Capstone: Economic Intervention Report

Pick one real, documented virtual economy, identify one real problem in it, and propose a scoped, justified intervention using the numerical and mechanism-design tools built across the semester.

Due: 17 May 2027 · Weight: 40%

The brief#

No one can design an economy from a blank page — there’s no context to be right or wrong about. But every real economy already has a problem worth fixing, and that’s a brief with teeth.

This capstone deliberately isn’t “design your own virtual economy.” You will pick one real, documented economy — EVE Online is the natural choice given the semester’s throughline, but World of Warcraft or Old School RuneScape are both acceptable if that’s what you went deep on in Week 9’s comparative teardown. From that economy, you’ll identify one specific, real problem: an inflation spiral visible in published data, a market that’s gone dead or illiquid, a faucet being exploited at scale, or a comparable documented issue. You then propose one intervention — a policy, a market mechanism, or a numeric rebalance — scoped tightly enough to address that one problem, and justified with the tools this course has built up: faucet/sink analysis, cost-effectiveness ratios, market microstructure, and mechanism design.

This is a bigger, semester-integrating version of Balance Patch Notes (Week 6), not a repeat of it: Balance Patch Notes rebalanced one dataset handed to you in the room, over a single session. Here, you find the problem yourself, in a real published economy, and the intervention has to hold up against a real system’s actual scale and history — not a simplified in-class dataset.

What you submit#

1. A written report (roughly 2000–3000 words) that:
   • names the real economy and cites the specific, verifiable problem within it
   • proposes one scoped intervention addressing that problem
   • includes at least one worked numerical model supporting the intervention’s expected effect (a ratio, a projection, or a before/after estimate, shown with its working)
   • acknowledges at least one tradeoff or failure mode of your own proposal
2. A timed pitch (under three minutes) delivered in the Week 12 Capstone Pitch Rehearsal session, covering the economy, the problem, and the intervention.

How it’s marked#

• Design coherence (40%) — the intervention is scoped to the named problem, internally consistent, and doesn’t quietly redesign the whole economy to solve a narrow issue.
• Numerical modeling (30%) — the worked model is correct, shown with its working, and actually supports the claimed effect.
• Pitch (30%) — the timed pitch is clear, fits its time limit, and a listener who hasn’t read the report can follow the argument.