Real life has entered Pirates of the Burning Sea as developers analyze patterns appearing in the in-game economy. Devs have deployed an economic stimulus package. See what's on the way to aid a struggling PotBS economy below.

Over the last several months, the Design team has been gathering data about the economy from a wide variety of sources. We looked at how goods were produced, how often they were made, how they were exchanged, where they were distributed, and how those goods were consumed. We looked at topics in the forums and survey results and tried to match them up with hard data.

The Economy was designed with one main goal in mind: large scale construction of ships. It is successful at this goal but only in a certain context. Large Societies can effectively plan out huge production chains with efficient output and virtually guarantee they have the goods they need at any time. There are some byproducts to this: a well executed production chain has very little left over to sell to outside customers. It also limits the flexibility of individual players in the chain, as they must perform specific tasks at regular intervals, in order to maintain the flow of ships and not waste labor.

However, a healthy Economy is not just about end goods. Merriam-Webster defines an economy as "a social system of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services".

What we found is that we had lots of production (making ships!) and lots of consumption (sinking ships!), but very little exchange and almost no distribution. The Economy works extremely well, provided you can sustain the infrastructure necessary to produce goods in large quantities. But if you can't make it to the top of the food chain, you're stuck with a small market and no help from the auction house.

At the very core, the problem with the Economy is the availability of goods.

Money is not really a problem - most players are not treating the Economy as a way to make money. Players are making money from missions and then trying to use that money to create goods. Investment is not a problem - economic players are building and using structures to make goods. The infrastructure for economic activity is present. What players are finding is that they can make item A and item B, but they cannot turn A and B into desired good C via the auction house.

We discussed a few approaches to this problem. There were other potential solutions we considered, including some that made the Economy an optional secondary game system. Even though many solutions had positive aspects to them, what we felt was really necessary was to streamline production and make goods more available to everyone.
Approach 1:

Assume that people want to use the auction house to turn the goods they're making into goods they want. We make it easier for them to do so by streamlining the process of listing items for sale in the auction house and increasing the duration items can be kept in the auction house for sale. We take this approach if we think the Economy can self-correct.
Approach 2:

Assume that people have no interest in manufacturing outside their immediate needs and the difficulty of fulfilling their own needs is the central problem they're facing. Streamline manufacturing, remove many of the steps necessary to create items and lower the labor costs for all recipes so that a casual economic player can create his own outfitting and ships with little involvement from the other players.

Approach 1 is a slower, more long term solution and portions of it are still important. Approach 2 is a short to medium term solution, aimed at getting more people involved immediately.

Read the specifics of how the package will be implemented at the link above.