's very important  

that customer support policy fully considers  the outcome of each possible intervention.

Your support team is effectively an admin  interface to the economy. Treat it like one.

I'd like to finish this video with an  example of where I personally screwed  

up regarding economic integrity and  fairness. Around four years ago,  

we had just launched a new Path of Exile  expansion, and were having some severe  

technical problems with the servers that limited  the number of players who could log in per  

minute. The result was that a couple of hundred  thousand players were stuck in a login queue,  

where they were forced to wait up to two  hours before they could start playing.

As you can imagine, an hour or more behind other  players in a race to the new content and its  

rewards is a massive economic disadvantage, so  this situation really sucked. Given the server  

instability, the players stuck in the queue  were essentially a random selection of players.

The problem was, we had spent a  lot of money marketing this launch,  

and that marketing campaign involved  a number of streamers who had been  

booked to play for a couple of hours were  sitting there streaming a login queue.  

I made the decision to bypass the queue  for these streamers, thinking that it's  

better for everyone if those streamers could be  playing and entertaining people in the meantime.

I didn't consider the economic advantage  that this would give those streamers,  

putting them ahead of some other players  because of a real-world privilege,  

and how that would be unfair. We were rightly  called out on this, and I instantly realised  

the mistake I had made. This was a valuable  lesson in how even an hour of headstart was  

an inexcusably large advantage to give people  who had not done an in-game action to earn it.  

It also shows how even if you structure an  entire live service around economic integrity,  

you still have to be so careful and fully  think through every decision you make. 

I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into economic  integrity. Thanks very much for watching.  

If you enjoyed the video, please like and  subscribe, and I'll see you next time!