Week 9: Cross-Game Comparative Economics
Putting EVE Online, World of Warcraft and RuneScape's markets side by side — same underlying problem, three genuinely different mechanical answers.
26 April 2027
Three games, three market designs, one underlying problem: get a seller’s item to a buyer who wants it, at a price both would accept, without either of them meeting.
| Dimension | EVE Online | World of Warcraft | Old School RuneScape |
|---|---|---|---|
| matching | regional order books, per station | listing-based auction house | matched-order Grand Exchange |
| primary sink | ship and module destruction | AH fees and deposits | GE tax (funds a scheduled item sink) |
| price transparency | full order-book visibility | listings only, no history | lagging “guide price”, no live book |
| dominant manipulation risk | market cornering in thin regional markets | undercut-bot warfare | manipulation within the enforced price band |
What the differences actually mean#
EVE’s full order-book transparency is only viable because the destruction sink (Week 5’s fittings, exploding) constantly removes supply — a transparent market with no comparable sink would be far easier to corner permanently. RuneScape’s opaque, lagging guide price does the opposite job: it trades transparency for manipulation resistance, at the cost of the “real” price sometimes being invisible to players who only check the guide number. WoW’s split-then-unified realm history — separate per-realm servers that also split each realm’s auction house by faction (Horde and Alliance), later merged first across factions and then into shared, region-wide commodity listings — shows a designer literally choosing market size as a lever: a bigger, unified market is more liquid and harder to corner, at the cost of realm- and faction-level identity.
None of these are “the right answer”. Each is the right answer to what that game’s other systems already demand of it. Week 11 gives this idea — that a market’s rules can be judged against a formal standard, not just preference — a proper name and a worked argument for why it holds.
Studio this week#
Comparative Market Teardown: pick two of the three case-study markets and find one design choice in each that the other explicitly avoided.
Teaching team
- Dr. Sana Okafor-Lindqvist — convenor