Now that you've said that, it's gonna be super hard not to try to push the first few worlds towards fallout :D

Let the alpha begin!

Path of Exile has a really good solution to both the opt-in research and the currency.

Opt-in fresh world competitions where players agree to sit a test and be studied. I can't imagine it being a good move to subject paying gamers to studies without an option otherwise.

Consumable random rewards as currency works really well in Path of Exile too.

The randomness means that it has an economically independent value like gold but it also has a natural deflation behaviour - if people get too many of them, they will burn through them trying to get a specific outcome from the random reward.
(Usually you end up stock piling them to get a 6-link but hey, I had "too many" when I burnt 300 fusing orbs that time.)

The kind of thing they affect creates a natural hierarchy of denominations as well.
Exchange rates: http://www.poeex.info/

It seems like there'd be lots of good options for consumables in Eco.

Just in case you guys are new to Git, I find everyone has a different way of using it. I'd been console only for years until I started a job at a place with 300 odd devs and GitHub enterprise. Here's some of the stuff we do...

If it's GitHub then it's generally GitHubFlow, a variant of GitFlow which includes pull requests.

Learn to rebase your local updates - it makes the history much more readable and will make your pull requests way smaller (when you encounter this pain, you will understand what I mean).

<code>git rebase -i <target branch></code> will start an interactive rebase (the best kind) by bringing up a textfile with instructions - it's worth just trying it out and seeing what happens (with a test repo).

<code>git rebase --ignore-date <current base branch></code> will rewrite all of your commits to now so they're all nicely grouped together in the history.

A lot of people don't seem to twig that any git repo directory is a valid target for a remote - super handy for working on two versions of code or exchanging code without the rigmarole.

It seems like GitHub Desktop is the GUI tool to use these days. GUIs help because they conventionalise merge, rebase and conflict commit messages.

https://github.com/nvie/gitflow - the console tools for git (hub) flow by the guy who came up with it.
If you use this, you'll get automatic release notes simply through the way it integrates with Git's tag system and how GitHub presents them.

https://github.com/GitTools/GitVersion - .NET tools for getting different formats of code version from the git history - super useful for CI

Change your git text editor and diff tool to something you might actually want to use.
kdiff3 is decent and pre-configured if you're after a free diff tool.

Get line endings sorted in a .gitattributes file and get a white-list style .gitignore because it is very hard to get rid of unwanted files once they make their way into the repo.

PuTTY is pretty key in Windows for not having to enter the password for your ssh key all the time.