Seasonal economy: how do you reset without making players leave?

Why I am rebuilding the economy

As of August 2026, Lunacia production is temporarily paused while I look for more support. The part I am still working on is redesigning the economy around seasons, clearer sinks, and a model that can scale more sustainably.

In an online game with long-term progression, one wrong number does more than make an item stronger than expected. It can distort supply, trading prices, upgrade speed, and the player’s reason to keep playing. Once too much currency or material enters the economy, removing it without frustrating players is extremely difficult.

For me, this is not only a Game Designer’s balancing problem. It also affects retention, monetization, return behavior, and the product’s lifespan - trade-offs I need to examine as Product Lead.

Three economy models I considered

I look at these models not only as someone building a game. Before Lunacia, I spent many years playing progression-heavy games as a try-hard player. Most of these strengths and weaknesses are things I experienced directly, then brought into the way I design my own economy.

Long-term progression

The first model is to calculate the economy carefully before release, then rebalance it over time. I saw this clearly in Lineage, MIR, and many older Chinese martial-arts MMORPGs. They preserve a long upward progression path: players who start early, grind consistently, and accumulate assets well create a real advantage. That gives accomplishments weight, but a major mistake in currency or supply can remain for a very long time and affect the whole system.

Approximately ten years ago, while playing Thien Ha 3D published by Gamota, I experienced an economy failure like this. Trading was less restricted than it is in many mobile games today, and players could maintain 10-20 alternate accounts quite easily. During an event whose name I no longer remember, currency was granted to almost every account. Currency from those alternate accounts flooded the market, item prices dropped rapidly, and players had far less reason to spend money.

In my memory, the game declined quickly and closed not long afterward, perhaps within one or two months, although I no longer have the exact dates. That experience is why I always want the economy to have a guardrail: if the team makes a bad decision, there should still be a path to recovery instead of one mistake distorting the rest of the game’s life.

Hard seasonal reset

Hard resets through leagues, seasons, or Cycles, as used by Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile, Diablo IV, and Last Epoch, give a team substantial room to repair the economy after each season. If something goes wrong this season, the next one can begin with corrected rules. At the time of writing, PoE2 is also making frequent economy changes before full release; seasonal resets give the team permission to experiment, fail, and fix without carrying every mistake forward for years.

The trade-off is that players repeat a large part of the grind. I often need to skip several seasons before wanting to return, because replaying nearly the same progression loop every three months becomes tiring. The model is safer for the economy, but it does not fully solve the feeling of long-term attachment to one character.

Soft reset and catch-up

I like the soft-reset approach in modern martial-arts games such as Justice Online and Where Winds Meet. Instead of letting someone leave for one to three months and return to a power gap large enough to make them quit again, the game provides a path to catch up to the new baseline in approximately one or two weeks. When friends invite someone back for new content, that person can genuinely return instead of buying another account or accepting that they will always remain behind.

The trade-off is that the business model usually needs to rely less on selling power and more on fashion and cosmetics. Content must also continue arriving; new gear, bosses, and power caps still reset the practical baseline. I have seen similar pieces of this thinking while playing BDO and Lost Ark. I am not copying their numbers. I am learning from the way they reduce the chance that a power gap becomes the reason a player cannot return.

The game still needs to answer clearly what remains, what disappears, and why a long-term player should stay attached when the power cap moves again.

The direction I am exploring: soft reset with legacy

I am exploring a hybrid model. Seasons provide a guardrail so the team can correct economic problems in the next season, but the player’s effort is not erased. Anything removed needs to leave meaningful legacy; anything retained must not break the balance of the new season.

Legacy does not have to mean raw power. It could be a character’s history, item provenance, discovered knowledge, collections, or a constrained form of utility. The goal is for players to look at a character and see the seasons they have lived through, not only a stat sheet that has been reset.

An open economy makes the problem harder

Lunacia is designed toward an open Web3 economy. I want players to trade with each other relatively freely, so botting cannot be solved simply by locking everything down. Supply, demand, burns, and sinks need to connect clearly enough that bots lose their incentive without over-restricting normal players.

Monetization introduces another conflict. If a valuable item is fully reset, someone who invested significant effort or money in it may lose trust. If all of its power carries forward, however, the new season becomes unbalanced for new and returning players.

This direction is still in design. It is not a complete economy and has not been validated in production. The diagram above is how I am separating sources, sinks, and the elements that might become legacy while I continue solving the problem.