Effort versus reward isn't a new concept; just about every video game involves some kind of effort versus reward calculation. Why is it new to us, and why are we talking about it now? For people who haven't watched the other shows, give us a recap of why it's important.

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.

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.

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.