Star Citizen Live: Q&A - Earning in the 'verse

3 July 202501:03:081,618 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hi everybody. Welcome. I'm Who am I? I'm Jared and I'm the host of Star Citizen Live. Uh a show that we used to do every week and have only done like four times this year because uh a bunch of the people who I work with uh changed the very nature of our project for the better. It's been a good year. Uh if you've never seen Star Citizen Live before and and and so lucky if you haven't, um it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and I invite CI developers onto the show and we talk about various work things. Um usually, uh they come back, sometimes they don't. Sometimes it's like, Jared, what the heck did you get me into? And I'm like, well, you know, it's not easy. But uh on today's show, it's going to be one of those it's going
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to be one of those shows where we get some we get we get deep and uh nope, that's not where I wanted to go with that. We're g we're gonna we're going to go we're going to go heavy into one of the most uh uh attractive and and exciting topics of all. Uh economy, loot, mission rewards, inventory systems. No, it's going to be a good one. So joining us on the show this week, we have members from several different CI teams uh who all come together to work on these various uh uh systems. So we'll go around and introduce them. This is one of those Zoom calls. So everybody's at their desk and because we didn't have enough chairs. So we're going to start with who? Let's go to Zoom and see who's on the screen. Who we start with? Jacob. Congratulations. You won Zoom lottery. Who are you and what do you do? Uh yeah.
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Hi. Uh I'm Jacob. I'm a senior gameplay programmer and I'm here uh this time because I have been programming a lot of these stuff for loot and harvestables uh which is what all of these wonderful designers uh will be talking about um for the rest of the show. Yeah. Um randomize here. Uh Declan, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? Hello. Hello. Uh yeah, my name is Deck, system designer. uh work on crafting, which we'll talk a little bit about, and uh inventory reworks, which very exciting. Uh immediately next to you, Luke. Who are you and what do you do? Hi, I'm Luke and I am here to talk to you about loot. Loot, the musical instrument, you mean? Yeah, I'm going to
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play the loot. Okay. Wouldn't it be the weirdest thing we've ever done on SEO? Uh Andre, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? Hi. Hi, I'm Andre. and the economy designer. And what does an economy designer do? We take care of almost everything uh that has to do with the shops, value of items, rewards. Um yeah, so almost everything. And you're the reason everybody's unhappy. Yes. And across from you, Nick. Who are you and what do you do? I am Nick. I'm also an economy designer and also involved in everything but not the reason that any of you are unhappy. Okay. So, if we have Andre, why do we need you? We have four economy people. We have
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three economy designers and uh an incredible technical um person who I'm not even sure what his job title is because he knows so much stuff. So, Andre is a lead and uh oversees uh everything. I mostly focus on missions and rewards and item prices and uh events and working with the mission team and the world famous Elliot Mby. And Connor is um commodities and trade routes and new systems and all the free trading and the and all that kind of stuff. He's the pretty face of economy. Connor is. Yeah, Connor is. No, you come on. Come on. Um and you mentioned Elliot Maltby. It's a shame that he couldn't be here on the show with us this week. Yeah, it is. It's a real shame. But the terrible accident meant that uh
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complet accident completely his own fault and brought upon himself. Too right. Let me sleep. No, I've got people messing with my desk and I'm anal. Hi. Should I introduce myself? Um I'm Elliot Malti, uh the lead mission designer. Um, and I spend all my time on Twitch chat. Yeah, spend all my time on Twitch chat or making you all shoot each other. According to Reddit, I saw I saw a post that said you were one of the masterminds of the entire Persistent Universe the other day because you because you listen to Imagine Dragons. Yeah, like I was just playing schedule one chilling. All right, so on today's show, we're going to go through a couple different
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topics. This is going to be a bit of a different show than normal. Uh we are going to have a section at the end for uh for questions from our community. But today I want to go through basically the four key pillars of how items and stuff are acquired in the verse. Uh and uh to start we're going to start with uh economy or money things you can buy with money. So Andre and Nick obviously as the economy designers we're going to start with you here. How do you decide what goes into a shop and where? Well, as I mentioned, shops are part of uh our uh our job. Uh so, first of all, we want to make sure that everything in the uh every uh game loop, every career in the game is accessible. So, uh every
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activity I want it to be accessible. So, if you want to trade, for example, you're always going to find uh FPS trading tool or you're going to find uh uh sorry, I'm a bit nervous, obviously. Um you're always going to find um if you want to trade, you're always going to find a uh a tractor beam. You're going to find a a ship that has a cargo grid. If you want to mine, you're going to find an attachment for that uh multi tool. You're going to find a a prospector. Uh more than that uh we try to keep everything tied to narrative. So you're going to find burritos in Stanton and you're going to find uh parat on a stick in Pyro. And sometimes we just have fun with it. For example, Connor suggested that every farm in Pyro should
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have shotguns. He's from Texas, by the way. Okay. And I think I I think I sent a a thread to um uh Nick the other day about how um because Hursten was was was so salvage focused and everything, maybe Hurston should have salvage items in their stores and whatnot. It's there's a lot of thought that goes into positioning what where something goes, not just how much it it costs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I mean that's actually the kind of thing that their narrative team they could have they could they would have a lot to talk about in this one in this uh as well. The narrative team has all of the history of of the of of the verse to date and also all the stuff coming. And so they have a pretty good idea of um the context of each location. So, uh,
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when it comes to what goes in what shops where, it's about bringing life to, um, the stories that we already have by letting players, like Andre said, access to the game loops that are appropriate in each of those contexts, but without stopping people from playing things. So, enabling game loops that fit the narrative. And you uh Andre, you said making things accessible from the start, but at some point you go beyond the start. You're you're you're in Midgame, you get to end game stuff. Is everything supposed to be available in the store? What where where do you draw the line for that's not something that should be available in the store? That's something that that should go to one of the other ways that you attain things. It's very hard to say that there's a a clear line. This is
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where a bit of the art comes in. And uh at some point you say, "Okay, this is an exclusive item or this is something that you should only get into the end game or maybe uh a lot of things, not not even a maybe that's going to be a certainty. A lot of things you're not going to be able to just buy from from a shop because I don't want to make you see the end all of the of the game. uh you see something that happens to you, helps helps you play the game, helps you fuel your ship or uh repair your ship, but should not be the way that you get the most important important items in the game. And it makes sense from a from a immersion standpoint that you wouldn't be able to go to a Herz rena car and pick up a Polaris or or an Idris. You know, you can't you can't you can't go to a rental shop and buy a battleship
