With so many duplication and cash glitches in the past few patches, quite a few players are rolling around with ridiculous amounts of money. Has this changed how we test certain systems? And will there be a wipe at some point?
TL;DRA wipe will definitely come at some point, but not every patch, since keeping progress lets them test long mid-game systems and gather data to rebalance before progress becomes permanent.
Yeah, there will definitely be a wipe at some point. We actually discuss whether a wipe happens at every patch. And I think in some cases, what we want to be able to do is we want players to be able to earn different things. Obviously, sometimes now they're finding ways to exploit it or cheat it. But basically, that's what this time is for: to break the systems and even be able to see, okay, if this person's doing this and we want them to be able to earn a ship, let's say after a month of gameplay or two months of gameplay or something like that, or even longer, let's say six months or something, this allows us to do it, since we're not wiping all the time. That sounds wrong, but basically it allows us to test things and allows us to work. It's something that we talk about constantly and it allows us to test certain things out. But if we were wiping every single patch, then there's a lot of these long mid-game systems and goals that we have for players that we wouldn't be able to test. So this allows us to go through and try that out.
There's also, from a short-term point of view, when you've got loads and loads of money, that short-term gain of, oh, I can buy everything and enjoy it, fundamentally it kind of devalues the game for that person who has all of that money. So if it's just something they've exploited to get or they've just found a loophole or something like that, it's like playing Dark Souls and turning on God Mode. It gets boring fairly quickly. Like Todd says, this is the moment in time where we're taking all this data so that we can rebalance it, so that when it goes to the unwipeable times, then we've got a solid progression that people can play through and feel really like, wow, that guy's got an Idris, he spent a long time to get that, and you have these really achievable goals, and it makes that progression all the more worthwhile. So it's definitely a critical thing for us to discuss and make sure that we get right.