Economy updates have been few and far between for the persistent universe. We know there are some economy updates coming in 3.23. What can you tell us about what's happening in 3.23?

So we wanted to basically review a bunch of our major items in the game. So looking at armor, weapons, ships, and basically start to apply more logic to why they are being priced that way. We started with the weapons and armor, basically. So we started looking at things like applying value to different aspects of them. So looking at pure size and associating a rough material cost: a pistol is obviously going to be less material cost than a bigger rifle or a shotgun or something that's a bit chunkier. So obviously there is a weight of value associated with that. Then also looking at things like manufacturers, because some of them have a manufacturing quality associated with them, or a prestige. Looking at the different tech levels: we've got some very basic ballistic weapons and we've got some very advanced electron or laser weapons that are going to have manufacturing costs associated with them. So people can go to the shop and look at the different weapons against each other and go, oh, okay, this makes logical sense, because this is rarer, or this looks more expensive and feels more expensive to use. And we did the same thing with the armor too.

Then we started looking at some of the bigger ticket items like our ships. So again, we applied very similar logic to those, where we go, okay, let's look at the size. Let's look at how they're being used. Are they used to make money? Because if you think about a commercial vehicle in the real world, typically they cost more because you're going to be able to make money with them. And then looking at manufacturers, quality: is it a luxury ship? That then applies more value as well. And then obviously weighing that up against the actual prices that you're paying real money for as well, and making sure there's an association there as well. And that also allowed us to look at a lot of the outliers that we had previously and go, oh, okay, some of them are sitting way far above everything else for some reason, and some of them are sitting way far below everything else. So it's been a way of leveling it out and applying logic to a lot of that stuff as well.

There were a couple of other things that we looked at too. We also looked at balancing salvage out, because I think that had not had a thorough pass before, and we saw people just getting millions upon millions of UEC through salvaging. So we felt that that was basically flooding our economy with alpha UEC, and that was causing problems: the value of things just goes down so much, and it becomes meaningless when you can exploit a system like that. So we've applied some more logic to that and brought the gains down on what you can get from salvage. And then we also took a look at balancing mission rewards. So instead of everyone having to default to salvage to make money, we're now looking at the effort versus reward algorithm that we're applying to our missions and basically going, hey, how much effort, how much risk, how difficult are they? What are you putting into these missions? Is it super difficult? Okay, you should earn more money from it. Is it long? You should probably earn more money from it as well. So overall, things should feel a bit more as you would expect.

And this isn't the end of that tuning in 3.23.

No, this is just the first pass. Well, the next pass anyway.

Yeah, on that note for economy, I think I touched on this in the Letter from the Chairman. I think a lot of these systems have been around for a long time, like claim timers, insurance, obviously the economy values for missions. And they were balanced correctly as and when they were done a long time ago. The game's been out for a long time. But we need to start bringing these systems a bit more cohesion in how they talk to each other. So going forward, I think the players and the community should expect to see some significant changes to those systems as we move towards trying to create a more cohesive experience in the game. Because I think right now, if you just take 3.22 as a good example, if you really know where to go, like JJ said, you can just make millions upon millions. And once you've got so much money and everything is linked to progression with money, you can just buy your way and that's it, right? You lose the desire or the motivation to keep playing the game. So I think we want to build that motivation in, that, okay, I'll go and do this because I enjoy doing salvage and it gives me this reward. And then obviously the other side of the coin is we don't really have a lot of money sinks in the game right now. So in terms of insurance, your ship blows up, you just claim it back immediately. You die... we've talked about Death of a Spaceman for a long time, but we want to start bringing all these systems in place. And I think going forward, we will have some more changes on that front.