Star Citizen Live Q&A: Making Missions II-2

Nick Wardle · Economy team

No, you won't have to load 101 one SCU boxes. You might have to load six one SCU boxes. But the missions are designed so that the amount of SCU and the size of the box is based on the ideal ship for the grade of the mission. So you can do the mission in one run if you have the appropriately sized ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So the ideal ship for the grade of the mission. So you're saying that each of these missions are designed with a certain size or scope of ship in mind?

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

When we go over them and we're planning out the grades and the difficulties, we will look to go, right, this one is one that we class for, say, a Caterpillar. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to have a Caterpillar to do it. It's just kind of the grading that we do. So we'll go Caterpillar, that means this much SCU. You could do it in a Pisces if you want. It's just going to take quite a bit longer and you might have to leave the back door of your Pisces open with a 32 SCU stuck out of it. But that's how you want to play the game.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

It's all in the contract details. So before, we just used to have the description on the contract and we used to have to expose a lot of information to it, and it always kind of restricted the granularity of the information we can do. With the cargo hauling update, we got the ability to pre-generate all of the objectives. So when you go in your mobiGlas to accept the contract, you'll see the description, which is the narrative for the mission, on the left, and on the right you'll see all of your delivery itinerary and you'll see every single commodity and you'll see the amount of cargo you have to haul. Now as for the specific sizes of boxes, unfortunately at the moment that isn't something we can display, so you won't actually know that it's going to give you a 16 SCU box and give you four of them to meet the sort of max you've got to haul. But that is somewhere we want to go for the future.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

No. Not currently. It's something that we'd like to get to on the design side, on the mission design side, because it gives more ability for the player to pick and know how they fit. Say you're doing some emergent economy trading with your commodities, right? And you've got space for a little bit of extra cargo and you're going to the same place. You've spotted a mission that goes to that place where you're going to sell your goods emergently. You might be like, right, well, if they were all in two SCU boxes, I could fit more in. So we want to get to that direction.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

No. So the hauling missions as they are, these are tracked, contracted goods. So this company already owns these commodities and they're asking you to transport them from A to B. However, what that open question is kind of alluding to is more resource gathering missions. So we will have missions where you are asked to just get 10 Kopion horns, or this mining, this refinery just wants X amount of raw iron, and the player can get them by their own means. For example, you could go mine it yourself. You could pirate it and use it for the mission and things like that. So in the future, we will have missions that allow you to get the commodities by your own means.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

But not in 3.24?

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

No.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

So the current hauling missions are actually using the same reputation system that's in the game at the moment, so similar to the mercenary missions. So you see your progression in Delphi like you do right now. In the future, there is a whole new system coming, which I think we mentioned on SCL, being designed by Luke Presley. And economy's been involved in that as well, because EVR handles any kind of reward, whether that's UEC or rep or whatever it is. So that will be a bit like, EVR is holistic for UEC, it will also be holistic for reputation. But that's not for 3.24, that's coming later.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

So this is something I know we're going to get into a bit later, but essentially the simplest form we look at it is there's hauling and there's courier. Hauling is large volume moving of commodities, and courier is meant to be like you're the Amazon guy, right? You've got maybe five boxes, but they're all personal. They've all been directly requested by someone. So they're the sort of two delineations we're going with. And they're all within cargo missions. Yeah, they're all within sort of the delivery general scope of it. So there's delivery: hauling, courier.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

It's just a statement, yes. So I guess the person doesn't like theme parks. Theme parks are meant to be fun, so I guess you don't want a fun game, right? No. No, how we see missions is, missions are, and I know people take the piss currently, but missions are meant to be more narrative-driven stories in the game, but we also use them as a vehicle to introduce players to the more emergent aspects of the world. So the hauling missions are meant to show players a connection of commodities between locations, which then, now they know that this place trades in iron and this place wants iron, and they can look at the commodity terminals and go, well, that sells for this much, buys for this much, I could actually make a profit if I ignore the mission and just do it without the mission. That's what it's there for, it's to expose a gameplay route. It's something we found very successful when we first did salvage, and Thorsten Lehman loves me for this, but when we first did salvage and we put out the hull scraping in its first release, we saw some people play it, but it wasn't as much of a boom. But when we released the missions, which acted as an easy way to show the players the salvage gameplay, we saw a huge spike in people playing salvage. And that's just generally how we look at missions. It's to introduce players to the sandbox nature of our game easily. So then if they wish to break away from missions, just start doing sandbox things, they can.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

