How do you price things? Is there some kind of matrix, or are you just also using art?

We are always using art, but there's a bit of technique that we apply to this, actually many, many techniques. Of course, we first use an algorithmic approach, otherwise it would be impossible to put a price or a value on all the thousands and thousands of items we have in the game, and again, those items in different shops at different price points. Once we have that value from the algorithm, then we start to apply our own intuition, we apply our expertise, we apply the experience we have from playing the game, and we do, let's call it a sanity check, whether we think that the algorithm is giving us the right value or not. And then we adjust the price or we adjust the algorithm depending on the situation. Nick uses this algorithm a lot, actually more than myself, because with FPS you have a lot of different items, you have guns and you have armors, and maybe he can tell us a bit about how he used the algorithm.

So it's like you say, the number of items and the number of shops and the number of locations, and then just even thinking about the future of the game, when that's obviously going to be even broader, you can't price everything individually, and it wouldn't be sensible to price everything individually. And in fact, everything is connected. All the prices of everything are connected. I don't think that's going to come as a surprise to anyone. But if you think of something like ammo, for example, you take assault rifle ammo. Well, that's going to be priced relative to the stopping power or possibly the desirability of the assault rifle itself, which has its own price on it. That's related to, say, the price of pistols or the price of railguns. Railguns is an interesting one. The decision to make railguns and missile launchers so you can't buy them in shops is a deliberate decision to encourage not just NPC shop trading; it's really, really important to us to have vibrant player trading. And we don't currently have the full systems to support that, but you guys are really resourceful and you're going to make it happen. We want to encourage that. Railguns are not available in shops, but they're absolutely available around the 'verse, and they have a value, and everyone knows that value.

Sometimes me and Nick will talk about it, we'll look at the black market. The org that I'm in, we do gun running and we sell. And not that I've infiltrated, but we use those data points from our org and how we do gun running to also influence it, because obviously we put our worth on it based on the effort that we put up front for you to get it, but then you put your own worth on it for you guys to get profit, and we take that sort of stuff into account as well.

It's super important. If you take something like the Antium armor set, for example, that has a value, it fits in with the algorithm, it makes sense, but the Antium armor set has a completely separate value to the people in the game because of its rarity, because of its availability in content. And that's why it's all related. So certain items are only available through content. There's a whole content waterfall of items coming from the dollar store all the way through into the game. And there's an appropriate level of when those things are introduced to various parts of the content in the game, et cetera, et cetera. And it's all related. And then on the other side of that is mission rewards and sandbox gameplay. And this is where EVR comes in, so that we can balance the risk and the reward of those kinds of things. And essentially both of those come together in the middle. Like I say, in the future, we want you to have a better view into how all of these things are related to each other. That's future work with UI and back-end data, so you can make meaningful choices about how you want to spend your money on particular resources or crafting or whatever it is in the future. Even though it's quite simplistic right now, that's not where we want it to end. And we need the player economy.