the thing neopets is doing right now with its economy might be the most interesting thing to happen in the last hundred years of economics. I wish i could take a sabbatical from my day job just to detail the magnificence of the project and also be a fly on the wall for the decision-making processes going on there — economics might be a dismally inferior science of the real actual world, but if it ever were accurate to a closed system full of people, this could be it! a perfectly controlled economy of production, that still has individual purchasers and primary competitor secondary markets, and has a history of rampant inflation but also of sustaining beyond that? there really has never been an equal to this in history or in contemporary digital environments.
god like. Imagine SOJ economies, diamond block economies, but at such a massssssively larger scale and complexity of system and exponential velocity of interaction! There's no guarantee that their models are sound, or that reality will behave in a way that was modeled or modelable. The new set of login and quest incentives might simply run the economy too hot in terms of total NP per person, leaving everyone to stop commercial transaction (they can buy infinite of what they need from the increased supply), but there's a thousand equally likely very different outcomes.
I'm trying to come up with a good allegory:
what if the government gave you a UBI and increased the supply of houses being built and food being grown? What happens to prices when everyone could buy enough from a centralized seller and have some leftover? do people try and corner markets anyways? do prices for niche items skyrocket as everyone has all this money to spend and nothing else to spend it on? in the real world, you'd see an inflation of financial vehicles, but even the gambling is cleverly controlled in the world! i feel like a crazy person but this is the ground floor of the best experiment in decades no one is writing papers on