And I mean, you don't need a mission to ask someone to escort you either, so it's not like they have to have an escort mission. So if you're thinking about the balance between missions and emergent gameplay, then hauling missions with an escort is a good example of those two things working together.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Yeah, data running is its own beast. I'm not going to touch that. But all of the other commodities, definitely so. The future idea is we want these kind of certifications, gradings, where you have to sort of show that you can haul radioactive goods or haul livestock and look after it appropriately to then sort of unlock those missions. But yeah, that is the plan. That's something we want. We want you to be able to haul these different things because they all introduce their own challenge, right? Whereas a simple box mission from A to B might be quite simple and you think, well, I just sit in my ship. When you're like, right, now I've got a whole livestock, the atmosphere of your ship's got to be right so they can breathe the correct mix of oxygen, air and nitrogen, things like that. You've got to make sure that you feed them, stuff like that. That's the idea of what we go towards. Things like if we have perishable goods like food, you've got to make sure that it stays cold so that they are frozen. You make sure that their crate stays at a certain temperature so it can prolong the lifespan of the food so it doesn't go rotten by the time you get to your destination. Things like that.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Hopefully, yeah. It's something that we've talked about and it's something that we'd like, the ability to go between two outposts, but there's a lot of things required to make that a good experience, along with the aspect of why would you do it? There will be people who are just like, I want to drive a ground vehicle, I'm going to do a delivery between A and B, but then you'll get Economy Nick here going, but it's not efficient, you're not earning the money in the best way, you're taking all your time.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

So those things need transporting, obviously, but the hauling missions are specifically for the large-scale logistics. So the hauling missions tend to generate the kinds of quantities that need to be transported at large scale. But like you have said, and like Elliot has just said before, different commodities, different items could be transported with different types of logistic mission, let's call them.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Yeah, definitely. It's something that courier missions would definitely tie into because they are more personal requests. So that would be a courier type thing.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

So that won't necessarily be what happens in the hauling career specifically, because of the volumes in hauling, but that doesn't mean that those kinds of high-risk, small-volume, high-value commodities won't need trading and won't have their own place in logistics.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

So, we do have player beacons, and I know what the current state of that is, but that is a system... To answer the question, the beacon system is something which provides for players to contract other players, and it's a system we will be looking to expand upon in the future. Personally, I think that this side of the economy is fundamental, given that we are having a hybrid economy, so player-driven systems.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, it really is. Like I said, I'm going on 10 years here now. I've had 100 conversations with Tony and with everybody else who's involved with this stuff. And I cannot overstate how important the player-driven aspect of our economy is to us. It's just things like the player beacon system and stuff, it's just waiting for the eye of development, Sauron, to turn its eye back to it, resources to free up, new technologies to work on. A lot of this stuff, you don't want to put in a whole bunch of work when you know this other work that you also have to do is going to invalidate that. So we're forced to kind of sit there and grin and bear certain aspects of this while we're waiting for other new technologies and other new works to come online.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

So the short answer is yes. And when we are ready to talk more about that, we absolutely will. You will be the first to know about it. And I mean, the reason we're doing all this now is because we don't want you to have to wait any longer for this kind of gameplay, but everything we're doing now, even though we're doing it manually, we'll be able to plug into the implementation of StarSim when it's ready. So we're not wasting work, but we just wanted to get this gameplay in so that you don't have to wait any longer. But yes, the short answer is yes.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You make a good point. All that work to spec out StarSim and to design it, to figure it out, that's there. So while it's still hardening and becoming ready, we can sit there and say, OK, this plugs into this, this plugs into this. We just fill in our own values based on the spreadsheets and stuff that you showed on SCL last week. And so we can still build missions without having to wait for it. And then when it's ready, plug right in.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

That's a good question. I think there's a timeout, right?

