If Chris Roberts had kept his promises, this would have been a WOW thread and still be on topic.
Once their ship sale begins again, I’m sure we’ll be discussing the new JPEGs. :)
There’s one going on right now (I think), though it’s not a ship, it’s a buggy. That might or might not have surface-to-air weapons. And it’s a concept sale, so it only exists as a JPEG that used a stock photo as background, apparently. And it’s cash-only, because you know, CIG has no monetary flow issues whatsoever.
That’s not true.
What would that even mean? Cash only? You walk down to CIG and pay them?
I assume he thinks it can’t be purchased with store credit.
Regarding the actual game, it looks like they’ve got their store system and economy going:
Essentially it’s a similar system to what EvE has, which I think has good potential for emergent gameplay.
There’s also some other stuff in there about some of the tech development for various aspects of the game.
There are some critical differences between the economies of EVE and Star Citizen. In EVE, the marketplace is almost 100% player-driven. That veldspar? Mined by a player. That small laser turret? Manufactured by a player using materials refined by a player from ore mined by a player. The only exception is a few items that are automatically seeded on the marketplace because the player has no way to obtain them otherwise.
According to CIG, Star Citizen’s economy will be 90% NPC-driven (or simulation-driven, more precisely). The developer in that Around the Verse video said that their background simulation will keep track of the various parts of their universe’s production chain to determine what items (and what quantity and price) will appear at any given vendor. This can be influenced by player actions, such as trading or plundering or simply purchasing and selling. But the big difference is that it is player-influenced, but will operate just fine on its own without any interference. Contrast that with EVE’s economy, which simply would not exist without the players.
There is no background simulation in EVE, is what I’m getting at.
Ya, that’s a fair point… although what I meant was that there’s a “real” economy there which players can interact with in a deeper fashion. You’re totally right though that given the size of the economy, and the fact that so much of it is ultimately sourced by NPCs, it might be harder to drive the same kind of large scale market effects that periodically happened in EvE.
But at the same time, it offers some of the interesting gameplay potential that you see in EvE.
Yeah, I think they’re making good on their promise to have a dynamic simulated economy, rather than arbitrary random number fudging.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean by “cash-only”, and thanks for the correction. CIG had a fair share of “cash-only” sales recently, and I assumed this one was as well. My bad.
Have they had any sales that only included Warbond options?
Not sure about “only”, but yes, I remember that being the case in previous sales.
When you said that the buggy was cash-only, I assumed you meant that it could not be purchased with store credit (sorry for repeating myself). As far as I’m aware, all of their sales have included standard credit options. The warbond items are sold at a discount.
Sweet, sounds like they are taking code from Freelancer!
Oh wait…
;P
More like trying to execute the original vision of Freelancer, since the outcome offered a static economy without simulation. It was one of Tom’s complaints when he reviewed it:
But on the other hand, as a multiplayer game, there’s no storyline to cover for some of Freelancer’s shortcomings: the unchanging universe, the superficial faction system, the lack of options for ship upgrades, the meager weapon variety, the homogenous missions, the limited multiplayer interaction, the utterly static economy, and the poorly thought-out trading system. In some important ways, Freelancer feels sadly underdone. These are all substantial shortcoming that you might not notice in the rosy glow of those first few hours of ‘hey, look how well it turned out!’. But the longer you play, the more likely you are to notice how much better Freelancer could have been. There are so many ways this very good game falls aggravatingly short of greatness.
Edit: my bad if that was the point of your sarcasm and I didn’t pick up on it
The idea of being able to steal stuff from other ships, or the ships themselves, is pretty neato.
What. You mean those ships that people paid hundreds of dollars in real money for can be stolen by other players?
I can imagine some theft of (virtual) property lawsuits if that’s the case. :)
Not that I wouldn’t mind watching this go down, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be involved.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding. I haven’t exactly been keeping up with all of this.
Yes… Although perhaps not with the consequences you think.
Generally, insurance will cover the loss… same as if a pirate blew it up or something.
But the guy is still gonna steal whatever cargo you got. You’d have to have some kind of additional insurance to cover that.
Well, you’ll get in trouble with the in game cops, bounties put on you, etc.
Is there going to be law enforcement or something?