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today. Now, again, there are always exceptions and stuff like that. is going to say the 890 jumps available here and whatnot. But it's obviously with the game with the game system, you try you make exceptions here and there in order to make things available to players at certain parts of your you know uh development. But on the whole it's we don't want to put everything in one place because we want we have to encourage players in traditional game design to go throughout the universe and and try different things in order to to attain their stuff. Um how do you price things? Is there is there some kind of matrix or are you just also using art? Uh we are always using art but there's a bit of technique that we apply of this but actually many many techniques. Of course we first use an algorithmical approach otherwise would be impossible to put a a price or a value on all the
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thousands and thousands of items we have in the game. And again those items in different shops at different uh uh price points. Once we have that uh uh value from from the algorithm then we start to uh uh apply uh our own intuition. We apply uh our expertise. We apply the the experience we have by playing the game and we do let's call it a sanity check uh if uh if we think that the algorithm is is giving us the right value or not and then we adjust the price or we adjust the algorithm depending on the on on the situation. Nick use a lot of this algorithm actually more than than myself because with FPS you have a lot of different uh items you have guns and you have armors and maybe he can tell us a bit about how he used the algorithm and
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so it's like is it's like you say the 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 to a as a surprise to anyone. But I mean 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 the desiraability of the assault rifle itself which has its own price. And then that's related to say the price of pistols or the price of rail guns. The price of rail guns is an interesting one. uh the decision to make rail guns that you so you and and missile launchers so you can't buy them in shops is a deliberate um decision to encourage not just NPC shop uh trading but it's
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really really important to us to have a 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 and we want to encourage that. So yeah, rail guns are not available in shops, but they're absolutely available around the verse and they have a value and everyone knows that value. Then you got me and Nickel talk about we'll look at the black market. Um I the the org that I'm in um we do gun running and we sell um and uh not that I've infiltrated but I we use those those data points that like we do in our or and how we do gun running to also influence 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
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account as well. It's super important. I mean, if you take something like the anti-Amama set for example, like that has a value. It fits in with the algorithm. It makes sense. But the anti-mama set has a completely separate value to the people in the game because of its rarity, because of its availability in content, and and that's why it's all related to it. So certain certain items are only available through content. Certain items are only available um there's there's a whole content waterfall of items coming from the 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 and etc etc um 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 and like I say in
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the future we want you to have um a better view into how all of these things are related to each other that's future work with UI and backend data So you can make meaningful choices about how you want to spend your money on the 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. Okay. And we need the player economy. Um, do you ever intentionally price something high or or weird to to make it rare in the verse? Yeah, we did the uh xenofret helmet, the uh commander xenofret helmet. But we we rocketed that up and I'm pretty sure I'm sure we put like 69420 in it as well because we thought it'd be funny. Absolutely. Yeah, sure. There are perks of working at C. If you come to me and tell me I want that to go be go a bit up or down, you
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know what? I'm going to be your friend. Um, folks paying attention right now know that there's a there there's a there's an exploit. I think I think it's let you to duplicate things like Janelite and sell and sell it for a whole bunch of stuff. Folks are working on that. We're not going to talk about the the fix for that and the and the adjustments for that right now. That's not not being done by any of us. But I did want to ask I mean the timing on this. We've got the we've had the show scheduled for about a month and a half and then this happens. How frustrating how frustrating is it to you personally to when things like this happen? Well, you can only imagine how frustrated it is to have your work affected by a bug that nobody could foresee. Uh and uh you're right, we are very grateful to our many colleagues that are working uh to fix those uh
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those bugs. Okay. Uh and last question before we move into uh loot and stuff. Um sorry I took this one from from Reddit here. Does Star Citizen even have an economy? Wow, that's that's a multi-layered uh question. It's such a short and simple question but yeah there are many many there's not the comprehensive economy you would like to uh have in the in the future but uh I think we are step by step getting there um I I can give you the big picture how we laid the foundation for so for example we started in uh 2024 by by doing a full balance of as many uh systems and items as uh uh as you could so probably you saw a
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different prices for ships for FPS items, for armors, for components, for fuel, for the rewards for the missions change commodities, trade routes and many many more that I cannot even uh remember from the top of my head. Uh this year we are focusing on big data, we are focusing on uh uh tools, we are focusing on the backend work that needs to be done and those things that needs to be built uh before we get to that. And now here insert your adjective uh uh dynamic, live, responsive, all those things uh that we want to put into the economy, the economy that we all dream to have and the economy that I joined the the company to to build. uh but we need to do that background work first and you're not going to see the those results in the game for uh for some time
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only after that we can focus on UI and system that are going to system that is going to expose all that work to to the player. So until then we are we are doing stuff like uh you you could see still this year but uh uh uh trade routes being adjusted. Uh you're going to see commodities changing price according to narrative and according to the events that uh we put in the game. Um we're going to offer more ways for you to extract value from all the content that we introduce to the game. So yes, you're going to always see changes. we have an economy but step by step we are going to go to that economy that we all dream to have in the future. I hope that answers the question. Yeah. No, I I I I I appreciate not just that
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you answer the question, but that you allowed me to ask such a pointed question at um and yes, I think you agreed to yourself very well. Thank you so much for your answer. Um let's move into things you find out in the universe. Luke, um talking loot here, what are the rules? How do we decide what goes into loot and where? Okay. Um well, I think anyone anyone who plays games enough kind of knows what to expect from loot and we're not going to um reinvent the wheel there. Uh but for a long time, Loot was it was owned by individual content designers. Um so it got a little bit inconsistent. Um, and in an initiative at the start of this year, um, I've taken it over as a systems designer to try and get things
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back to consistent again. Um, and hopefully you'll notice that in, um, it was a line. Was it mine to align and and the most recent Stormbreaker location line to mine? How could you forget? Well, we called it Orbeageddon, right? Like internal name. You're not supposed to share internal names for this stuff. We have some really terrible internal names for things. Yep. Hex penetrator like less said about that for the better. Um okay. So um basically we just uh take a few things like into account um category of the item uh rarity and size um because they all have to fit in a box. Um so we have four main categories which are weapons and ammo, armor, medical and then miscellaneous.