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Yeah. So missions as they currently are, they generate based on eligibility and then they stay around for an amount of time. So if there's a cargo hauling mission, it will stay around for, I don't know, maybe 30 minutes. And if no one accepts it, it shuts itself down and will try to generate a new one. There might be changes to that in the future with maybe StarSim that Nick might want to talk about or might not want to, depending. But right now they just shut down and then they'll regenerate after a period of time.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

So, yeah, what missions are available and what opportunities they present to players is a balance that we're going to have to judge as we go with StarSim, because it is a hybrid economy, and that means that player-driven is really important, but we don't want parts of the universe to be abandoned or to lack input if there aren't enough players there. So it will be player-driven, but it will be system-maintained.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Yes and no. Yes in the future, no right now. The performance isn't great in landing zones, as I'm sure many players are aware right now. We used to have some missions that were in landing zones, for those veterans who can remember.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

3.2?

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Yeah, like in 3.2. I'm sure Salty Mike will be sat there going, I remember that, and start moaning about something else. Yes, we used to have them, but they used to take like five minutes to spawn, and that's because a box gets put in a spawn queue, and then if people are doing stuff, like I'm trying to spawn my 890 Jump or whatever, the box is kind of a lower priority. So they took ages and it was just a really bad player experience. So we turned them off for the time being. But when performance at landing zones is improved and we have a bit more stability there, by all means, because the hopeful idea would be that you wake up in a landing zone and have things to do. So it makes it feel like that landing zone is alive and you've got things to do. Pick up this trash, deliver someone's pizza, things like that.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

Yes, we know. Sorry about that. The reason is because in order to make them more reflective of how we actually want them, we actually need some more development on them. And everybody is very busy. So it is a priority, and hopefully coming soon™. We had to get something to work in a tier zero so that we could at least get the hauling missions out, and we will be working on fixing that as soon as resources are available to fix that. But it is actually worth noting, just from a time calculation point of view, that the times when calculating the reward on the hauling missions don't use the auto-loading times, they use the manual loading times, except for the Hull C, because that is always auto-loading.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

From a mission design point, you can. This isn't something I want to limit. I want you to choose. I mean, it was way ago, but back when we used to have the old delivery system where you could chain your own cargo missions together, that was exactly the point. Players could have this huge ship and take quite a lot of small jumps and then go, oh, this one goes to this location and then I have a pickup from there and it goes back over here and I can make my own round delivery loop. From just reading contracts and understanding where everything is locality-wise, I know that this outpost is right next to this outpost, so I'll drop off here and I'll do a quick hop, grab it and make my time more efficient. But sure, Nick might have some other reasons as to why not. It's not the most efficient route. You're wasting your time.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

No, no. I mean, you're absolutely right. Obviously, not only can you do it, but you definitely should be doing it. The question isn't so much whether you should or shouldn't be using a C2. Why would I ever use a small or a medium ship? Maybe that's all you have. Maybe you only have a small or medium ship. Not everyone has C2s like Salty Mike. So if you only have a small or medium ship, then we wanted to make sure that you still had access to the hauling gameplay. The other thing to bear in mind, of course, is that there are only so many of each type of mission in each part of space. If you are in a very trafficked part of space and there are more people who are doing hauling and they have small or medium ships, they may have taken all of those small and medium-sized contracts. So there may be one or two you could grab, but you aren't going to be able to fill a whole C2 with them if you're in a heavily trafficked part of space where everyone else is scrabbling over those same missions. And then, of course, there are the more economy-based answers. So can you make an efficient delivery route? If you have to go back and forth and forth and back and out of atmosphere and back up again, and sometimes you quantum, sometimes you're using hydrogen, fuel costs alone might make it not economically viable to do eight different small missions when you could just do two medium or two large ones.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Also, depending on where you're going, a C2 is a really big target. If you're seeing a C2 fly between big commerce areas, people are going to start to figure out that that's what folks are doing, and those become bigger targets. And imagine losing not just one mission's worth of cargo, but four simultaneous missions' worth of cargo to four different providers.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

