If you've played your fair share of multiplayer RPGs, you'll know what it's like to carry more types of currency than a bank. World of Warcraft has over thirty of them, Destiny 2 had upwards of twenty, and this multitude of money gets on a lot of adventurers' nerves. As they try to sort their Justice Points from their Emblems of Valor and their Phaseglass Needles from their Seraphites, some players see an economic system that's cluttered and impenetrable. When they receive payment in non-standard tokens, they can feel cheated out of the land's most broadly valuable tender. When a merchant only accepts instance-specific fun bucks, they may become frustrated that their hard-earned dollars have become useless sheaves of paper.

Why do MMOs have all these currencies if they can be so dispiriting? Like some sort of gil-centric Columbo, we're going to do whatever it takes to find out, and we're going to start by asking why MMO endgames place such an emphasis on money. A game with one currency gives players agency over how their character develops by letting them choose their rewards from vendors. Given that, we might think that having a range of currencies broadens that power. Surprisingly, the opposite is true. If there is a single currency in a game, and we have hoarded enough of it, then whatever the item we wish to buy or merchant we wish to purchase it from, we'll have access. But introduce more than one currency, and suddenly we're locked out from all sorts of shops. And that's the point.

If I'm a guild leader and made sure to log in every night for the past two years, my bank will be bursting at the seams. With that fortune, I can potentially warp future experiences for myself or other players. Updates to MMOs tend to expand them with new enemies and NPCs selling superior gear. Designers expect competitors to defeat those enemies to purchase those prizes. However, if I've filled up on currency for months before the update, I'll be able to buy all the gear out of the gate and won't have a reason to work through the challenges. I could also donate some cash to friends and skip them over the same content, and if equipment factors into the PvP, I'll immediately have an advantage over other fighters just for having played longer.

But now, let's imagine that the gear vendors in this new expansion won't accept my money. Instead, with new regions comes a new currency that's only dropped by the expansion zone's enemies. Suddenly, everyone starts from a balance of 0 and has a reason to work their way through the novel hunts, quests, and dungeons. No one can leverage their profits from the base game to leapfrog themselves or another player past this content. Nor can they use their base currency to get an edge in player competition. And as covered in a previous article, money is a means for designers to turn particular kinds of work in the game into specific rewards. Say the developer has gear in mind that would be ideal for the player to wield in the upcoming expansion challenges. They can encourage the player to wear that gear by dropping them DLC-exclusive currency that can buy it. If the designer has sway over what equipment the player has, they can delicately balance and tailor an experience for them with those items in mind.

A designer can also use these tactics to make limited-time events worthwhile. Let's imagine a Halloween event with quests for which the developers drop the base currency: gold. The event also includes seasonal cosmetics for the player to purchase with that gold. If the developer makes the Halloween-exclusive items cheap, higher level players won't participate in Halloween quests because they'll be able to buy their trophies from the outset. If they make them expensive, newbie players won't jump on board because they could never bob for the number of apples they'd need to buy that spider costume. But make the event run on a seasonally-specific currency like Candy, exchange rewards only for that currency, and now everyone has a reason to join in the holiday.

Of course, the more expansions you add and the more events you hold, the more shapes and colours of coin in the economy, and as practical as they may be, that doesn't mean that the player base will find them any more appealing. So, are the critics of multiple currencies forever doomed to bean count their way through MMO endgames? Are they destined to be distanced from the simplified financial management they want? The history suggests they're not. In my experience, fans annoyance with multiple currency systems come from their implementation as much as the raw concept.

Firstly, many of these currencies are hard to track because they exist as a smattering of items lost in the stew of our inventories. With multiple money types, getting a basic overview of your funds can become a tedious object hunt: you might be looking for twenty specific items in a cache of a couple of hundred. Designers can relieve players of this burden using dedicated UI tabs, displaying how much of each currency we own. Designers may also find worth in marking currencies with a special icon, allowing us to sort our items by type and making currencies one of those types. Additionally, they can enable us to transfer all of a currency type into or out of banks with a few clicks. Creators can further save players grief by having money represented solely through a points system instead of manifesting it as an item.

Secondly, players often become confused when leafing through their bills because the relationship between currencies, currency sources, and rewards is not immediately apparent. When they first lay their eyes on a form of exchange, the person at the keyboard may not know what they can spend it on. Upon re-entering an area, they might not remember what resources drop there or what vendors accept those resources. When they see an NPC's price list, the player might be unsure how to earn the money the vendor accepts. These issues could be eliminated by coding in some help buttons on the minimap, in shop menus, or that appear when you right-click currencies. The screens that these buttons would pop out could explain where to source and spend the money, and could even show those locations on a map.