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and that those ones are um distinguished visually by different boxes. Um miscellaneous can then be broken down into more specifics like food um mining repair um so that if the level designers have like a cafeteria or a garage, they can place things that make more sense in there. Um and then we have five rarities. um common, uncommon, uh rare, epic, and legendary. Um you'll find the first four of those in loot boxes. Uh we have three different rarities of loot boxes. Common, uncommon, rare. Um epic, we don't have a box for that, but it it appears in all those boxes in a very small amount. Um
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with you, you know, more likelihood of getting EP um rare if you are looking at a rare box. We don't have those distinguished visually yet, but that is the plan. We will be getting new models for those. So, you'll be able to just glance at a box and see that, oh, that's a rare box. It'll be a lot shinier than the common one, I assume. Um, and then we also have um size size of the item. Uh we have three different sizes of boxes and it obviously it makes sense that you can't find a rail gun in a small weapons box. Um, and it tends to be that as things get more powerful, they get larger. Um, so, you know, you won't get um you'll only get the full suit armors inside um the large largest armor box. So, it's kind of turned out
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that as far as gameplay goes, a large, you know, a large box, the size of a box is actually, I think, more important than the rarity of a box because what what is rare? like it's kind of like a tint on an item or something like that. Um, and then we have like legendary items and those don't appear in loot boxes. Those are saved for the um location. So in all in a line to mine or whatever it's called, um we had the uh camo rifle uh vault rifle. Don't shake your head. Um, and we had the camo uh hunter outfit, hunter armor. And then in Sageddon, we had um Stormbreaker. We had the um bright yellow radiation
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suits. And uh like those will never be found anywhere else. They'll be found in those locations. Whereas all the other stuff that's kind of like it's kind of unique to those locations, it's only unique right now. As as they get older, they'll kind of spill out into other locations as well. Um, and how we decide where they go. Um, so those individual boxes or the loot, um, we draw a map of the location and then we, um, decide how difficult it is to get into all those rooms and then assign them a loot value and that determines whether they can have like uncommon or common, um, loot inside them. Um, and then maybe good to mention, we are also making like an active effort to go back through some of
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our old locations and and update them sort of to to snuff. Obviously there's there's no date on when that is or when that's going to finish, but it's something we are trying to do to make sure we we we be consistent. Yeah. Yeah. Um like and that will be done using um the new kind of extension to the system that Jacob's currently working on, which makes it easier for us just generally um to set up loot, to place loot, but um also to define locations. So you'll start seeing um like differences between Stanton and Pyro through loot. Yeah. So um a lot of what Luke has said is uh things that we're already doing. We're trying to make each location have its own themed loot in some way. But it
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currently takes quite a lot of manual intervention to make that happen. Uh a lot of you know inefficiencies in the workflow. Uh so I've been working on some uh extensions to the system to improve our tools around that and make it easier for designers to set up things in such a way that it can scale to, you know, all of our different locations, all our different systems and grow for the future as well. Yeah. When I first started on this, I remember you saying this system was made to place rocks and trees. Yeah. One one system was made to place place rocks and trees. Yeah. And now it's it's grown and it's even placing Atlas geo suits, I think, in Didn't say I couldn't, Jacob. If you don't tell me I can't do something, I'm going to do
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it. All right. Yeah. Yeah. God, that that might be the truest words ever spoken in. I'm a designer. My my my my goal is to get stuff done by any means necessarily. And if it means I'm using something called a harvestable to place down an atlas, I'm going to godamn do it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I understand that. I respect that. But then uh I still Yeah. Do so. I I got what I do is uh I will try to adapt to the to the changing needs uh that the designers have as we're making new content. uh and you know what might not have been supported at one particular time uh will be supported later. So uh yeah we we keep growing our technology as the needs of our content
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and gameplay grow as well. Yeah, that's actually where I want to take this. I want to ask you now. So obviously we we're now using the we we now taken the harvestable system and adapted it to better place loot and stuff. Um there's there are technical limitations that we just got done talking about. Luke, at the beginning of this, you mentioned that there was an organizational limitation before this year where all the individual content designers were responsible for doing this and there wasn't any kind of global overarching theme or process to this with the growing technical aspects of the harvestable system or whatever. we're going to end up renaming it now that we when we start using it for other things and with this new organizational change Luke for you know trying to build a a new kind of philosophy over
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everything u with the efforts Elliot made I mentioned to go back and revisit old places folks in chat are mentioning certain pyro locations that were built with the old mentality and stuff and going back and revisiting those like this what is the what is the future of this look like we're not giving any dates or anything? Where do we go from here? Does it just keep doing what we're doing or are there more things we want to push for? Uh, I can say some very far future stuff, but uh, you know, we we hope to have um consistently themed loot throughout the whole location. And that would encompass the stuff that the people you find there are wearing, uh what they'll be having in their backpacks or or any other clothing items they have, the stuff that you'll find around the location. Uh and uh it'll end
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up being themed towards what that location is is for or related to. So if you find a mining outpost, there'll be more mining related stuff. It's it's all about just being able to fine-tune the experience to be what you would expect to find there in the verse. Um, and we have various initiatives on the go that are building us piece by piece towards that. And because everybody gets a a question that I'm going to that it's going to be a little harder to answer. You know, Andre, still sorry for the economy one. I'm not really. You did great. Um, it's all right. One of the things that separates us from other MMOs is that one of one of the many things anyway is we physicalize everything. All of this loot has to be physicalized. You can't just we don't have a system where
