Week 12: Capstone Studio — The Intervention Clinic

The last lecture is a clinic, not new material — bring your in-progress Economic Intervention Report and get it stress-tested before it's due.

17 May 2027

No new theory this week. Every idea the Capstone needs — faucets and sinks, market design, cost-effectiveness ratios, time-gating, mechanism design — was introduced somewhere in Weeks 1 through 11. This lecture spends its time on in-progress interventions, worked through out loud, so everyone can see what a marker is actually going to look for. Two examples of the shape a strong one takes:

EVE Online, a null-sec resource monopoly that actually happened (Week 7’s frontier logistics). For years, the moon material Technetium — a key Tech II production input — was concentrated almost entirely in EVE Online’s northern null-sec regions, letting the alliances holding that territory control a Tech II production chokepoint worth hundreds of billions of ISK a month simply by sitting on it. CCP’s own dev blog named the problem directly: value and region had become too tightly coupled. The fix, delivered in the 2013 Odyssey resource rebalance, wasn’t to break the monopoly by force — it was to spread value across all four of the rarest moon-material tiers instead of concentrating it in one regionally-clustered mineral, so no single region (and by extension no single alliance holding it) could sit on the whole bottleneck alone. The cost: an already logistics-heavy game got another layer of chained intermediate materials to move around, in exchange for a scarcity ladder that finally matched Week 7’s “no single alliance can go it alone” design intent instead of quietly undermining it.

World of Warcraft and OSRS, bot-driven illicit faucets (Week 8). Automated farming injects currency that never came from a legitimate faucet at all — Week 8’s distinction between an illicit, bot-driven faucet and manipulation of an already-legitimate one. It’s easy for a faucet/sink audit to miss for exactly that reason: it’s currency the books never expected to see, not a legitimate channel running too fast. A worked intervention, consistent with Week 8’s argument that enforcement rather than a new sink is the fix: report bot-suspected currency separately from human-sourced faucets in that audit, at the cost of the false positives (legitimately fast human players) that any automated bot-detection heuristic will inevitably flag.

What a strong intervention argument looks like#

• names the specific real economy (EVE, WoW or RuneScape) and the specific documented problem, not a generic “inflation is bad”
• picks one concrete mechanism from the semester — a new sink, a changed matching rule, a mechanism-design payment change — rather than several vague ones at once
• says what the intervention would cost the game to implement in player goodwill or complexity, because every real intervention this course has studied cost something

What sinks a mark#

Proposing a fix for a problem that doesn’t have documented evidence behind it, or one so large (“redesign the whole economy”) that it can’t be argued for with the tools this course actually taught.

Studio and assessment this week#

Capstone Pitch Rehearsal runs alongside this lecture; the Economic Intervention Report itself is due at the end of the week.