Will we be able to increase the quality of a material?

I'll start with a hot question. Current plan is no. You won't be able to increase the quality of the material. And there's a few aspects that go into that. Firstly, we would like rare materials and valuable materials to remain rare and valuable. Concern being that if I can take a large chunk of low quality, condense it into high quality, given enough time, players will have high quality everything. And that greatly devalues the future player trading opportunities, where we really want to see the scenario of a player finds a super rare, high value ore deposit. And perhaps on their player base, they set up a shop, and then you have people coming to your shop and buying from you, and you get to interact with them and so on. The second part is there is a need for the lower and mid quality to have greater value. At the moment, because bigger number is better, everyone's searching for the higher quality. So to resolve this, our plan is with the refining updates that you have two ingredients when you're refining. One of them will be a primary — it could be two or more, to be fair — two or more could be secondary. And the quality of the secondary determines how much of it you need, whereas the quality of the primary is used for the refined material. So if it's iron — we always go for the steel example — if you're making steel, primary is iron. 750 quality iron makes 750 steel. Carbon, the quality is not too important. So you can get a massive amount of carbon, however much you need, of terrible quality. Shove it in and get your steel.

So the value in the lower quality stuff will be in using it to get a greater quantity.

Not quantity. It's just for the secondary inputs. You need less of it if it's high quality, but you can still use any quality. So you can farm up loads and just shove it in as secondary.

So there's a purpose for the lower quality. And to be very honest, it's something that we discussed a lot, if we want to go down this road. And as Dec already described, one of the main reasons why we want to stick with this approach of you not being able to upgrade the materials is that we still want you to search for higher grades, that we don't want you to hoard lower grades because at some point you will be able to upgrade. And for that reason, we came up with some solutions of making the lower quality actually worthwhile holding onto, especially then once we have the refining process in.

Yeah, and when you find those really high level ones, we want that to be exciting, we want that to feel like a moment, and if you could just get higher easily, you would dilute that experience.

It seems to me like you're finding a nice compromise here then. For the people who gather casually, there's a path, there's a use for the lesser quality stuff they get, but for the people who dedicate themselves, like "I am going to be a miner, that is my job," because you're going to keep those higher resources more valuable, that effort is going to be more rewarding to those people because they're going to be able to sell that stuff.

Exactly. That is the point. Because with that, we open up the opportunities for players to sell it. If every player is able to upgrade their materials, then we swamp the market with high quality.