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you you can just throw something into somebody's bag and it's there and they wear it and it's there. It's all got to take up space. It's all got to it's all got to be hand uh you know physically manipulatable and stuff. Does this I'm pretty sure I know the answer but I'm going to ask. Does this make your job easier or harder? ton. Very nice. That's your second bomb. This uh you know this cool. You got to be careful there. I'm so h but yes it makes it a lot harder for sure. Um you know in there's like different layers to the physicalization as well. So you just saying it takes up space. That means even within an inventory, we are measuring the the dimensions of the item and uh the volume that it will take up. Uh so that you
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can't fit a super long thing in a really small box even if its volume would technically fit. Um so that that gives uh you know more work for me to do in terms of the maths um you know internally. But then there's more uh level design and you know system design kind of perspectives on this as well. Um which uh Luke might be able to say more about of how we choose between when we're going to present the item to you physically in the world or when we're going to present you with a loot box that you have to look inside. Yeah, you asked does it make it harder? Um I think it makes it harder for everyone, even the players. Um but especially the devs um because we have been physicalizing um certain items. It's always the items that are
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particularly rare or useful like if we want to draw your attention to this um we'll put it in the world. Uh we do that in like an eye-catching way within the level. So um a line of mind we place for vault weapons and gun racks. Recently those got lit um consistently to really show off what's inside there. Um, and there was the again the the radiation suit is now available on a mannequin. Um, and we'll be using that quite often I think from now on and going back through and and placing it. Um, but the reasons the other reasons other than technical reasons we don't um want physicalized loot everywhere is because loot boxes solve all the downsides of that. Um, so you can group items
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together and e they're in an easily recognizable package, you know, whereas um, you know, a big red box, whatever, a physicalized items, you can easily mistake those for static props on tables and and maybe miss them. Um, it massively speeds up the jobs of level designers and artists to kind of place these things around. You imagine placing individual pieces all over tables, making sure you got room for them. Um, and then it makes my job easier because if anything changes in loot, we don't have to go back through every level and delete individual bits and pieces. I just change what's going to spawn in the box that's there. Um, and then finally, like it just hides respawning, you know, the respawning of bits and pieces.
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Nothing pops in on tables. It just we refresh inside the box. It's a difficult thing to balance because you're going to have like as as Luke says, it does make our life harder and it can make sometimes as Luke said the players life harder, but it can also make the experience better. Like when we're designing things like Stormbreaker and a line of mine, you know, you think back to playing games when when I was a kid, a loot room should feel like a loot room, right? Instead of me just seeing a bunch of red boxes and knowing it's a chance of rare loot, I want to see like the gold stacked up on a table. I want to walk in and I want to see a vault shotgun or a vault sniper rifle in in a case in front of me because it gives two things. It gives affordance to players cuz when they look through the window, they see the reward that they want and they know the doors locked and aside from you all clipping through
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environments. The normal flow would be then you have to go and figure out how to get through that door without breaking physics usually. Um so is it's kind of a sort of a tossup between the two. So what we try to do is we try to choose what we think could be something that we'd want the player to latch on to visually and think I want to achieve that. I want to get that. And that's why, you know, in some places we have the vault weaponry visible so people can sort of see it and get into it. And we have a few armor mannequins that are the same. I I can see it. I want it. How do I get to it? And physicalizing physicalizing affords us the opportunity to make a more immersive universe. It's going to going to become a big part of when uh player housing and stuff comes online and being able to decorate your homes and your habs and your hangers and stuff with the with the things that
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you've collected and stuff like this. It's it's it is it makes the job harder, but the rewards down the line are still everything that we're shooting for and stuff. So, it's like anything else. Like a lot of things else with Star Citizen. We don't we didn't take the easy path. We take the harder path. But when it works and we and when we can do it right, it is much more rewarding. Um let's move to rewards for specific efforts. Uh uh and basically mission rewards and stuff. Uh Elliot, uh the first question actually comes from somebody who just got banned in chat. Uh Mulix the real asked, Elliot seems incredibly immature. Is he right to be a lead designer for important missions? He doesn't even have situational awareness right now. So, I guess that wasn't a
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question. No, I but I can answer it anyway. Are we sure that was from chat, not just from you? Genuinely, it could have been from anyone in this office. Um, my my my personal philosophy is games are meant to be fun. You got to have fun to make fun. So, I might seem a little childish, but that's because I'm having fun at what I do, and it just enables me to do a better job. God help us if making video games for people's enjoyment should not also be enjoyable to do. God help us. Um to the real questions here. This year has seen a major explosion in mission rewards. Was this a technical limitation that we overcame, a philosophy change in development, or was something else at play? there was a few things that kind of came into this. Um
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we we firstly we needed freight elevators. That was the big thing cuz it's either we do a bunch of temporary throwaway work to get your rewards or we wait and we do it properly the first time. And the big thing for this was we needed the freight elevator system. And then we got the freight elevator system. And the next big thing was server meshing. Uh so it was all about the mission refactor. Um but once we got the mission refactor done, it finally enabled us to take the time to actually make these mission rewards. So it was kind of it was kind of like a it was a technical limitation. we was waiting. We always wanted to do mission rewards. You know, way back when uh the mission feature team was still around, it was always something we talked about is we want to try to get away from just giving people UEC because UEC can just help you buy things, but you know, you you want to kind of see some other stuff. You want to you want to have a gun. So, it was sort of like a pushing forward and