Absolutely. That is a really good point. I mean, imagine there is a trade lane, a small trade lane, which is traditionally Nomads and maybe Cutlasses or whatever, Hull As, hauling this lane. And maybe there is a pirate lurking. If they see a C2, which one are they going to go for? The Titan or the C2? So there are considerations. But by all means, take multiple missions. Be as efficient as you can.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

And the rep hit to that: if you do get caught out, there's four missions that are going to fail, and you get a rep hit times four. You might have a bit where it's like, right, I can't play cargo missions for the next hour or so.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

Yeah, absolutely. This is not proprietary tech. This is the way that you would approach how to balance the player's activities versus the reward that they should be given in any game. I mean, if Star Citizen were a traditional single-player game and we just had characters with levels, then it would be relatively easy to work out how much gold we should give you, depending whether you're a level 12 or 50, 70, whatever it is. But because Star Citizen is not only an MMO of a very large scale, but we also have a mixture of structured missions and sandbox gameplay, and we don't have a traditional leveling system per se, then EVR, which is, for people who didn't see the SCL or the ISC, effort versus reward. So it's basically time and difficulty on one side of the equation. How long it takes you to do something, how difficult it is to do it, will always be equivalent to the amount of reward that you will get for the time and the difficulty. So that could be UEC, that could be reputation, that could be the amount of loot in an area. And it allows us just to balance the universe, whether that's a mission or an area like a distribution center or sandbox gameplay like piracy, for example. It's really important that people doing any kind of activity feel that they are receiving appropriate reward for the effort they're putting in. That's part of what makes the game fun. So Jared actually had a brilliant description of it in the last SCL: a par for the course. It's not the final number, it's a design discussion, and it creates an expectation for what the reward level should be for the player activity. And there are additional factors that we need to consider, like for example, how do you handle the risk of players stealing the cargo that is given to them in the hauling missions? So when we're designing the hauling missions and the reward for that, we have to consider what to do about that. And that isn't directly a question that's answered by EVR. It's a question that has to be answered by design, around the mission design. And all of these conversations happen with the mission designers and the economy. We work really closely together so that we can apply it to all of the different behaviors, all the different activities across the world.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Part of the conversation that we have is, Nick's tool will generate this value that we look at. And then on the design side, it's not exactly that we know the numbers and we know all of the economy, so we know how it fits and we know it balances. We can just go as simply as, this doesn't feel like it's enough, or this feels like it might be too much. And then from there, we have a conversation on what part of it and why. And then we rebalance from that. And we've done multiple passes. Even since everyone saw the SCL, me and Nick have sat together a few times and we've gone over the sheet that balances every single mission and sort of gone over how it feels and given some more information, being like, right, this one's insane, right, because it takes into account you'll get a CrimeStat. And then if you get a CrimeStat, inherently you either go to prison and serve time off, or you have to go to Kareah, do your hacking, people will come kill you, PvP, you've got all the AI there to battle against. And then because of that, it's like, right, well, every illegal mission baseline should have this value, and then anything that's extra gets put on top of it. So it's not like a cold and unfeeling system. It's something that is nurtured with love.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

