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What is holding back the dynamic economy?
The idea of a dynamic economy has been around for quite some time. The Latos economy has been that way for quite some time as well. This interview with Incarnate say's it's been there for atleast 6 years now. So my question for Inc: What is holding back its implementation into the entire game economy? Not as a rhetorical question; I'm actually curious. Is it something you have already figured out and just want to release with some other big stuff, or something where you're clear on the idea but haven't been able to (for whatever reasons) implement, or something where it's not even clear how it's supposed to be?
There has been a "shadow economy" for a long time, but it's not a small leap between having a shadow economy and making it completely "real" and "mandatory".. moving, say, convoy-completion be a hard-dependency for item availability.
For instance, Latos is more than just an "economy" (virtual numbers for prices), it's an entire NPC game mechanic that reflects the transport of goods into the "real world" of the game universe, and tries to "cheat" as little as possible (blockading convoys actually results in station-good scarcity).
We had a number of challenges crop-up around trying to "physically" get convoys to operate properly, and creating fallback scenarios when something bad would happen, like a convoy pile-up, or some kind of player-created issue, etc. With ~15k convoys per day, that's a lot of bots that can go awry.
We spent a lot of time working on this around late-2019, early-2020. I wrote about it in March of 2020, in this Newsletter and elsewhere. The bot-handling and general convoy mechanics improved a lot, but we had to do a bunch of fundamental testing of NPC navigation.
Then there were other challenges, after that, like the Latos economy being badly exploited, which required a forensic cleanup of all the credits that had been unfairly generated by an unreported bug. That was really time consuming. If someone had just reported the bug, we might have "released" the full-economy in the time we took doing exploit-cleanup (the experience also made us feel more cautious, for obvious reasons).
Fundamentally, any time someone asks "What is holding back the X?" the answer is the same: Shifting priorities and limited development resources. One could ask as much about.. the new client UI, the game translations, or the VR port, etc.
All development happens against a backdrop of player "customer-service", for lack of a better term, which can be really arduous and time-consuming (and when dramatic stuff happens, sometimes soul-draining), not to mention what happens in the individual developer's lives (personal or family health and well-being, other challenges).
The simplistic perspective is usually like "well, if you just kept working on X, it would get done!", but, we don't have any control over Google or Apple deciding that "supporting Z feature in Android" is now a hard-requirement and they'll no longer accept app-updates until we add that.
It is not that unusual for us to have an unexpected "hard requirement" get shoved into our timeline (a bug, a partner feature, an exploit, a community issue, a server outage) and we have to effectively stop and go "do that".
The Google/Apple thing is a trivial example (albeit one that does happen periodically), I'm not saying Apple and Google are responsible for all development delays.. I am saying that operating the game is a complex "dance", particularly with limited resources, and sometimes the dance goes better than others.
To make another example, right now we're working on a bunch of server-side stuff, and we have been for awhile (probably 6 weeks?), and it cropped up because of some testing that showed we had specific problems that we definitely needed to solve. But, then, while testing those problems, this week, it raised other problems in the Sector code, which need to be fixed so we can go back to testing the vserv (core server) code.
So, we can't fix the problem until we now go and fix the "other problem" and then come back and finish fixing "the first problem". Yay. (On the upside, the whole server-side is benefiting a lot from the work).
There's always a series of things that go awry, and take you in an unexpected direction. All game companies struggle with this, it's why games are often "late" to market, even with teams of 300 people. But, it's exacerbated with limited resources and a really complex game.
The expanded economy is coming. I know it'll have a big impact on the game as a whole. I thought we would be hitting it by now, but, I didn't see this server thing cropping up, or various other things. C'est la vie.
As a side-note, this is also why I've just generally stopped talking about "what's coming". I used to do that a lot (Newsletters, newsposts, etc). But, my predictions would be wrong a lot, and people got really pissed at me for "lying".. when honestly, I really believed (at the time I wrote it) that we would be doing X, Y or Z, but.. things went off the rails in some challenging new way.
Now I talk about "what's coming" when it's practically done, or already released. It's poorer marketing, but people don't seem to get as angry at me.
For instance, Latos is more than just an "economy" (virtual numbers for prices), it's an entire NPC game mechanic that reflects the transport of goods into the "real world" of the game universe, and tries to "cheat" as little as possible (blockading convoys actually results in station-good scarcity).
We had a number of challenges crop-up around trying to "physically" get convoys to operate properly, and creating fallback scenarios when something bad would happen, like a convoy pile-up, or some kind of player-created issue, etc. With ~15k convoys per day, that's a lot of bots that can go awry.
We spent a lot of time working on this around late-2019, early-2020. I wrote about it in March of 2020, in this Newsletter and elsewhere. The bot-handling and general convoy mechanics improved a lot, but we had to do a bunch of fundamental testing of NPC navigation.
Then there were other challenges, after that, like the Latos economy being badly exploited, which required a forensic cleanup of all the credits that had been unfairly generated by an unreported bug. That was really time consuming. If someone had just reported the bug, we might have "released" the full-economy in the time we took doing exploit-cleanup (the experience also made us feel more cautious, for obvious reasons).
Fundamentally, any time someone asks "What is holding back the X?" the answer is the same: Shifting priorities and limited development resources. One could ask as much about.. the new client UI, the game translations, or the VR port, etc.
All development happens against a backdrop of player "customer-service", for lack of a better term, which can be really arduous and time-consuming (and when dramatic stuff happens, sometimes soul-draining), not to mention what happens in the individual developer's lives (personal or family health and well-being, other challenges).
The simplistic perspective is usually like "well, if you just kept working on X, it would get done!", but, we don't have any control over Google or Apple deciding that "supporting Z feature in Android" is now a hard-requirement and they'll no longer accept app-updates until we add that.
It is not that unusual for us to have an unexpected "hard requirement" get shoved into our timeline (a bug, a partner feature, an exploit, a community issue, a server outage) and we have to effectively stop and go "do that".
The Google/Apple thing is a trivial example (albeit one that does happen periodically), I'm not saying Apple and Google are responsible for all development delays.. I am saying that operating the game is a complex "dance", particularly with limited resources, and sometimes the dance goes better than others.
To make another example, right now we're working on a bunch of server-side stuff, and we have been for awhile (probably 6 weeks?), and it cropped up because of some testing that showed we had specific problems that we definitely needed to solve. But, then, while testing those problems, this week, it raised other problems in the Sector code, which need to be fixed so we can go back to testing the vserv (core server) code.
So, we can't fix the problem until we now go and fix the "other problem" and then come back and finish fixing "the first problem". Yay. (On the upside, the whole server-side is benefiting a lot from the work).
There's always a series of things that go awry, and take you in an unexpected direction. All game companies struggle with this, it's why games are often "late" to market, even with teams of 300 people. But, it's exacerbated with limited resources and a really complex game.
The expanded economy is coming. I know it'll have a big impact on the game as a whole. I thought we would be hitting it by now, but, I didn't see this server thing cropping up, or various other things. C'est la vie.
As a side-note, this is also why I've just generally stopped talking about "what's coming". I used to do that a lot (Newsletters, newsposts, etc). But, my predictions would be wrong a lot, and people got really pissed at me for "lying".. when honestly, I really believed (at the time I wrote it) that we would be doing X, Y or Z, but.. things went off the rails in some challenging new way.
Now I talk about "what's coming" when it's practically done, or already released. It's poorer marketing, but people don't seem to get as angry at me.
Thanks for the response! You have a lot on your plate, and handling such a big game with all it's complexities and players is no small feat. The game's great, and it just keeps getting better and better. Whenever the real economy is released, I'll be waiting. Thanks again.