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an initiative to get that. but also because we knew we was going to do a year of content. What we wanted to try and do as well was have a way of uh incentivizing that content, not just in the aspect of, hey, it's cool, I want to play it, but hey, it's cool and while I'm playing it, I can gather things for Wiccolo that later benefit me or I'm doing it, I found it, I've picked it up, and then later on I found that Wiccolo wants it. Um, so that that's where mission rewards come from. It's not going to stay with just Wiko. We're going to keep pushing it out. we already have with both Foxwell and Head Hunters. Uh sorry, there's a lot of missions. Uh they give out script obviously and they give it directly to your uh home location. You know, that's something we'll see for other missions uh going forward. Um are there ever any considerations for
00:35:06
how weighty or meaningful the reward should be? Like should a mission reward inherently have more value than something you find in a box or buy in a store? Uh yeah, we we it's it's a balancing act, right? Um like most things, we we always want to strive for a mix of here's a mission thing. It's really cool and you can only get it via missions because obviously then it incentivizes the mission and then we'll have some items that you can get via a mission or you could find as as potentially a rare drop inside of loot boxes. Um or it's something that you can't get via mission, you can only get via loot. Uh we we try to achieve a nice mix of it of it all, but we always want to make sure that some items are visually distinct via the methods of getting them. Uh this is so say I'm walking around in my uh Stormbreaker uniform that I've got from
00:35:54
Wicolo, right? And um Nick um Wardle, who obviously doesn't read very well and hasn't read the contract, comes up to me and goes, "Hey, I you know, I've put my glasses on and I really like the uh the armor that you're wearing. Where do I get that from?" Um, and then I can slowly, you know, walk walk walk Nick through and be like, "Hey, you need to go do the Stormbreaker event. I know your reactions have degraded and have slowed down, but I'll come and help you a bit and we'll go through it together and I'll help you get the items you need." Honestly, and it's something to do with experience and, you know, the wisdom of years as opposed to youth and impetuousness. Got a few years there, aren't you, mate? That's your third one. So Elliot is absolutely right and I think it's important to discuss what we mean by value because something can have value to someone and
00:36:41
it's nothing to do with UEC. So the mission rewards have value to people not because they're worth UEC. Sorry, I was just I was just thinking about how much better looking you are than Elliot. So I listen I know it. That's the main reason I'm salty. The other thing which is crazy is like I'm like 6'2 which means I'm like three foot taller than Elliot which is crazy. Go ahead. off. Go over there and stand next to him right now. Nick, go stand next to him right now. I swear to God I'll break your knee. See it. I'm kneeling. I was kneeling. I was a joke. You weren't kneeling that much. Goblin confirmed live. Let's Let's go. Listen, Goblin Gathering isn't named
00:37:29
after me. I thought it was named after the Magic the Gathering card, but I didn't find out what it wasn't named after, and it's a good story. Um, Wiccolo has been a major new avenue for mission and event rewards this year. Where'd that come from, and how'd that come about? Um, so, uh, previously as I mentioned, you know, we we knew we wanted to do a content year and we wanted to make some really cool things for players, but we also wanted to make sure that we gave them more more reasons than this is just new content to go and engage with it. Um, we wanted to give specific rewards that are tied to content um, or tied to multiple pieces of content. Um, that means that players if they want these rewards, they kind of have to engage with a bunch of different different ways of gameplay. It's also nice because it might show players into gameplay that they're not really
00:38:18
you used to playing. You know, I watched a really cool podcast with uh people when we first released Siege of Boris and they were saying how they was only ever um ship combat flyers. They'd never done FPS in in Star Citizen. And then when um when when we did Siege of Orison, they was like, "Well, let's check it out." and now they do a mix because they they had engaged with content for a purpose that was different to just I this is what I normally enjoy. Uh and it encouraged them to to check content out and play it more and more. So, we kind of use it like that because obviously not everyone's going to want to play the goblin gathering, you know, hauling missions because they're not really interested in hauling, but they might have a reward that they want to achieve. And by that, they might go, "Ah, I might try this out because I could just do thousands of these to hit this, but this one is more dangerous, so it's going to give me more points
00:39:04
towards my overall goal. So, I'm going to sort of engage with it like that." Uh, as for where came from, uh, we're a space game. we should have aliens and ones that actually are sentient and talk to you even if it is broken English. Um, so, you know, when we was thinking about it, we, you know, we was like, we want some sort of like figure that's collecting oddities and is very mysterious and the original plan was that you wasn't going to find out that it was a Banu. We was going to have a broken sort of camera and it was going to take you time until you discovered who they was. But then we was like, we're hiding one of the coolest things. So, we was like, let's get him in there. Let's let's let's put some comms in there eventually and have him speaking to you and maybe even talking pure in Banu. Um so the people who understand Banu can understand it and the people who don't don't have some subtitles to read because yeah, it's another
00:39:53
language. I don't understand it. I barely understand my language. I'm going to have a migraine by the end of this with everybody using the internal names for things. Wait, what did I say? You said goblin gathering like four times. Oh, right. Well, that's because It's all right. No, no, no. In my new role, I'm I don't really care. Let's just be real. Um, should we should we give the Stormbreaker name? We've already We've already done it. We've given like the last four names. You just haven't been paying attention. I don't think I said Apex again. No, no, that's somebody else. Somebody else said Ormageddon. Whatever. It's just you What I was going to ask? I thought what I thought you weren't going to do another live one Jared with Elliot cuz of all the I I thought we No, that was Le that was that was Laith just just never mind. Love you La but never again.
