The Economics of Online Gaming

CHAPTER 13

Cooldown

After months of players complaining about the balance of the game’s economy, Entropy finally responded with a major structural change. His plan was, in essence, to simply make it more difficult to manufacture. First introduced on December 8, 2005, he called the idea “cooldown.” In theory, it didn’t sound like a bad idea. Under the original system, players ate food to get the energy they needed to make stuff, and there was no limit to how fast they could eat the food. The new system added a “cooldown timer” to each different type of food, limiting how fast the player could eat and therefore limiting how fast they could produce. More expensive foods had a faster cooldown, and cheaper foods had a slower cooldown. Assuming everyone ...