Do you just live in spreadsheets?
TL;DRThe economy designer says spreadsheets are central but they also play the game, and because their own experience is anecdotal they rely heavily on community feedback and live playtests.
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.