CO: It’s the Economy, Stupid!

Chronomancer talks about CO’s economy. Folks have been griping about too few drops, too expensive retcons, etc.

Actually, at the risk of alienating people early days, I agree with the caution they’ve shown. Balancing always needs to be handled carefully. Make things too stingy, yes, and people grumble about it not being fun. Make things too easy, and people have the same grumbles. But loosening up always makes people cheer, while tightening down makes folks fume. Better to make few changes, and make things more fun, than to thrash back and forth frequently and “take things away.”

The bottom line of the analysis since they’ve gone live is that … well, yes, the economy was too tight. So there’s changes a-coming, starting on Test this weekend:

We’re increasing the number of white upgrade drops in the world by a substantial amount – close to double of what you’re seeing now.

Yay! Granted, that puts pressure on people’s inventory while in game, so expect some frustration if stores aren’t easier to find.

We’re also flattening out the curve on resources gained for selling upgrades to stores, meaning that you’ll get a lot more for white primaries, a little less at the highest end (blues and purples). This equates to distributing about the same overall potential resources while skewing gains to the lower end. We had originally considered just simply increasing the amount of resources you earned from selling all items to “fix” the economy. However, this would have broken crafting – hence the shifting of primary and secondary upgrade values that maintain a net balance of total resources you have coming in from selling upgrades.

Not breaking crafting is, I guess, good. At any rate, this shows a reassuring level of nuance (assuming they are correct). Ratcheting up the costing slider or the drop slider would be easy, but probably too crude.

We’re also increasing the amount of resources you get for defeating all enemies. This means not only will you naturally get more for doing missions, but you’ll also get more by helping others on their missions or by sweeping the streets. We’re also increasing the resources you get for mission rewards specifically.

More money is probably good.

The retcon pricing curve is going to be much gentler so that players can undo more decisions at any time. It’s important to note that although we’re tuning the overall costing model of retcon during this phase, a substantial retcon will still have a high price. The heroic, thematic nature of the game doesn’t support letting players constantly change their fundamental character concept. But at the same time we want to make it possible for them to completely retcon their character if it’s their goal.

I’m glad they’re easing the curve on this. Honestly, though, I don’t see the problems with letting folks easy re-roll their characters, esp. since I don’t anticipate it’s something that most folks will do.

Finally, we’ll be issuing a free retcon for all heroes when the economy changes go Live since it will take a little time for the effects of the new economy to allow players to build up a retcon bankroll.

I’ve inferred elsewhere that, like CoX, you can only have one “freespec” in your bag. The result here being, if you still have early-days characters that have a freespec, you should probably go ahead and use it before this goes live, since 1 + 1 will still equal 1.

Note that this is all giving us some data points, too — how frequently freespecs are given is always useful info as to how much they should be hoarded or spent.

Anyway, it’s good to see that, yes, they have been paying attention to player unhappiness on this, and that the direction is to loosen up on the money supply a bit. Good times should ensue.