The advantage is that because it's a combination of maths and design, we can make bespoke decisions as we need to, but fundamentally underneath it all there is an algorithm. So in the future, when StarSim, when a system is making these decisions in a more algorithmic way, the entire system can be balanced at once and then tweaked and designed accordingly, which is a really important place for us to be when it comes to balancing an entire universe.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I just want to reiterate again that every aspect of Star Citizen is still a work in progress. We're in alpha. We're going to try some stuff, and then we're going to try some other stuff, and we're going to try some other stuff. Even Master Modes has some changes coming down the road, which we'll talk about in a bit. Don't get too excited, it's just more evolution. We try a thing, we listen, we try another thing. You can say a lot of things about Star Citizen. I don't think anybody can say we're afraid of trying new things and afraid of taking a different direction after we try something. So I just want to caution you again, when you see these numbers, even when 3.24 goes out, when you see those numbers on those days, that's the number then. And we will continue to review, we will continue to discuss, we will continue to iterate. So feedback, feedback, feedback, always. Doom and gloom, the sky is falling, less helpful.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

Yeah, and I mean, on that point, to the hundreds of days point, if you were to take the numbers of the early missions, and let's say at the moment we're imagining those numbers are around the 20k per hour, for example, but like Jared says, these numbers change, and then you just did a straight times this by that, what's an 890 Jump, then you're getting hundreds of days or whatever. Okay, but you're not going to be doing those missions. Well, I mean, for starters, we're an MMO, so we're not like a 40-hour game that you finish in three weeks. But even so, this is not a linear scale. This is a curved scale. The whole point of it is, the further you climb up that scale, the more rapidly you accelerate, the more rapidly you make more. That's not only to reward players for their progression through the system, but it's also to account for the fact that an extremely difficult environment is going to require multiplayer. It's not going to be soloable. So it can't just be the case that I get this reward when I do an easy one and I get this reward when I do a difficult one. It needs to be one person gets this reward when they do an easy one and three people get this reward when they do a hard one, split up between them. And you still progress that way. But it's not a straight line. It's quite a curve.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

For the first part, I know Nick's got his answer to it, but in the real world, if you're a hauler, you have your vehicle and you get your petrol paid for. The time it takes you to get there is your own time, right? And if you take longer than necessary, it won't be worth it, because it's like, oh, this is meant to be a two-hour haul, but instead I stopped off and had a meal, so it's actually a four-hour. That's on you. When I'm working here, they pay me from the second I'm sat at my desk to the time when I finish at my desk. They don't pay me for my walk in. They don't pay me for my stop at Mackie D's for my breakfast. So for me, there are bits we'll pull into the payout that make sense. But there are also bits that just don't make sense.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

I was actually going to reply to this more from a design point of view as opposed to just a cold numbers point of view. Star Citizen, like any game, you can play it as a min-maxer. You can play it as a, I want to make absolutely the most I possibly can. I want the best reward. I want everything in every minute of every day. Why aren't I getting the best thing I possibly can? But we're building an immersive universe here. If you want to spend time walking around the station, buying your food, getting your burritos, doing your stuff, you shouldn't feel guilty that you're somehow not earning enough. You're going to take your missions, you're going to do your sandbox gameplay, you're going to get a fair reward for it because of EVR and because of the ongoing balance and because of the feedback and the fact that we work with the community to make this happen. And if you want to just chill and not earn money every second that you are playing the game, because it's a game, go for it.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

So we're in a strange situation right now where we have hundreds, in fact, we have thousands of missions. And in order to get them all into the balance with EVR, there's quite a substantial amount of manual work that needs to be done. And that is ongoing. You're experiencing that moment. Some of the missions are in the new system in EVR, and some of the missions are still with the original designed rewards, which were kind of put in by whichever designer put those in at the time. When everything is rebalanced to EVR, then there will be a new reality, if you like. But it's not doom and gloom. You've just only seen certain parts of it. So, for example, the hard retrieve consignment missions. What are those called, Elliot? That's the name in DataForge.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Retrieve Consignment, they are the missions where you go to a UGF and there's a box dispenser. You have to find a code from the body, enter it into a terminal, and it pumps out random commodities that you can sell, and you're looking for a confidential item that you then have to deliver. That's what those ones are. I can't remember the narrative name because it's got a few variants, but that's what you do in the mission.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

