Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - The Economy of Spaceships

That's a really good question. And it's also a really loaded question, I think. There are a lot of things that go into that. The economy team is here in ATX and we have a lot of discussion about that kind of thing. I'd say that we can't really say exactly which of these ships will cost a certain amount of time, but I can talk to you about what kind of things go into the price of the ships and what goes into the economy behind them where players will be able to buy these ships. So when we look at the ships, one of the things that we're looking at right now is not necessarily the UEC or the dollars to earn it, but we're trying to figure out the time to earn it. So we look at items in such a way that we don't say, oh, it's a certain amount of UEC or a certain amount of this or that. We look and say, oh, it should be three hours to earn this thing, or it should be one hour of effort. And of course, if you're a better or worse player, that amount of time that you'll spend will be more or less, right? You can't just sit around and log into the game and do the wave emote for hours on end and still make the money required to earn whatever item you're looking for.

So a lot of things go into what causes the ship to have a lot of effort. One of the things that we're really concerned about right now is making sure that the progression is correct. We put out these ship prices to the community, and we had surprising feedback, actually. Some people thought that the prices were too much and a reasonable majority thought that the prices actually worked. So the community is kind of divided on this based on the feedback that we've been watching in the Evocati and on the forums on the website. But really, there's a lot more to the economy that we have yet to add to the game. That's part of the thing that players are probably feeling: right now we put these ships out with the amount of effort that we expect the game to take.

Today?

Well, actually, we delivered them with what it will end up being in the future. That's a very hard target to hit because there's a lot of things that aren't in the game currently that will be in the game then. And the reasoning behind that is that the economy has a lot of things going on. And at some point we have to say, look, we've got to aim for what the game is going to be, not for what the game is. And that's why we made the decision for this particular thing. We are looking into ways to kind of mitigate the effect of having a very expensive, fully completed game kind of price on these ships right now with very alpha ways to earn them. So that's one of the things that we're looking into, and we're currently looking into the best way to do that.

So you're saying have these ships at what we anticipate their final costs to be and then adjust the ways that we can earn money in the Alpha right now to an accelerated rate, so that people don't have to nickel and dime their way up to get them, because there's only so many different opportunities to earn money in the game today.

Exactly. Well, consider the Stanton system, right? This is a relatively secure solar system with very few risky business opportunities to engage in. There should be a very low risk, low reward kind of thing going on in the Stanton system. Now whether or not that's actually the case right now is a different story, but that's kind of the idea of this. And so we don't want to have these low-level courier jobs being the kind of thing that will finance a Hammerhead. So the incomes that players see currently in the game are not sufficient to earn these ships, and we know, because that's what this system is about. This system is not the kind of thing where you can start up a company and do that. We have to look at the big picture and see what kind of things are going to happen in the very far strategic view of Star Citizen, not just what the game currently offers.

I am the king of spreadsheets. I have so many spreadsheets that do so many amazing things. It kind of has a negative connotation sometimes. I know that people like to diss on spreadsheet designers that don't open the game, but the truth is that we do open the game. We do experience it. One of the problems with being an economy designer is that anything that I do in the economy is doomed to be anecdotal, right? I can't go in and say, oh, well, how much is the cost of this material going over, shipping from place A to place B? Well, if I did that, I'm not giving an accurate assessment of the system, because I'm not playing in a server with hundreds of other people at the same time, right? So it's something that we have to rely heavily on the community feedback to figure out: how does our economy work? How does it feel? What are players actually experiencing? Because there's a big difference between what we hope the players experience and what they actually end up experiencing. And the only way that we can figure that out is by listening to the forums, listening to player input, seeing how the economy system is performing in the game.

And using this thing that we have, this live environment in the middle of our development, to our advantage. I mean, we all have to log in. We do these regular playtests. We do these organized events where all the developers get in and play. Most people have no idea it's happening. But it's important, because we have to know the cost of a gallon of milk, what the cost of a cart of Big Benny's is. We have to keep that in our minds at all times to know what the player experience is. But then we go home and we watch the Twitch streams and the YouTube videos and all this stuff and see the player experience. And we get to do that during our development, and that's such an amazing tool. And I have to imagine that's a big part of your workflow.

Yes, that's right. The economy team deals with the design of large groups of people, like how the player base as a whole reacts to the game. And that's very difficult with a live environment, but also very rewarding. It's really cool to be able to look at feedback and react to it.

Well, I could show you various amounts of interesting spreadsheets. I'm not going to show you one that shows you what all the best trade routes are, which I have. But there are other interesting spreadsheets that show kind of the breakdown of what the ships are, which I also can't show you, now that I think about it.

And for those wondering, "I thought this was open development, why can't you show?" It's because it's temporary, in-flux information. And because it's constantly in flux and constantly changing, we do try to be responsible with the stuff that we show you. Maybe at a future date, when things are more locked in, we can crack open that shell a little bit more. But right now, while it's still in such a malleable form, we're not.

Sadly, I can't. But another reason that we don't show all these spreadsheets is just because part of the gameplay, we feel, is finding out what some of this content is, right? And providing all the answers really shortcuts a lot of that entertainment of exploration that Star Citizen is supposed to be about.

