How will the economy in the Persistent Universe handle inflation?Players always want to feel like they're getting ahead for their time spent, and never want to lose something they've "earned." Money sinks like rent, repair costs, taxes, and mandatory consumables have been loudly denounced by players in other MMO games, but without countermeasures, inflation is inevitable and eventually game destroying.How will Star Citizen get the players to swallow the bitter pill for better long-term health?asked by Demuse
TL;DRRoberts says the economy mirrors the real world with running costs, taxes and fuel balancing production, hoping to avoid wild inflation, though whether it balances is part of the challenge.
We're setting up Star Citizen much like the real world.We actually do have, whether you want to call it money sinks, I call it running costs, of things like repairing your ship, keeping up to date, we have taxes in the form of landing fees or trade tariffs depending on where you are.So if you're in a very state-regulated area, there's a lot of law enforcement, well then yeah, it costs a bit more to do business there, because you're paying for the protection essentially.There is an equivalent of consumables because we have fuel. You can go harvest your own fuel, or you may not have time, so you may just pay to refuel when you're down on a planet. But in general will cost you to operate, as well as things you may earn.So our hope is that we're not going to have wild inflation, because we have consumption as well as production. And whether that consumption and production are properly balanced, well that's part of the challenge of the economy system that we're building.We're sort of building a whole, stand alone, simulator that would interface to our persistent universe server, and we can have a meta view of the galaxy and that's actually not that far from us playing with it internally, so at that point, I could tell you. But essentially, we are trying to, in a rough way, simulate what happens in the real world.In the more unregulated areas, there aren't so many dues, or taxes, or duties, and so you can have a better margin when you're selling. The risk is that you may get attacked and you won't get the same level of protection that you would in the inner systems.