Right. So the original reward on those was set by the designer, but they didn't perhaps understand quite how long those missions would take, because EVR is time and difficulty. The original designer was only slightly out, but EVR takes into account the time. And so we have that data now, and so they're getting a bump. They're getting about a 50% bump. And the multi-three and the multi-four hauling missions, they're like up in the hundreds per hour. And the illegal missions, like Elliot was saying, because they are additionally complex with the CrimeStat and the difficulty in those is always higher, they're going to have a bump. And those crazy, very, very low-paying missions, for example, the box delivery missions, they're getting a bump as well, because they take a certain amount of time more than perhaps they originally thought. So it's not all doom and gloom, but it will be a new normal. And we will listen to all the feedback and balance everything so it's rewarding.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

But it's not all happening in 3.24?

Nick Wardle · Economy team

Absolutely not. No, no. This is very much ongoing work.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

Yeah, that is a very fair question. Because the longer we waited to put this tech into any mission, we'd basically be adding to the old way of doing things instead of moving on to the new way. So the entire mission system is being refactored now, and EVR is a part of that refactor. So new stuff is coming out with EVR. Recent stuff is being addressed. Older stuff is going to be addressed.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

We want an MMO. We want gameplay. We want opportunity. We want years of Star Citizen. We don't want 40 to 60 hours, I got an 890 Jump, I'm done, I'm going to go and play.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

You feel more connected to things that you've had to put more time into getting. There's other MMOs where you do raids that take absolutely hours, and the rewards you get from them feel even better because of the effort you put into it. And it is effort versus reward, right? The grind is a part of the effort, and your reward is how an item makes you feel. There's a really popular community event we did a while ago, which was kill 50 players and you get a Vandal mask. That Vandal mask means something to those players because they put in that time, they put in that effort. The ones who actually did it, not the ones who just had all their mates on a server and just killed them. The people who put in the grind, it means more to them. And it's the same thing that we've been going forward with with some of our other events, where we've been giving you a set of armor that shows that you've done a bunch of stuff for it. It feels more rewarding to you as the player. And that's what a lot of MMOs do. You put in time, you put in effort, and you have something to show for it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

One of the weird challenges that are unique to Star Citizen is that we're running a live environment in the middle of our development. In the development of any game, many things will start easy and then become hard. Some things will start hard and become easy. It's this continuous sculpting and reverse sculpting. And most of this is done in secret, most of this is done in private in any other game. By the time they open it up to the players, they're well along, and a lot of those big sweeping changes have been done. We have this continuous thing where, because we've run a live game environment since late 2015, November, December 2015, to this day, these growing pains are experienced not just by us, which is normal, but by our players, which is not. So players who have played a long time, players who have played a tremendous amount, can get used to things being a certain way. And when we change, that almost never feels good. Whether it's a good change or it's not is a whole other discussion. It's just when you become used to something, when you've been accommodated to it, when you've decided you like it, and then it changes, that can cause consternation. We see that with everything from Master Modes to these economy changes and everything else between. That's not the same as saying that the feedback is not valid. I want to be real clear with that. Feedback's valid. Some of these changes are going to be too sweeping. Some of these cuts are going to be too much. Some of these bumps are going to be too much. Some of the things we did for Master Modes, like hover mode stuff, are going to be right where we want them, and some aren't. And we're going to keep tweaking. This is all of Star Citizen's game development. I see it from everybody, from good people, from the best people who struggle with this. And it's unfortunate, but it's normal. It's a part of our process here, and it comes part and parcel with running a live game environment in the middle of our development. So as always, we just encourage you to be patient with us, to help us, to keep testing, to keep giving us feedback. Like I said before, the doom and gloom stuff doesn't help so much. The 'hey, this could be more like this, and you would get this', that's the sweet stuff.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Something to add is, we're very much aware, obviously, as Jared says, with us being live service, and we talk about being an MMO and grind, the reactions we get, we understand why for most of them. We're making a grindy environment in something that we constantly reset and wipe as it is currently. And that obviously isn't fun, because you're not getting that long-term reward out of the effort you put in. But eventually, when we're closer to done, you will, because we'll have solidified a lot more of this, so therefore the grind and the wipes will go, so that you can put in the effort and get the effort out. I understand right now that it won't be as fun to put 80 hours into getting somewhere up there in the hauling things just to find out next patch that we need to wipe because of a bug or because we're balancing. It's part and parcel of just having to lay the tracks while we're still running the train down it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Although I want to add to what Elliot says. I've had a dozen conversations with Rich Tyrer about this topic. We want to try to avoid as many wipes as possible. That's always the other thing. People don't want to invest time, people don't want to invest effort knowing this thing is going to wipe. It is our intention from this point forward to not wipe for anything. That's not the same as saying that we're not going to. I want to be real clear, because every time we say what we want to do, and then something changes, people are like, CIG promised. No, we told you what we wanted to do. What we want to do from this point forward is we want to try to avoid any wipe. If we have to wipe from this point forward, it'll be something severe. It'll be something that we've all come together and said there's just no other way forward. And so that is still a possibility. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and say it's not. But the intention from everyone at every single level is to do every single thing we can from this point forward to avoid any more wipes.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