So one of the things we take into account is the performance of different things compared to each other. There's a couple things going on. One is the quantity of items that go into it. And the other is kind of the performance of the ship. In the end, we want a better performing ship to be more expensive. That just makes logical sense all across the board, right? Typical game design 101. It's almost typical life 101. A lot of our stuff is translating life into what a video game would do.

So what we end up doing is taking things like how many weapon hardpoints this ship has and then relating those into part of the value of the ship. So a ship that has more hardpoints ends up costing more. Or a ship that has more power plant sockets, that will go into consideration. A ship that has more seats for crew members, right? A ship that has more room for cargo. All of those things get abstracted into kind of these value points that at the end of the day can put actual value numbers on each of these ships where otherwise they couldn't be compared. Because it's very difficult to, say, compare the value of a shield generator to the value of 20 cargo slots on your ship. That's kind of tough stuff to do. So what we do is we abstract that away, we turn it into value, and then we compare those things to each other. And then we also put in how much material costs we think will go into those ships, and that's how we get luxury ships like the Constellation Phoenix costing a lot more, because the materials that go into that end up costing a lot more.

Yes. The eventual goal is to make those things be one and the same. However, we want the Phoenix Constellation to be a luxury ship and to have really good reasons why it's a luxury ship, like to have all of the things that go into making a shield generator be a better shield generator. That all comes from materials that are mined on various planets, that are so hard to get, that are hazardous to store, that are difficult to process or whatever. And then behind the scenes, those are all put together in such a way, with technology and different manufacturing plants and different manufacturers, that actually translates from the effort that it takes into the value of the thing. So we don't want to just have shield generators where this one's better. Why does it cost more? Because it's better. It's kind of a circular argument. What we want to do is really link that to the entire economic chain, all the way down to the rocks that these things are mined from. We want those to have better qualities that influence and inform the performance of the items and then go into actually being better on those ships. And then when you look at the ship, in the end, it's just a bunch of materials and a bunch of processes applied to a ship, and a bunch of labor tacked on, that comes out to be the price of the ship. So that's what we're working towards. We're working towards all of that making perfect logical sense. It's going to take a long time to do, but that's the goal. That's what Chris wants. That's what we want. So that's what we're aiming for.

We try to make them tangible is the answer, I suppose. It's a very challenging task where we constantly have to look at all the things that add value, and we have to really assess what the value actually comes from. For instance, while doing the ships, one of the things that we scored was the arc range of different guns that were available on it. And that's kind of hard to put into a flat number, because that's very much a value judgment kind of a thing, but we ended up putting a number on it, so that you can definitively say this thing has better arc compared to this ship. The joke going around the office is that Jake frequently puts value on human life or love or other things that should never have numbers. That's the kind of thing that I regularly have to put numbers on. That's kind of the name of the game for my job.

It's something that we've been thinking about for a long time, and I have had it on my mind for a long time. With 3.0, we did a really big push to increase the level of persistence in the game. And this included some work to get, for instance, loose item persistence working in ships, which was necessary to get cargo working. However, we've known for a long time that we have this kind of trick that we're relying on, the giant magic bag of holding that the player has, where you just kind of stuff everything and you just kind of pull it out. Where was it? And so, yes, physical inventory is where we're headed. So we want to have it to where you don't have this magical place where all your guns are stored. You have it on your person, or maybe in a bag that you're holding. And if it's not there, then, well, you don't have physical access to it, so you can't equip it. You may own it, it may be in some location that you own or a ship that you own, but that doesn't mean that you can equip it. And we want to start using the ships, the ship storage, habs, physical locations, eventually that the players own themselves, as the kind of physical storage.

However, this kind of starts to get into something that we're also working towards, which is global persistence, which itself is pretty closely tied in with server streaming and server meshing. So actually these are big topics that we're starting to look towards, now that we've got object container streaming starting to look good on the client. And now that we're considering what server-side streaming needs to get working, actually one of the big things is global persistence. So we need to be able to stream out parts of the universe on the server, and in order to stream it in correctly, that means that place needs to be persisted out correctly. So that actually is going to help for physical persistence and physical inventory, because that means that if I leave something somewhere, say in an outpost, it's still going to be there if I come back next week, potentially, unless somebody took it.

So the plans are, we're going to do it. We have some ideas. We're going to increase our global persistence. That said, some fine details, like can I use my PMA app in the mobiGlas if I'm standing next to the locker? Do I have to physically take it out? Things like that, those details are still a little bit in the air. I think as we get closer to working on it, we're going to hammer down those kinds of details, but we're working on the big tech that's necessary to deliver on it. And it's not something that we've forgotten about at all.

So I imagine it's something that people are going to want to keep an eye on the public roadmap for, as far as when they can expect things like global persistence and then the physicalized inventories to make their way into the Star Citizen Persistent Universe.

The other thing that I'll add, just quickly, is that in addition to the core system work to get the persistence behavior working, there's also a lot of other miscellaneous work surrounding it. So that includes any kind of item game code that needs to be written, for maybe lockers, and then also actor code that needs to be written to do any kind of the carrying logic to pass things back and forth. We have some of that, but I think there'll be more, as well as some animation work that's going to be necessary to do smooth locomotion in the transitions with items being passed around. There's work to go around.