Designers can be averse to spelling out the rules for users as they may find this condescending or that it bars them from discovering the wonders of the world for themselves. Users playing high-end content, where multiple currencies typically rear their head, tend to be especially capable, and as a rule, these more capable players are more sensitive to spoon-feeding. Still, not every game has to be for everyone, and most MMOs are trying to engage a broad player base. So, their developers may consider including some clarifying texts that would benefit a general audience. After all, not every player has to ask for this leg up if they don't want to.

Lastly, endgame currencies have gotten a bad rap because there are multiple high-profile examples of developers using them to weight their games too far towards deterministic rewards. What do I mean by this? I have mentioned in passing how designers exchange rewards for currency and that this is a mechanism for them to control what gear players get and when they get it. To drive home the concept, let's look at an example from the player's perspective.

Let's say in a hypothetical world, a Diamond-Tipped Pickaxe costs 2,000 Seals, and I get an average of 100 Seals every time I complete a certain dungeon: The Mines. Say I beat The Mines and do nothing else twice a day. At that rate, it'll take me about ten days to get my Pickaxe. We've talked about all the stupendous things a dev can do when the player can buy items from shops, but now we're broaching what shops can't do.

Putting some hard numbers to my reward assures me when I'll get it and allows me to plan ahead, but excitement in media often rests on success being uncertain. It's fun when we don't know whether we'll be able to jump that gorge, whether the young go-getter achieves their dream, or when that slot machine pays out the jackpot. Randomness puts a little electricity in the air, and there is some randomness in currency drops, but when we cause those drops many times in a row, the total currency we get out of them trends further and further towards the average. I can't say for sure when I'll hit 2,000 Seals, but I can get a pretty reliable idea, killing the uncertainty. Players buying their rewards are also often confronted with heady climbs to the next prize rung. If you know the house you want costs 50,000 gold and you can see yourself getting around five gold for each monster you slay, you can start thinking the house might as well cost an infinite amount of gold.

Players in conversation with a polycurrency system may feel like they invested days of free time into an adventure of chance and surprise, only for it to decay into a predictable and drawn-out exercise in accounting. This is what happened to World of Warcraft during the days of its Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions. This one failed implementation of multiple currencies may have done more than any other to stigmatise the mechanic. Yet, the magnitude of the problem and Blizzard's production capacity meant that they also came up with the first notable fix for it.

Designers plotting out reward systems would look to be damned if they do and damned if they don't. Awarding high-end equipment through loot drops would make progression random and unlikely, but selling that gear would lump audiences with the predictable and long-winded advancement we've just discussed. There is a third option, however: what if players could purchase loot drops? This approach could establish a balance between randomness and determinism, and it's the direction that Blizzard went in. Starting from WoW Patch 5.0, raid bosses dropped not only random items but also "tokens". Adventurers could spend these tokens on extra loot drops from the same bosses, which were still randomised, of course. The token system allowed the player to experience both control and risk regarding the rewards they won.

Of course, as much as a designer can massage currencies, none of the above solutions cuts meticulous management from player's schedules entirely. While WoW did markedly improve on its implementation of multiple currencies, players were still shouldering a sizeable volume of them. And eventually, even the token system, Blizzard phased out. We can't put it off any longer: we have to talk about alternatives to multiple currencies. Once again, Blizzard has the most storied history of developing in this area. The games community at large sees WoW expansions as an opportunity to explore new worlds and live as new fantasy races, but they've also served as an experiment in constructing edifying endgame reward mechanics.

These delivery mechanisms were complex, and some of them were eventually sent to the chopping block. However, Blizzard's alternatives to multiple currencies included:

• Weekly caches that provide both random drops and a guaranteed salary. Under this solution, your potential drops are dependent on the difficulty of the raids you completed that week.
• Materials that you can use to craft or upgrade items.
• Weekly opportunities to claim a number of items from a list, with that number of items decided by how many high-level activities you completed that week.
• Progression systems that let you unlock new abilities.
• Progression systems that let you unlock slots for new abilities.
• Progression systems that let you upgrade gear pieces.

For the three progression systems mentioned above, players advance through them by completing activities within their relevant expansions.

Blizzard's rules for distributing awards have changed drastically over the years. Still, one constant remains true: they do not consider multiple currencies alone to give players meaningful new experiences. Instead, both studio and players have been happier with systems that offset guaranteed rewards with pseudo-random ones. It's why those weekly caches which combine assured prizes and slot machine output remain part of the MMO's makeup. I think there's a lesson in that.

In summary, including multiple currencies in a game can stop players from skipping content or unfairly overpowering rivals. The downside is that they can leave the player overwhelmed with management and research, and they can make rewards feel unattainable and predictable. Allowing easy access to information on these currencies can help alleviate these problems. The enterprising designer must also consider ways to balance determinism and randomisation, including cutting back on, or expelling, multiple currencies altogether. Because the truth is that a game doesn't need money, it just needs rewards. Thanks for reading.