And of course, there are some other things which are very important, pieces of functionality which we haven't got to yet, which will, like Elliot was saying, let you enjoy your progress and your status that you've earned over all those hours. And it will become even more meaningful with Death of a Spaceman, where it'll bring a bit more consequence, more meaning to decisions you make. Server meshing, where we'll bring more players together interacting in the same place, which is going to bring a lot more life and collaboration to decisions you make. And StarSim in the background makes the universe dynamic around you. So at the moment it might feel like it's a grind and it's Groundhog Day, but we're building for the future.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

There'll be areas where you're safe and there'll be areas where you're not. Places that have armistice zones or green zones, you'll be very safe in. But ones where you don't, you won't be. It's the intention, right? It's going to be an experience you have in Pyro when you're trying to do these sorts of missions. You're unprotected. If I go to an outpost that has a freight elevator that doesn't have a green zone, I need to be aware of it and I need to be ready to defend myself. Whether it's I leave people in the turrets of my ship while I load, whether I hire myself an escort by talking in chat and trying to get some people that I don't know or do know to help me out, there's meant to be some risk. And that risk is calculated when we do the reward. We know the locations we're sending you to, we know all this sort of stuff. So that risk is inherently calculated. No, I'm not here to hold everyone's hand through the unloading and loading process and make it all safe. There will obviously be things to aid you. I believe currently if you try to steal a box, say I call up a freight elevator with my cargo on and Nick, who I don't know, tries to take it off, they should get a crime. There'll be a way in the legal system for us to defend and to allow you to sort of enact justice yourself legally without consequence.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And as you mentioned, obviously where you operate is important. There's the green zone stuff, but even in a place like Pyro that doesn't have any green zones per se, you can align yourself with one of the factions there, and if you're aligned with the Citizens for Prosperity and you're doing your loading there, you'll have a certain amount of protection from the folks there. But if you're aligned with Citizens for Prosperity and you try to go to one of the Headhunters' trading posts and try to load up there, you're going to have a worse time. So these decisions are part and parcel of the process. And even without green zones, there will still be places for everyone, based on the decisions you make for your character, to say, okay, this is less risky and this is more risky. The choice is yours.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

It goes into, like in real life when they do shipping lanes. If they know that they're going to go through pirate-infested waters, there are mercenaries on board to defend against it. And that should be the same thing. The players, if they want to do these missions, at some point they'll have to adapt and understand that, oh, this location I know of, because it doesn't have a green zone, that means this portion of the mission I'm safe, but as soon as I'm getting close to this location, I need to be prepared for anything, right? And it will be something that comes with the player's knowledge and then building their game knowledge: they'll understand that this location isn't safe for me, I need to make sure I've got protection.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And while we have some version of it now with these new missions that are designed to link to go from this place to that place to that place, natural trade lanes are going to start to form. As server meshing comes online and we begin to increase the number of players, these natural trade lanes will start to harden and they'll start to solidify and you'll start to see more and more ships. That will create a lot of interesting opportunities for players on both sides of the moral compass, for protection and for piracy.

