Economy Wars: How BDO, EVE, and Albion Handle Wealth Redistribution

BDO taxes it, EVE destroys it, Albion loots it but none of the three biggest player-driven economies have fully solved wealth concentration. Here’s why.

Player-driven economies are one of the most compelling features in online gaming, but they all face the same fundamental challenge: wealth concentration. Over time, the rich get richer and the gap between veteran and new players becomes a barrier to entry rather than an aspiration.

Three of the most discussed MMO economies — Black Desert Online, EVE Online, and Albion Online — each approach this problem differently, and none of them have fully solved it.

Black Desert Online: The Tax Sink

BDO uses a marketplace tax as its primary wealth sink. When you sell an item, 35% of the listed price is removed from the game entirely. In theory this should drain significant currency — in practice, end-game inflation has consistently outpaced the drain. Silver duplication exploits aside, the core problem is that the tax scales linearly while player wealth accumulates exponentially. A casual player selling life skill materials pays the same rate as a whale selling boss gear worth hundreds of billions. One of those transactions matters to the economy. The other barely registers.

The result is a game where silver inflation at end game is a perennial complaint, where price caps exist on the most valuable items specifically because free market pricing would produce numbers so large they’d feel disconnected from reality.

EVE Online: Violence as Economics

EVE’s approach is elegant in its brutality. Ships get destroyed. Structures get blown up. Resources get consumed in manufacturing. The economy circulates because conflict is the primary mechanism of redistribution. Wealthy alliances fund wars to expand territory. Wars consume ships. Ships require minerals. Miners harvest minerals. ISK flows from combat back into industry.

This works remarkably well at the macro scale — EVE’s economy is stable enough that it has employed real economists — but it creates an accessibility problem at the micro scale. If you don’t engage with PvP, either directly or through the industrial complex that supports it, you exist in a separate economic layer that doesn’t circulate properly.

Albion Online: Full Loot Honesty

Albion Online’s solution is the most direct: everything meaningful can be lost. Die in a black zone and your equipped gear is gone. This creates constant demand, keeps prices from stratifying permanently, and ensures that even the wealthiest players are constantly reinvesting into the economy just to maintain their position.

The critique is that this mostly redistributes wealth between PvP players rather than across the whole economy. Island farmers who never leave the safe zones accumulate without ever contributing to the destruction cycle. The gap between safe and dangerous play creates two parallel economies that only partially interact.

What None of Them Have Solved

The deepest problem across all three is making redistribution feel like a feature rather than a punishment. Players understand intellectually that sinks are necessary. They resist emotionally when those sinks apply to them specifically. The ideal economic design would create sinks that players actively want to engage with — prestigious status, cosmetic investment, community contributions — rather than purely punitive loss mechanics.

No major MMO has fully cracked this yet. The closest attempts have been in games like RuneScape where the variety of gold sinks (death costs, high alchemy, the grand exchange tax) creates enough diversity that players barely notice each individual drain. The aggregate matters. No single sink needs to carry the weight alone.

The economy war continues. The players are still winning.