00:40:49
Okay. Um so what are the limitations of this system? So, we know it's not precisely how we'd wanted it and there are some peculiarities with elevators and and uh uh uh the Wiklo favors and the RNG which is getting addressed in uh 421. Uh walk me through what's happening now and uh how we're making Wiccolo better in the future. Uh I'll break that down into three little bits because you mentioned a bunch. Uh freight elevators obviously have their issues. You know, we're not blind to it. We know about it. It is an incredibly complex system um because it touches so much kinds of things is you know it's got the whole thing that Jacob was on about before with the volumes and the fitting. You know you can have so much stuff on that and they're all different dimensions like it's a lot of stuff to figure out. So they they're actively working on it every single patch to try and make it as as good of
00:41:36
an experience as can be. Um but we're working on stuff as well for uh the Wiko experience uh to make it better. So, one of the big things that I know is going to help a hell of a lot is um what we call like nested item turnins. So, essentially if you had a 1SU box and you put everything in that one SCU box. So, like I put in my 50 50 favors and I put in like 20 uh medals and I put on 10 copion tooth and three pearls. I should then just be able to put that box on the freight elevator and send it down and it accepts it and it kind of completes it uh like that. Now, we don't currently have that. there's a bug like it should work but there's a bug that's stopping it from being worked and it's something we're actively looking to fix and that'll that'll improve the experience because instead of like like I say we're not blind to it. I I have to stand on
00:42:25
that freight elevator as well and manually drop each item for a stack of 50. The problem is that we want to fix the bug and we don't just want to make the recipes easier to account for that problem because then it it completely devalues the reward at the end. Um, so working on that part of the experience. And another thing is what we call uh multilocation drop off. Um, this is essentially instead of having to go to a certain Wiccolo Emporium to do the mission when it's generated, we're going to be having it so that you can accept it and turn it in at any Wikileo location. So, say I need to get like 10 pearls, 10 10 uh irradiated apex pearls, and I need to get, you know, four quasi grazer eggs, and I need to turn them in. And, you know, station thing is closer to the pyro jump point. So, I want to
00:43:14
turn the pearls in there. And then the quasi spawn over here, and that's close to this station, so I want to turn it there. We're going to enable it eventually. So, you can do that. And what will happen is if you've deposited the pearls here and then you finish the eggs off in this other location, it doesn't matter where you put it, wherever you complete the recipe is where you'll be given the award, but you can drop them off at any location. This way you can choose exactly where you want to go and and finish the mission. Um, and when we get that tech, it won't just obviously come to to Wick. we will come to a bunch of our missions where we notice this is kind of like a uh a pain point of of right well I have to go all the way over here now and I don't want to um but that that should help that'll be the freight stuff favors uh favors are something we want to keep because they're um in law they're a representation of the Banu
00:44:03
because they don't have they don't write stuff down they don't really have that history thing if you do work for me as and I'm a Banu I've got I won't remember that. So a favor is like a token that says, "Yeah, if I give you this, it means that I've done substantial amount of work for you." And then me as a banu, I'll go, "Okay, right. Well, I can't remember it, but because you have my favor cube, I will honor the deal, honor the agreement." Um, but favors also act as a purpose, which is uh stopping your items being deleted. Um, we have uh some technical limitations obviously in the game where certain amount of items in one zone uh can cause lag, frame drop, uh physics to freak out, all of these kinds of things. Um, and what we have is this density cleanup
00:44:52
system that eventually when it violates a rule set, it starts starts cleaning them up. Um but because obviously we need the worth of the items but we have the limitation of too many items in one space causes problems. Uh favors are also used as a conversion method. So when we ask for you to trade in 50 karat for one favor it like I say it's a conversion instead of asking you to put 500 car down and 450 of them be deleted and you're like all my hard work no uh if you don't get a crash or whatever else. That's that's why the favors exist and they're going to continue existing because they're a really interesting piece of the law. Uh but the idea is that we'd be able to have more items in bulk when we can do that sort of box thing. So favors will stay but they'll kind of morph a little bit
00:45:38
for how we use them. And then RNG RNG uh this is something obviously we've we've we've looked at for 4.2.1 and we've put in some fixes that play people have been playing. Um, we, you know, RNG in grinding is very typical for MMO. Um, and it's something obviously we want as well. You know, we want you to put effort because effort means the valuation of the things you get as a reward goes up. Uh, you've put your time into it. But the the point where um we've changed it was that the RNG was done a lot more on the reward side. So instead of going, I want this item and this is all the stuff I need to get for it, we would go, here's a list of a bunch of items you
00:46:25
could possibly get if you give this stuff, which you know, randomizing the reward isn't as fun because then you've got all this work done. You go for the excitement of getting the reward and then it's like, hey, you got this and you're like, yeah, it's not what I wanted. Um, so we we've we've we've kind of changed where that where that is. Um, so what we want to do is is have you choose the rewards you want. Um, and then on the getting of the items is where we have the the the RNG. And it's something that uh me uh to Leman on systems design and the economy team uh Andre and Nick have been working on which is defining what that is. And we've we've basically split it into like three distinct categories. You have your core content items. These are items that you are guaranteed to kind of get while playing a um a piece of content. So an
00:47:16
