Howrse is a twenty-year-old web MMO about everything horses - caring, breeding, trading, and training them for competitions. With a massive player-controlled economy and deep management mechanics, it is a game way more complex than the cute graphics would have you think.
You can play Howrse on a web browser, Android, and IOS, right now, for free:
At the time I joined the project, it had already been live for more than 10 years. With the team, we were releasing new content every three weeks to keep players engaged; however, we arrived at a point where the game's persistent economy got in the way of its survival.
Some players had been playing daily for many years, and accumulated so many resources that they had driven a massive inflation in all the horses and services prices.
Despite our best efforts and a complete rework of the first-time-user-experience and tutorial of the game, this drove the vast majority of new players away from the game as they had no way to take part in the economy. As the game was losing some long-time players, it needed new ones to maintain its overall player base.
We knew we couldn't (and didn't want either) to enforce more control over the economy by taking the control of prices away from players or anything like that.
In the meantime, it was evident that if we wanted to solve this, we had to give new players more currency somehow. However, providing more meant we had to take away more as well, or the problem of players accumulating resources would only worsen.
We started by creating an entire flowchart of the game, including all its different systems, tracking every single source (creation) and sink (destruction) of currencies.
Once we did, it became clear the game had a balance problem, with a ratio of approximately 2/1 sources to sinks. But the biggest problem we identified was that currency movement between players was absolutely free, and as such, it was the primary factor in accumulation.
Soooo... it became clear the best solution to target currency transfers between players was to implement taxes on sales. We knew this wouldn't go easily with the players, but the change went even worse than we could have imagined. The one question players were throwing back at us again and again was "what are you doing with my money?". And the truth - that their "money" was just a bunch of 1s and 0s we were removing from the server to balance the overall flow of currency, wasn't really a satisfying one.
For a time we really didn't know what to do. The change worked, and rebalanced the economy so we didn't want to go back on it. But on the other hand, the player perception was terrible, and having a balanced system if it doesn't feel balanced to the players is missing the point.
One of the designers of the team had a genius idea: Create an answer as to what we were doing with players' money. This took the form of the community piggy bank, which displayed in real time all tax money collected by all players this month (and the player's contribution in comparison to it). Once a target goal of total currency was reached, special promotions and events would trigger on the server.