When we re-opened RoF back in May, we didn’t just release a new update with some new additions—we wiped all ranks, money and inventories. This wasn’t done for no reason; it was a deliberate first step in an attempt to fix RoF’s economy. RoF’s economy was completely broken, with some players having over a million cookies—it needed desperate fixing. In case you’d like to read more about a pre-wipe perspective on RoF’s broken economy, you might like my two-part blog post on here called Big Data.
Anyhow, almost all major changes in the new updated were hugely related to the economy of the server:
- We added a sellshop, in which you can sell your materials for cookies
- We removed ironman, prestige and supercookies
- We added Ascension Tokens, earned by surviving rounds
These three changes may seem weird but they were very calculated and a lot of thought went into them. Since its launch, RoF has been known as an AFK server—and for a good reason. This is because pre-wipe players were able to just make a quick house and afk in it. It didn’t matter if you built a 3x3x3 dirt house or a beautiful mansion; you got free cookies at the end of the round as long as you were in a non-safe zone with at least 20 blocks of air.
This is what I call time-money, and it’s one of the two currencies used in my proposed Two Currencies system.
Basically, there are two kinds of currencies on RoF:
- Time money ($T)
- Work money ($W)
or passive income and active income. They kind of speak for themselves: Time money is earned just by being on the server and spending time on it, while work money is earned by actually working—through mining, mobfighting or whatever. The big problem with old RoF was that Work money didn’t exist at all.
There was initially only one source of income, $T, which would gradually increase as you ranked up. This would mean that people who spent more time would automatically earn more too, regardless of effort. The sole basis of your income was being online.
The addition of ironman, prestige and especially supercookies was both genius and idiotic at the same time. It offered a much-needed engame post-grandmaster. I recall asking to be reset to Player rank two or three times because being a Grandmaster was just boring. The prestige shops were a great addition to the server and things like the Efficiency X iron pick and rocket boots were very fun and much appreciated.
Its foundation, however, was a disaster both economically and in terms of gameplay: Supercookies allowed people to amass a ridiculous amount of wealth very quickly due to supercookie to cookie conversion, and ironman caused people to AFK because almost all of its features punished moving around. Supercookies were really just a more overpowered, redundant $T currency. In fact, because people couldn’t even build in ironman, it inherently forced people to just build a house and go AFK or chat. In short, there were two major problems:
- Economy: Players amass huge amount of money doing nothing
- Gameplay: Players are forced to AFK and don’t actually play
Our solution was removing ironman, prestige and supercookies and replacing it with Ascension Tokens. Tokens are the post-wipe replacement of the old Cookies, a $T kind of currency, while the new Cookies are a completely different kind of currency– $W, meaning players are forced to actually play the game and sell materials. So, by adding Ascension Tokens, we basically fixed two of RoF’s biggest problems.
- Players are forced to actually play the game by collecting & selling resources for Cookies
- Players are forced to be online for a long time and complete rounds as well as surviving the lava to gain Tokens
- Economy: Players get rewarded for effort
- Gameplay: All players need to spend same amount of time to gain same amount of tokens (=fair system)
This is also why tokens to cookies conversion or cookies to tokens conversion would not work at all. In fact, it would break the entire system we so carefully constructed. If we were to add tokens to cookies conversion, this would mean we’d get rid of the $W currency. This means we’re back exactly where we left off with the old RoF. Same issue with cookie to tokens conversion: This gets rid of the $T currency, meaning players don’t need to actually survive the rounds and can just earn money by selling stuff.
This also means that, theoretically, someone could just get a bunch of stuff from another player and obtain a lot of tokens/cookies that way. They wouldn’t even need to play. It’s an utter failure both for RoF’s economy and gameplay. If you want Ascension Tokens to be able to be converted to Cookies, what you really want is Supercookies, and the old RoF system—a broken system.
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