A developer running a live game deleted the middle of the usual loop. Every currency sink in the world is pro-social: gifts to other players, food to share, tips to people who made things, a communal pot. There is no upgrade tree — nothing you buy makes you stronger, faster, or better at anything. The intent was to remove “earn, hoard, dominate.”
What the design actually produced, by the developer’s own account, is a hoarding simulator.
- If every sink is optional and altruistic, accumulating is strictly dominant.
- The generous player is not rewarded — just poorer than the player who did nothing.
- Costly signals with no payoff do not survive contact with players.
Every obvious repair reintroduces the thing the design was trying to avoid. Mechanical gift benefits rebuild the upgrade tree with extra steps. Currency decay punishes instead of motivating. Public gifting converts generosity into status competition.
The thread’s more useful ideas:
- Reciprocity is what players invent anyway — two players agreeing to trade equal gifts both end up ahead of everyone else.
- Provenance gating: a gift only counts if it came from someone else, which forces the currency to circulate.
- Track contributions end to end and score community contribution rather than individual wealth.
- Ask what people actually spend on — power, safety, comfort, status. Gifts that deliver none of these are not hoarded, they are ignored.
The failure worth filing: removing the reward is not the same as removing the incentive. When generosity has no payoff, the rational move is to hold, and an economy built to encourage giving quietly becomes an accumulation ladder.