Benoit Beausejour · Chief Technology Officer

Well, that's a really great question, and the timing couldn't be better. I don't know how you did that, but it's of actuality. So the backstory of this is that, for those who don't know about that, there's a store that you can access to purchase items with your UEC. And that will basically load up your inventory and make sure that you can actually access these items in-game. So this is a really old piece of tech that we built early, after the pledge campaign actually finished, first year. And so people have items from Voyager Direct. So to answer your question, our plan is to basically move on from that system. So we want to deprecate the Voyager Direct web store to move to an in-game equivalent that is more dynamic, that is tied to the universe, tied to the economy. And so we're currently exploring this. We have a high-level plan that we're looking into, so take this with caveats. So we want to deprecate this. So in order to do that, we will most likely give you guys the choice of melting back your Voyager Direct items for UEC, if you so choose to do that. For items that you want to keep, you'll probably be able to keep that. We're still investigating exactly if we're going to do a blanket reload; that's still being talked about. Because there are items in there that are no longer available, and so we need to figure out what we're going to do with that. This might cause issues for other items, but the goal is to basically give you back your UEC, and that counts as a cap. So for this to come online, we also need to be seeding your aUEC wallet from your total UEC. Since the game is still in a state where we wipe persistence to reset the system to try it out: when a new patch comes out, like when 3.0 came out, we wiped the persistence database to restart the wallets and everything like that. So instead of giving you a fixed, right now we're working with a constant amount, we're going to give you your amount of UEC in the universe. This will allow game designers to see the economy in motion with real UEC values in aUEC. And so as you spend your aUEC, this will stay in game; this will not affect your platform-side UEC cap. Right now, if you purchase UEC in the meantime using real money on the web store, this will actually credit you aUEC in game. If a new patch comes in, 3.2, we wipe the persistence database again because we're testing the system, your aUEC wallet will be initialized to your total UEC value at that moment. And so we keep on rolling like this. The goal is to basically migrate this entire system in-game and provide you the equivalent in-game. Yeah, that's the goal.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So if I understand, let me clarify here. We are planning on getting rid of the Voyager Direct store on the website. We are planning on converting whatever Voyager Direct items that people don't want into UEC, the real UEC, the core UEC that will be used in the Persistent Universe. We are still exploring whether we're going to do a blanket wipe of everything, whether we're going to give people the choice on which items they want to get rid of, or some mix thereof between the items that can be used and the items that just can't be used anymore. We're still exploring how best to work that. But the plan is to give people the UEC back for that stuff. Then we're going to move the store inside the game and people will be able to spend...

Benoit Beausejour · Chief Technology Officer

That's right. One thing that I want to add to your explanation too that I didn't mention is that we also want to start supplementing that value with the value contained in your pledge packages. So the famous starting money UEC that is stashed right now in the packages. We want to start accounting for that in our calculations to start this up. The goal here is to get the economy started with real values instead of a blanket fixed value for everybody.