Exponential Claim Fee Growth Quickly Prices Out New Players, Leading to Game Stalling

Description

• Normally, a percentage-based increase mechanism is meant to gently scale costs over time. However, due to repeated multiplicative updates to claimFee, the current formula results in exponential growth rather than linear.

• Explain the specific issue or problem in one or more sentences

• This causes the fee to grow by a percentage of itself each time a player claims the throne, resulting in the following pattern.

• newFee = initialFee × (1 + p%)^n

• Where:

  • initialFee is the starting claim fee

  • p% is feeIncreasePercentage / 100

  • n is the number of throne claims

Risk

Likelihood:

• This will occur inevitably with any non-zero feeIncreasePercentage.

• The more popular the game becomes (i.e., more players join), the faster the fee escalates.

Impact:

• After a few rounds, the fee becomes prohibitively expensive.

  • At 20% increase, the fee doubles in ~4 rounds

  • At 50% increase, the fee doubles every 2 rounds

• Players will drop off rapidly, leaving the game inactive or inaccessible.

• Core economic mechanics fail due to unsustainable growth.

Proof of Concept

Recommended Mitigation