The MMORPG Tibia is struggling with a gold and EXP inflation. However, the changes introduced are not liked by everyone and strong criticism is being voiced.
What is the problem? The influx of gold into the economy of the MMORPG classic Tibia, which started in 1997, has gotten out of control in recent years.
The influx looked like this in recent years (in millions of gold per day):
- January 2017: 96
- January 2018: 753
- January 2019: 3116
- January 2020: 2867
This has led to an enormous inflation, which has thrown the game into a gold crisis.
There has also been an extreme increase in players reaching level 1,000 quickly, as there were simply too many EXP in certain areas. New areas were developed for events where players could quickly farm EXP. However, this led to nobody wanting to visit the old spots anymore, so they adjusted those. Thus, a vicious cycle emerged that led to an ever-increasing influx of EXP and loot.
Developers react, but players remain angry
What have the developers done about it? CipSoft, the developer studio behind the now 23-year-old Tibia, has adjusted the hunting grounds. The nerf means that there is now less gold and EXP in some of the areas. The team has been thinking about this for two years, but only acted now when the situation got out of hand.
How are the players reacting to this? Not everyone in the community is happy with the changes. There have already been accusations that this nerf was only introduced to boost the sale of Tibia coins, which the developers deny. Some players would have preferred that the changes be tested with focus groups or on a test server, but the developers did not find that to be sensible.
Some also do not understand why exactly the most popular hunting grounds were nerfed. The team then explained that they did not fundamentally change the areas themselves, but rather the monsters, which appear in many areas.
The changes have apparently now particularly severe consequences for players who find themselves in the mid-level range.
Mandrah, a level 500 player, says: “I will just add that the changes have affected the lower levels. The spots I ran at levels 200-300 are now dead.”
The problem seems to be somewhat deeper, and fundamentally larger balancing changes need to be made to the entire game. Whether these will come is the big question. Tibia certainly has a money and EXP problem that the developers urgently need to get under control.