Nick Wardle · Economy team

Absolutely, and in the long term, the very long term, when there is a broader system of law across the various solar systems that is being managed, so the original Quantum demonstration that Tony gave us shows how different action areas can be spawned in response to different types of activity in an area. If there are a lot of pirates, then there's a security response. And that could be player-driven or it could be system-driven.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Yeah, as I mentioned before, this is the resource gathering type mission, so we will have missions that require them. I know the question is to miners, but you can steal those goods, you could buy them from somewhere that's really cheap and bring them over, or you can mine them. It's a choice that I want to give the players so you can choose whatever gameplay you are interested in for this mission. But yeah, we're going to have missions where you have to bring resources to a location. And then naturally, that location would then take those resources, produce something, and then another location would then consume what that location produces. And that makes the hauling sort of mission. Currently, hauling missions are very static. They're not reactive based on the location's inventory amount. That's something more on the side of StarSim, because that will keep track of things like that, so it knows what to generate and whatnot.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

Yeah. Again, it goes with the type of cargo that you're hauling. We will also have express hauling requests. These will just be missions where maybe a company's like, we've got an order on from another company to make this many shield platings for this ship, but we've run out of tungsten or something. We need a quick delivery of it so we can make our quota and we don't get punished by violating our contract. These sorts of contracts that require you to bring something ASAP to a location, we will [have]. And these ones will be possibly a bit more unique, because they will skip the trade routes that we're setting up with this logistical network, because they are in demand right now. So there'll be a route which is your quickest route to take, rather than from a distribution center that makes them to the LEO, then the LEO to the Lagrange point, Lagrange point to the jump point. It will skip that flow, and it might just be get it from Pyro straight to the jump point, straight to the delivery location. So yes, we will have express hauling contracts eventually.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

They mean quite a lot. We can do a lot more now we have them. Now we have this sort of thought-out structure of how we retrieve stuff, I can give you missions where you have to deliver vehicles. I can give you missions where you have to go to a freight elevator to collect a part. Maybe we do a repair mission, where we'll put a bunch of the repair stuff in the hangar in this location. You've got access to it. Go pick it up and then bring it to the mission to sort of deem it. I could even do a mission where I make you do Tetris in an AI's hangar, where it's just, hey, load my ship up for me, and off you go and you play Tetris. It gives me a lot of power. So, yeah, I can do stuff like that. It gives me more opportunities to do it. There could be a mission where it's like, gear up for a raid. We've put all the gear in this location. Here's a box full of guns and masks and whatever else. It unlocks a lot of possibilities for missions.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

There's no such thing as box delivery missions. They're not broken. Anyone who says so is lying. No, the hauling update and freight elevator update that came in allowed me to, if anyone remembers that very fun ISC I did on the delivery system, all of that stuff is gone, or will be gone, because we're turning it into a code-based system. So it's more robust. It still allows us to put our hooks in it on the design side when we're building logic. So I can still request things and tell it to do things and manipulate it in ways I need to. But for simple missions where there's no extra gameplay that we set up in logic, it's a lot better if it's a coded system. So alongside the freight elevator missions, we have the ability now to do the box missions the same way. So instead of using a logic system, which can sort of go a bit weird when a server's gone on a bit long or when it's a low server frame rate, we can use more of a coded system, which makes it more stable. And it will be something that we look to refactor. I can't speak as to when it'll all be done, but we have started this work as it is. So yes, box missions: everyone who wants to still pick up three boxes and take them to a delivery locker or to a shelf, you guys will still have something to do, because that is a part of the courier gameplay. And it is still something we want. It's just, I'll get them working eventually.