Are you testing and monitoring the economy right now? It feels very grindy and makes it hard to get more ships and bug test them.
TL;DRThey have economy telemetry and watch it constantly, accept some grind is intended (such as capital ships), and expect rewards and prices to be adjusted as more systems like Quantum arrive.
Well, yes, we have telemetry on basically the economy, and we look at it constantly. Now, one of the things, if you refer to Tony's talk at CitizenCon, there's Quantum, and I'm lobbying for a different name for that one. But there's the Quantum talk, where that mimics an economy, and so if something over in this area isn't being used that much then the prices will go down, versus if something's being used more over here then the prices go up. Now, what we have to do is we do that by hand every quarter. And I understand that some things will feel somewhat grindy. Now, there are certain things that we do want to feel grindy. So like a lot of the in-game ships, anything of a capital class, I consider that very, very grindy. I can't go out and buy a mansion, and I don't think the average person would be able to, but if we pull together as a unit, then maybe we can.
There are also interesting challenges in trying to balance for an economy that doesn't have all of the game features that we're intending for. It's trying to balance an economy when you don't have all the ways a player will have to make money.
Correct, and again, if you think something's grindy, with our mission rewards, these are all going to be in flux. We've got basically just so many people looking at this and working on it, and once we start getting some of these other things coming into place, like Quantum, this will actually help those guys adjust things on the fly and be able to say, okay, here it is, but here are the rails that it can go between.