How can choice matter when the only constant in game development is change?
TL;DRThey say changing development and meaningful choices can coexist, with melting, upgrades and limited buyback tokens as a compromise, and they're still discussing help for people who melted ships for a limited sale.
Yes, one of the things I get quoted on most is when I say the only constant in game development is that things change, that development is iterative. That can exist at the same time as having meaningful choices. The two are not mutually exclusive. We want choice to matter, and at the same time we do many things to allow people to reconsider and re-evaluate their choices. We allow them to melt their pledges, we allow them to CCU into different ships, and now with the buyback system, we allow people to go back into their history, almost all the way to the beginning of time, barring the physical items, boxes and stuff, and bring back those pledges. We do many things to allow you to reconsider your choices, because the only constant in game development is change. We recognize that. At the same time, we're not building systems just for today. We're building systems that will take us into tomorrow when the game releases, and we have to consider that choices matter. So there are restrictions on the things that you can buy back and the way that you can buy back stuff.
Absolutely. I'm thinking of the high school class in Starship Troopers now: "Figuring things out for yourself is the only true right anyone has." It's not the exact line. Picking a ship should have a weight to it. It's supposed to be our equivalent of deciding on a car. The ship system was never meant to be switch to this one, switch to this one, switch to this one. We kind of pledged that in there as we've gone along, because there are a lot of people who want to. But the ship should have value. It shouldn't be something you throw away and...
Yeah, so we're looking for a compromise, an area between the two opposing views that best serves both ends. A compromise is never going to be 100%. A compromise is never going to be perfect. That's why it's a compromise and not everybody gets everything they want. So that's what this is with the quarterly buyback tokens. And there are folks that are like, but we've always been able to buy back with store credit. Yeah, that wasn't an official system. That was the fine folks in CS bending the rules.
That is truly what that was.
Yes, that was us making exceptions to things, because a system wasn't in place to help you with automated buybacks.
One other thing I'll say about the buyback tokens is that it's not the permanent, last decision we'll ever make. There may be plenty of decisions in the future where we want to say, okay, here's an extra token. Especially, it seems like the use case we're running into that is a legitimate problem is people who melt all their ships to buy a capital ship when we have a limited sale. That is something that comes out of our system. So we're looking at ways to counteract that. Maybe have a free day after we do a capital ship, or issue a couple of tokens afterwards. I think this doesn't actually let you issue multiple tokens. We're talking about next time we have a limited sale or something like that. If there is a next time; we don't have any on the books. Even the decisions on how we deal with things are iterative, just like game development. They're based on people's responses. That's the big legitimate issue I've seen from those threads.
We've had a lot of internal discussions about it this week.
Yeah, there were a lot of people that melted a good quantity of their ships to try to get a shot at buying the Idris, and they didn't make it in for whatever reason, and now they're left with a bunch of store credit. We want to do something about that. We're still discussing it. It's in the process.