Andrei Tudor

As I mentioned, shops are part of our job. So first of all, we want to make sure that every game loop, every career in the game is accessible. So every activity, I want it to be accessible. If you want to trade, you're always going to find a tractor beam, you're going to find a ship that has a cargo grid. If you want to mine, you're going to find an attachment for that multi-tool, you're going to find a Prospector. More than that, we try to keep everything tied to narrative, so you're going to find burritos in Stanton, and you're going to find rats on a stick in Pyro, and sometimes we just have fun with it. For example, Connor suggested that every farm in Pyro should have shotguns. He's from Texas, by the way.

And I think I sent a thread to Nick the other day about how, because Hurston was so salvage-focused and everything, maybe Hurston should have salvage items in their stores and whatnot. There's a lot of thought that goes into positioning where something goes, not just how much it costs.

Exactly.

Yeah, and that's actually the kind of thing that the narrative team would have a lot to talk about in this SCL as well. The narrative team has all of the history of the 'verse to date and also all the stuff coming. And so they have a pretty good idea of the context of each location. So when it comes to what goes in what shops where, it's about bringing life to the stories that we already have by letting players, like Andrei said, access the game loops that are appropriate in each of those contexts, but without stopping people from playing things. So enabling game loops that fit the narrative.

We are always using art, but there's a bit of technique that we apply to this, actually many, many techniques. Of course, we first use an algorithmic approach, otherwise it would be impossible to put a price or a value on all the thousands and thousands of items we have in the game, and again, those items in different shops at different price points. Once we have that value from the algorithm, then we start to apply our own intuition, we apply our expertise, we apply the experience we have from playing the game, and we do, let's call it a sanity check, whether we think that the algorithm is giving us the right value or not. And then we adjust the price or we adjust the algorithm depending on the situation. Nick uses this algorithm a lot, actually more than myself, because with FPS you have a lot of different items, you have guns and you have armors, and maybe he can tell us a bit about how he used the algorithm.

So it's like you say, the number of items and the number of shops and the number of locations, and then just even thinking about the future of the game, when that's obviously going to be even broader, you can't price everything individually, and it wouldn't be sensible to price everything individually. And in fact, everything is connected. All the prices of everything are connected. I don't think that's going to come as a surprise to anyone. But if you think of something like ammo, for example, you take assault rifle ammo. Well, that's going to be priced relative to the stopping power or possibly the desirability of the assault rifle itself, which has its own price on it. That's related to, say, the price of pistols or the price of railguns. Railguns is an interesting one. The decision to make railguns and missile launchers so you can't buy them in shops is a deliberate decision to encourage not just NPC shop trading; it's really, really important to us to have vibrant player trading. And we don't currently have the full systems to support that, but you guys are really resourceful and you're going to make it happen. We want to encourage that. Railguns are not available in shops, but they're absolutely available around the 'verse, and they have a value, and everyone knows that value.

Sometimes me and Nick will talk about it, we'll look at the black market. The org that I'm in, we do gun running and we sell. And not that I've infiltrated, but we use those data points from our org and how we do gun running to also influence it, because obviously we put our worth on it based on the effort that we put up front for you to get it, but then you put your own worth on it for you guys to get profit, and we take that sort of stuff into account as well.

It's super important. If you take something like the Antium armor set, for example, that has a value, it fits in with the algorithm, it makes sense, but the Antium armor set has a completely separate value to the people in the game because of its rarity, because of its availability in content. And that's why it's all related. So certain items are only available through content. There's a whole content waterfall of items coming from the dollar store all the way through into the game. And there's an appropriate level of when those things are introduced to various parts of the content in the game, et cetera, et cetera. And it's all related. And then on the other side of that is mission rewards and sandbox gameplay. And this is where EVR comes in, so that we can balance the risk and the reward of those kinds of things. And essentially both of those come together in the middle. Like I say, in the future, we want you to have a better view into how all of these things are related to each other. That's future work with UI and back-end data, so you can make meaningful choices about how you want to spend your money on particular resources or crafting or whatever it is in the future. Even though it's quite simplistic right now, that's not where we want it to end. And we need the player economy.

Wow, that's a multi-layered question. It's such a short and simple question, but yeah, there are many, many layers. It's not the comprehensive economy we'd like to have in the future, but I think we are step by step getting there. I can give you the big picture of how we laid the foundation. So for example, we started in 2024 by doing a full balance of as many systems and items as we could. So probably you saw different prices for ships, for FPS items, for armors, for components, for fuel, for the rewards for the missions, for commodities, trade routes and many, many more that I cannot even remember off the top of my head. This year we are focusing on big data, we are focusing on tools, we are focusing on the back-end work that needs to be done and those things that need to be built before we get to that. And here insert your adjective: dynamic, live, responsive, all those things that we want to put into the economy, the economy that we all dream of having and the economy that I joined the company to build. But we need to do that background work first, and you're not going to see those results in the game for some time. Only after that can we focus on the UI and the system that is going to expose all that work to the player. So until then we are doing stuff like, you could see still this year, trade routes being adjusted. You're going to see commodities changing price according to narrative and according to the events that we put in the game. We are going to offer more ways for you to extract value from all the content that we introduce to the game. So yes, you're always going to see changes. We have an economy. But step by step, we are going to get to that economy that we all dream of having in the future. I hope that answers the question.

There's not a good way or a bad way to do it. We explore different ways. So talking specifically about vehicles, for example, manufacturers. It's something that we look into. We could take each individual vehicle or ship and disassemble it into its stats. How fast does it accelerate? What is its maximum speed and mass and everything? But because that is subject to change, we don't want to tweak those prices every time a small change is made. So for that reason, we take those factors that we know are already decided on. For example, I mentioned already manufacturers. Some manufacturers put more care into their work. They use better materials. They use better technology. They use alien technology that is harder to get. That informs the price. Obviously, if a ship is larger, it's going to cost more.

So manufacturer is one tenet. What else is a factor?

The size of the ship and its focus. So the same way a tank is more expensive than a lorry, the same way we'd expect a combat ship to have better technology, better armor, better stats on average than a truck.

I watch your show, so I see that you have a Pisces there. The Rescue one: because we want to make it more affordable, and because I see myself playing as a medic in the future, I made it a bit more affordable. So it's going to be in the range of half a million UEC, Alpha UEC.

So you're saying something like the Pisces might actually go down as far as the cost?

Yes. The Pisces Rescue is going to be a lot more affordable than it was. I can give the example of my favorite ship. You can argue about that in the chat. It's the Arrow. I really like the Arrow. It's going to be in the range of about 2 million UEC. It's a combat ship, it's a high-performance ship, so obviously somebody that can drive that ship works very hard to get that ship, and again, they can be proud of owning that ship.