REPAIR COSTS
Paying to restore degraded equipment and structures — durability loss charged in gold at the anvil, materials consumed patching walls, escalating maintenance on damaged vehicles.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN MMO · SURVIVAL · RPG · SOULSLIKE
World of Warcraft's repair bill is the classic gold sink (death and wipes literally tax the economy, which is the design's actual purpose), Dark Souls' early entries charged souls for equipment upkeep, survival bases demand material repairs after every raid (Rust's upkeep tax on large bases is deliberate sprawl control), and vehicle sims price crash damage in credits. Designers charge for repair because it's the economy's most defensible drain: unlike vendor prices players can refuse, repair costs scale automatically with activity — more fighting means more wear means more gold leaving the world — making it inflation control that self-adjusts, and one that doubles as a soft difficulty tax (failure damages gear more, so struggling costs more, which is regressive and needs watching). Repair also converts durability from annoyance into decision: when fixing the legendary sword costs meaningfully, players field-triage which gear deserves maintenance, carry backups, and feel equipment as owned physical property rather than permanent stat blocks. At the base scale, repair costs after raids make defense quality an investment calculation. Key decisions: cost basis (flat, value-proportional, or damage-proportional — value-proportional makes best-in-class gear expensive to love), where repair happens (anywhere versus anvils-in-town, which makes wear a dungeon-length pacing clock), and the failure floor — can gear break permanently, and does zero-durability mean weaker or useless. Pitfall: the regressive death spiral — repair costs that spike when players are already losing (die, pay, re-die with worse gear you can't afford to fix) compound failure into quitting; the sink works best taxing the comfortable, so caps, mercy floors, or free basic repairs keep the drain off the drowning.
SEEN IN
- WORLD OF WARCRAFT
- RUST
- DARK SOULS II