Playing Among the Stars - Part One

Yes - it's always a question of how manipulative it is. If it's new gameplay, for example, we tend to have a hands-off approach to running the economy. We don't have a central bank or anything like that. It's more about evolving what's already in there, and at the same time providing our economist, Dr Eyjo, with more tools to analyse what's happening.

There's always something happening around the economy, whether that's in the back end for analysis, or making new resources more accessible. In general I think that getting Eyjo on board, getting a proper economist to look at that part of the game and see how we could improve it - but also see if real-world economic theories actually work in-game - was good.

Yes - the thing is that you think about so many things as a value chain, with lots of links in-between. With this we've been seeing things like mistakes in resource distribution and fixed scarcity of moon minerals.

We've seen when more people have come in, that fixed scarcity has really upset the entire balance, which means that we're moving more towards resources that are just totally player-dependent. It's still scarcity-based, but it's more that there's not a totally finite number that doesn't scale.

So especially on the resource and industrial level, the economy has improved on that perspective, both by seeing where the major holes are and by seeing how small changes can affect the entire thing. It's more awareness-based.

Yes - but we'll address it more in the way that I, as a player, can actually address it, by simply choosing to go get more of those resources, or whatever. The fundamental thing is that you want the supply and demand to be 'affectable' by a player, because that's where you really put in real supply and demand, and the effort around it which creates the real price of it.

Our way to deal with it is to make it more available new space, or things like that, instead of directly injecting some more of a commodity into the economy. We don't really do that - with wormhole space we looked at which aspects of the whole industrial process would benefit by increasing the supply through that space.

Because number one, the opportunity is that the materials coming out of wormhole space are inherently more expensive because there's a lot more effort, which means that now effort is being priced into a lot of items - which they weren't before, the hardcore numbers didn't really count in that it took you eight hours to get the stuff.

That's kind of interesting to see - and at the same time we can be quite careful in manipulating the resource distribution. We don't really set a specific target - it's more that a certain resource here should be ten times greater, because it's way out. We're not really fine-tuning something like Tritanium, it's more that we see something has blatantly gone wrong, so we try to open up a path to future-proof it as well.