example of core content items would be karanite, right? You get karanite from doing the align and mine flow code name obagedon. Um then you have your content items. These are items that you that are not core to the experience but you will like you can find you can get. So an example of these would be the Ace Interceptor helmets and then the ones that help us with the the sort of the the RNG uh in a big way are the rare content items. These are things that you will find less are less likely to find. They still they still can be there but they they increase the time and help to add that sort of grind aspect to an MMO. So these are new these are some new things or things that already exist that we're kind of like injecting. So, for example, in 4.2.1 when you play and you do um I
00:48:07
was going to say all a line of mine, uh you will find pure caronite now in the uh cave. It's a new new type of resource. Um but you're going to find a hell of a lot less of them and you're going to notice that some of the recipes now require that. You know, if you're doing the uh Stormbreaker, there's the uh grade AAA uh Radiate Pearl. That's going to be a rare content item. We've got a bunch of war badges uh for ship battles that you can find on the Ace pilots, but they have a chance to spawn. You can find them in Luke's Luke's loot boxes. Uh but they have a rare chance to spawn. Uh and this is kind of like how we're looking to to keep a little bit of the RNG and keep a little bit of the grind, but you decide up front what is your reward you want. Um, so you don't
00:48:54
have to end up with like 50 like terrapins from Wiccolo all just because you wanted a completely different ship. Uh, yeah. Listen, it was a long question. What do you want me to do? No, no, it was great. Great answer, Elliot. Uh, you're playing with dolls. What are you doing? I want to read two comments from the chat. Uh, uh, first was from St. Deacon. Uh, this was this was caught by the automod, so I want to make sure this gets out there. Uh, nine unicorn horns, my virginity, my eldest child, and 900 air 900 hairs from a tick's butt. What do you think, Nick? I'm I'm good with that. You want to put that as a recipe? How does he have his virginity? I think that's reasonable. I'm not sure
00:49:41
which one of those is I'm not sure which one is the rare content on that one. Is it the Is it the the the butt ticks? I can't I'm not sure. Definitely not the virginity for sure. No, he's definitely still got that one. But uh and then another comment from Bluesmx. I love Elliot Malpi. I could listen to him for hours. Please continue talking about what you're talking about, Alec Malpi, and don't change the topic at all. He's being very uh gracious and uh good in the chat. Um all right, so our last pillar here, uh Declan, you've been waiting patiently and hanging out. Uh it's your time, baby. It's your time uh stuff you make and storing it. Now, obviously, we're not going to go too far into crafting as we get closer to the actual imp implementation of crafting the PU. There'll be there'll be ISC's
00:50:29
and there'll be and and stuff like that. Um but because it is yet another way that people know we're going to get some stuff. I do want to touch on it here. Um how does all these other avenues of item acquisition affect what you're doing on crafting? Uh it's big with crafting. God knows how many things we're going to uh inject as rewards. There's thousands of blueprints, hundreds of materials. So we really need all of this available to us so we can kind of dish it out into various parts of the game. Some places where it's more difficult, some places where it's easier, unique resources, different systems. So uh it's big because the whole gathering aspect of crafting is the the foundation layer. So it's kind of like the biggest and then
00:51:15
the pyramid refining and then crafting at the very top. So it's big big. Yeah. So, all of the all of the pieces that we've talked about so far, uh all of the work that uh Luke, Nick, Andre, Elliot is is doing, all of that content is things that we'll be able to add blueprints to, add crafting materials to, and in uh loot boxes, potentially even you might find some pre-crafted loot, but we'll we'll see about that. I know there's some conversation about separating uh gear and cosmetics deck. What what can you tell us? Uh yes. So I suppose most people know right now the way we have to do cosmetics and gear at
00:52:03
the moment like your armors and your guns is a bit annoying because it's like bound to the item rather than being like a ship paint where you can swap it around. So, we are working to separate out the cosmetics from the gear. You take it to a crafting terminal and be like, I want my gun to be whatever skin I have available for it. And it won't be a physicalized item either. The paint won't be physicalized. Ships eventually transitioning to not be physicalized either. The paint aspect of them. Uh yeah, that'll be an item. Yeah. And something we'll hear more about obviously when we get closer to the stuff. Um because crafting is, you know, still a ways in the future and whatnot. Um all of this stuff, and this is really the reason I've I've invited you here in case I don't know if you were know this or not. All this stuff, all this way of
00:52:50
getting stuff, all this way of acquiring I got to ask you about the inventory system. Yeah. Help, help, help, Declan, help. There is a stuff done in stack right stuff. It's I gota just just help what can you what can you what can you what can you tell us? We we fix it. Well, I'm personally not fixing it. However, the talented folks in Montreal are working on a rework at the moment. So, I will share some concept UI of what being worked on and we can talk through it. Hang on. I don't need to zoom much. So, here we go. So, we're looking at some uh concept UI here. Uh, obviously you can see there's a visual facelift, but um, kind of the most interesting aspect to me isn't
00:53:38
super obvious straight away, and that is that you will be able to access um, other inventories that are nearby to you within proximity. So, if we start drawing, we imagine we've got our storage box over here. And then we kill the guy. Yeah, thank you. We we kill the guy. Here he is. He's on the floor. So he would be accessible as one of the tabs up here. And then the inventory box would be over here. Same on the other side. And so when you press I to access the inventory, you can then access the dead body's inventory, access your storage box. You can start moving stuff around without having to directly go up to the body, go to the box, press F. So it's much much quicker to kind of get in there and start looting. Uh we'll just get rid of all this.
