The economy
One currency, one wallet, play money only. The rules are built so that chatting with lots of real people pays, and farming with alts or bots doesn't.
Coins can never be bought, sold, cashed out or traded for anything outside the game. There is nothing to pay for in Wordlord, and nobody can pay for an advantage.
One wallet everywhere
You have one wallet that works in every server with Wordlord. Words, though, belong to a server: owning monsoon in one server says nothing about who owns it in another.
Coins you earn in a small or new server are locked to that server until it becomes a global server. You can spend locked coins there as normal; they join your main wallet once the server qualifies.
Where coins come from
| Source | How much |
|---|---|
| Starting coins | 100 coins when you join, and again at the start of each season. |
| Rent | 0.75 coins per use of your word (1.125 for rare words), paid by the bank. |
| Daily stipend | 5 coins once you've sent 5 messages in a day. |
| Takeovers | When someone takes your word, you get your full price. |
| Lost Deeds and schemes | A 30–60 coin bounty per Lost Deed, 40 coins per scheme. Both come out of the server's daily rent budget, so they never add coins on top of it. |
| Game winnings | Double or Evicted and Property Slots pay out from the bank, but pay back less than they take on average. |
Where coins go
| Sink | How much |
|---|---|
| Claims | 10 to 60 coins per word, by tier. |
| Property tax | 2% of each word's price, every day. |
| Takeover fee | 15% of the price, on top of paying the owner. The fee is burned. |
| Rent box spill | Rent left uncollected for more than 12 hours goes back to the bank. |
| The Gavel | Every coin of a winning auction bid is burned. |
| Games | The house edge: about 10% of every flip, 18% of every slots spin and 11–13% of blackjack, dice and the wheel, with game winnings capped at 150 coins a day. |
| Trades and gifts | 5% of every sale and every /give. |
| Community | Coinage (50), strike signatures (10), wrong accusations (20) and town project donations. |
These numbers were tuned by simulating whole seasons: a busy server burns roughly half of the coins it mints, and a small group of alt accounts burns most of what it farms.
Pricing your words
Wordlord uses self-assessed prices (economists call it a Harberger tax). You pick your word's price, you pay tax on that price, and anyone may buy the word from you at that price plus the fee. Overprice and the tax eats you; underprice and someone takes it. The best price is what the word is really worth to you.
Rent limits
Rent is generous for real conversation and stingy for spam:
- One person pays rent on one word at most once every 1 hour.
- A single message pays rent on at most 3 words.
- If the same person keeps paying you in a day, it fades: the first 4 payments are full, then half, then a quarter, then nothing until tomorrow.
- Saying your own word pays nothing.
- After 300 coins of rent in a day in one server (or 8% of its daily budget in a big server, whichever is more), your rent there drops to 25%.
- Each server can pay out about 50 coins a day per active, real person in it, plus 10 more for every hour each of them chats today (up to 8 hours a person). Chattier servers have bigger budgets, and one message an hour counts as much as a hundred. If yesterday's rent asked for more than the budget, every word pays the same smaller share today, so the budget lasts all day instead of running out by the afternoon.
Busy words pay more
A word's rent per use grows with how many different people say it. Once more than 3 people have said it today (or yesterday, if more did then), each doubling of that crowd adds 30%to its rent, up to 2.5x. A word the whole server says is worth far more than a word one friend repeats, and spam from a handful of accounts barely moves it.
Coming next
- A player marketplace: sell words, make offers, lease words, post bounties and tip. planned
- Global servers and global leaderboards. soon