Open Economy
A game in which there is no limit to how much money, items, or XP the player can harvest from the world. There may be caps on the amount of money, items, or XP that a character can posess, but the world itself will never run out.
Designers may want to choose an open economy for several reasons:
- Not having to store which containers have been opened, which combat encounters have been defeated, etc. drastically lowers the amount of data that needs to be persisted for saved games.
- If the game allows creating or recruiting new characters any time after the game starts, there would otherwise be no way to obtain XP to level them up. If certain quests are required to flag characters, then those quests must also be repeatable, or flag the player, not the character.
- MMOs must take open economy to an exteme as there are constantly new players joining the game, and those players want to do everything the other players already accomplished - including doing all the same quests.
- The game designer may want the game to be “grindy”, which requires repeating the same content over and over.