00:54:29
If we focus in on one of the panels, you can see it's called personal all. That's just kind of the the default personal would be on the left and it's all because it's showing everything that is stored on your person at that moment. If you wanted to see what is in your backpack in particular, you have the side tabs and then we have a search function which has been added in. If you were to click this, a search box would come out over here and you can search the item that you want. You have your select all, your capacity, you have your filters. Uh these filters kind of similar to freight elevator where you have the drop-own box with the subcategories here. And we're working on these filters being multi-purpose. What I mean by that is at the moment filters, you click them once and it means I want to see these items. If you were to click them twice, it would hide that category
00:55:17
of item. There's a lot of people with freight elevators full of decorations they don't really care about at the time. So they can just hide all the decorations if they want to. uh clear filters, sorting options when crafting comes in. This will be big because you want to sort by um quality items here, that kind of stuff. And then tucked away in the corner is stack all. So that's a nice quality of life addition as well. Just just a nice little addition. Just a nice little addition. Uh there he is. Uh anything about anything about maybe getting to name our boxes, label our boxes? Yes. So this is your commodity box and then this would be like a backpack and one of the options will be to right click and just rename them. So you could say like oh this is my box with high quality channel lighting
00:56:07
whatever as you you've given boring gamer salty Mike and space tomato so much content for the next week. Bro, we're not done. We've got tool tips and everything. Oh my god. Here he goes. So, as you can see, looking at the inventory, everything's a square now. Instead of it being a mix of squares and long rectangles, that'll also be applied to the freight elevator. So, the ship guns won't take up half the screen. You get a lot more information uh available to you. We have the equipment panel where I know I just said they weren't rex angles. These ones are, but regular weapons aren't. So, I'm technically true, but also li. Uh you can equip your attachments super easy here. Uh the one, two, three is basically like the slot they're in. And then again, if you were to look at your ammunition, you can see which weapon it's viable with. If we go
00:56:56
over to the character, uh we have all the slots. The slots would be shown by default here, and they're contextual. So, if you want to quickly see all the backpacks you have available to you if you were to click the backpack slots, then the various inventory would filter to only show the backpacks. Um, yep. We have the new tool tips, which very nice. Rather than being text, we have bars. Um, you've got a bit of info here. When we have crafting, then the crafting the the person who made it would replace the manufacturer. So, it's crafted by whoever it was crafted by. Uh, we have taken into consideration wear and tear with integrity and durability. And I suppose you know there's more than three stats on a weapon. So, if you to right click and details, you get the full view, the scroll bar, the attachments,
00:57:43
description, which can be expanded. And then if you [Music] if you hover onto a item of the same type, you'll see the comparison stats as well. Um, you can make the icons bigger or smaller. If you are uh if you got bad eyes, you can make them a bit bigger. Uh Elliot, don't make a joke about Nick. Um the thumbnails as well, obviously there's a problem where sometimes they don't load or sometimes they appear as far that's been worked on as well. We'll get that fixed. I think that's it. It's probably not everything. Um there's a lot of stuff that's going on. Yeah, it's not everything. We haven't tal we haven't talked about the the imprinting and the and the and the stuff with item recovery v2 and stuff like that. Uh but again, we just wanted to share uh a bit about the
00:58:35
at least the concept for the upcoming inventory uh revamp. Uh for folks in the chats that are saying 2026, 2027, um possibly I'm not going to not going to BS you here. It's not it's not in active development right now. It's just like it's in the concept phase and being specked out and and the work is being uh figured out and then it will be scheduled and stuff like this. So I can't speak none of us can speak about when it will be developed or been be delivered rather but that is the direction uh we want to go in this moment and I thought it was super cool and I thought it was super exciting and at the end of a conversation about all the things you can get in the verse and how you get them it just made sense to me to to cap it off with a look at at least how the future of managing that stuff uh will potentially look. Um so yeah with that folks we made it. We're at the end. Uh, Andre, Nick, uh, Declan,
00:59:25
uh, Elliot, uh, Luke, um, and, um, um, Jacob. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Jud. Thank you. Thank you for Thank you for hanging out. And, and shout out to Connor who wanted to be here, but because we changed the date on him, he couldn't be here. Uh, he wanted to be here, but he's there. Um, uh, thank you so much. Uh, also, I got a I got a shout out. So, there's a thing before I let uh the viewers go. I got to bring it up here because I didn't look at it ahead of time. There is a Oh, what chat was it in? Is it in your chat or my chat? There's a thing called Quantum Vegas. Uh it's happening on on Saturday, July 12th. Uh it's a big community organized Star Citizen event like other ones like BCON in Belgium or Con42 in in Germany. Um, uh, it's, uh, we're in attendance on
01:00:15
July 12th is Sean Tracy, uh, Sandy Roberts, uh, Tyler Wicken, uh, Galaska, our social media person. Um, there's going to be panels and contests and a bunch of giveaways and a bunch of stuff that you can get. So, if you're if you're in the Vegas area or at least the Pacific Southwest, and you can attend. That's on July 2nd, and you can check that out. Uh, just search for quantum vegas.space. They had a space thing. um and for details on that and that's uh July 12th. Um as for me, uh that's it for this week's show. Uh come back next Thursday. Uh it's a it's a behind the ships uh episode dedicated to um something I've been waiting for for a long time. No, it's not the jalapy. Uh
01:01:04
it's it's it's something it's something else. uh just because I know people are gonna think that's but but I it's it's it's been a ship that's near and dear to my heart and and it's coming to the verse uh uh real soon. So check that out next week and then of course we'll be back. A lot of folks had questions about uh the the new event that's currently testing on PTU. We have an ISC dedicated entirely to that and how the rewards work and how you can get all that stuff. That's coming uh in two weeks after that. So So go play it. Put some bugs in for me, please. Oh yeah, I need them. Yes, but if you're on PG now, play it. Uh Elliot's work is terrible and he needs as much knocking on the pipes as possible to to all these other people by model. So if it's terrible, it's not me. It's it's it's it needs it needs some play testing. Go to the PTU. Exactly. He didn't have his glasses on when he was
01:01:51
doing the I had it I had the screen really big. Somebody somebody in the chat said, "Do you remember when used to be professional?" And I'm like, "No, I've for every single remember the summer show. Was it the summer show or the Christmas one? Which one was it, Jared? I don't know what you're talking about." We don't talk about the anniversary show. I hope you're playing Hello Darkness, my old friend, right there. Do we not have that queued up? No. All right, so that's it, everybody. Uh, thanks for watching. Thanks for hanging out. Uh, jump on to Pichu and test if you can. Uh it helps us uh release these things every single month. And uh come back for uh BTS next Thursday uh for a pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty
01:02:37
pretty pretty spaceship. All right. Uh thanks. Bye.

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