Regarding Economy in Hegemony
There have been some polarising comments regarding progress being unfair to other players. Hegemony has a beautifully designed economy system where you play at your own pace.
There are fears that people with more progress will affect you in a negative way and also fears regarding market control and manipulation, this is not the case.
In other games even with fresh starts, they are designed in a way that those that play more can race and manipulate the market and gouge newer players. Resetting progress only delays this and does not solve the underlying systemic issue.
Hegemony’s economy is designed intentionally to address the underlying issues present in other MMORPGs. We have designed a system and world that is truly equal in playing field and would even favour newer players over old.
Hegemony’s Item System is not Gear Centric
In other MMORPGs, most often this is the case for what is considered late-game items are limited through the concept of “resource-poor” gating.
Where they are either gated behind either a boss that spawns every 12 hours or some super rare resource node map that is PvP enabled that is monopolised by stronger/richer players who only get stronger/richer due to that.
This is not the case in Hegemony
In Hegemony we do not gate gear like that, resources are neither time-gated nor PvP gated. There is literally no argument for players monopolising items.
Price Floor/Ceilings and Supply/Demand
In Hegemony crafting skills that turn raw materials into finished products LOSE money. Those that have higher crafting levels have to make huge amounts of gear in order to level up.
This means that there is an excess of gear on the market
This means that due to supply and demand curves, gear will actually trend towards lower prices if there are people with higher crafting. Most often it is the case of crafters selling gear for less than 10% of their production cost or even just flat throwing it away as there is not enough demand for it.
This also means that those levelling crafting skills will always attempt to outbid each-other for raw materials, driving up the price of raw materials (which benefits newer players who can use gathering raw materials or processing it into intermediary products such as ingots highly profitable).
NPC shops also act as a price floor/ceiling to guarantee newer players can sell items to other players without getting ripped off as if any player tries undercutting raw materials would lead to the argument “I can get more if I sell to NPCs”. This would result in the demand for raw materials setting the prices above the floor, at a point where supply meets demand.
They also act as price ceilings for finished goods such as equipment as if any player tries overcharging, players will just purchase items from NPCs. This combined with the way that artisan skills are balanced means there is an excess of equipment on the market and it would be a race to the bottom, with artisans undercutting each other to recoup some of the material cost.
Conclusion
Other player’s progress has no negative effects on you. This is not a rat-race game, stop thinking of it as that. We designed the game in a way where everything is in balance and joining at any point or being casual/hardcore player in terms of play time does not have a negative effect on you.
The “X is ahead of me and ruining my experience” is a strawman argument and would be present sooner or later due to differences in hours played per day.
We have solved the inequality issue from the roots instead of treating the symptoms temporarily with resets.