[Music] there is something special about doing something in a game and knowing it affects other players and I'm not talking about like killing a couple enemies and making the path clearer or you know blowing somebody's ship up from the inside yeah jerk no I'm talking about the general chaos of an MMO being able to just do things in the game and know it affects the way the game plays more specifically though I'm talking about player made mission and in today's fature watch we're going to talk about player made missions and the quantum economy or Star Sim as they're starting to call it and how these things are actually going to really affect the way this game flows if you haven't been to a feature watch before this is a small Series where I just kind of take a topic from the last week of star citizens development and give you a little bit of a deeper dive on the history and the plans for that in a more casual setting than the Tomato talks so player made missions are something that players have gotten a little bit nervous about over the last couple months mainly because in 323 past transport beacons basically disappeared now we don't know if that's a glitch or not but this has made people a little more nervous about the beacon system taking a step back but it's not in fact it's been acknowledged in the last Star Citizen live that the system is much like the economy just not in a great place uh player contracts and job boards will players ever be able to set up contracts to have cargo or items hold by other players so we do have player beacons and I know what that current state of that is but um that is Nick what is the current state go ahead admit it worked perfectly it's um it's a feature uh but that's that's something which we it's like the economy it's non-existent oh sorry car Nick okay you know this is pre-recorded and if that still makes it into the show know that I don't value my job yeah yeah Elliott's still working at the company okay it's good yeah but ultimately this answer we got from Nick after Elliott's little Interruption was pretty good confirmation that player made missions are very important to the game to answer the question Elliot um the beacon system is something which provides for players to contract other players and it's a system we will be looking to expand upon in the future and personally I think that this side of the economy is fundamental given that we are having a hybrid economy so player driven that St tomato clip hit we got you while players won't exclusively control the economy in this game allowing players to make missions for other people is going to be really good at keeping players engaged with each other and like keeping the game alive and if you think think about it this is pretty key for solo players if you didn't want to get involved in a huge group or sign up to get your friends online whenever you wanted to go do something but you still wanted to take part in some of that bigger scaled gameplay now you can do it without ever having to talk to people you can just take missions that are assigned by other players benefit from the fact that it's an MMO but not necessarily have to go and get into a group it's also really important though cuz it shows us the direction of the economy that's planned to be pretty Dynamic and actually changing based on what players are doing thus allowing you to affect other people's gameplay this is actually pretty in line with what we've seen from previous Quantum economy demonstrations which we will get to in a little bit now later in the same talk it's actually specifically mentioned by Elliott that there will be chances for refineries or other locations to receive Goods based on your cargo running route or your mining or whatever you're doing and transform those goods into another good or a product and then another mission would be generated somewhere in the verse that would require a cargo hauler to come pick up those goods and take them somewhere else like a storefront or another Factory now we don't know which location would generate that mission but this is a pretty important part of the economic chain that they had planned out for Quantum but yeah we're going to have missions where you have to bring resources to a location um and then naturally that location would then take those resources produce something and then another location would then consume what that location produces and that makes the um the what do you call it the um the hall sort of mission this was actually reflected in the March monthly report if you go back and look it talked about how the economy team identified producers Transformers and syns for all resources essentially categorizing all the locations outposts factories cities distribution centers within the economic chain this is the Quantum system soon to be officially known as starsim it seems they keep saying it starim constantly starim everywhere starim and this is the overall economic simulation that's meant to actually make Star Citizen interesting back in 2019 Tony Z who yes is still working at the company as confirmed by a couple of friends who ran into him back in May did give us a good preview of The quantum system or what they had planned for it back then now it is a frustrating watch because it's taken so long to get here but let's look back at those demonstrations we're going to add a little bit of interest to the system by adding an aluminum mine to Delmar so now we're going to go ahead and add an aluminum Refinery to Crusader that Refinery it wants to build up a stockpile of aluminum and in order to do that it needs some raw aluminum ore and thus it's willing to pay for it and so the Quant ore are seizing upon that Economic Opportunity heading out to Delmar doing the work extracting that ore and taking it back to the refinery and and this will continue until it f you know until it's until it's full so what we're going to do now is add a factory but before we do that let's head on over to the power plant formula and you can see here that building a power plant um just like refining ore requires something it requires 10 workers working for a duration of 60 ticks and it also notably requires two units of refined aluminum or to in order to produce one power plant it's going to be more complicated than that I promise they'll actually require ships ships require engines and so all of a sudden there's a real demand for how many power plants do you need how many ships do you need it all follows the same meical equations while this process could include players or AI this is still pretty consistent messaging on what they want the economy to do and how they want it to change based on what players and AI are doing on the micro scale the economy itself was originally meant to be a 10:1 ratio of AI to players in the game so that players could have an effect on what's going on but maybe not completely screw up planetary economies like nobody wants there to be an overabundant supply of human waste on Hurston but you know there's going to be an org that's trying to make that happen this whole idea is supposed to allow for price changes resource droughts or even an overabundance of goods like human waste the kind of events that might push you to stockpile your Commodities until you'll get better profit for selling them or run a specific trade route on a specific date because there may be a blockade not talking about Blockade Runner get out of here go shoot but this still allows for there to be guardrails for the economy to self-correct throughs the simulation rather than having to depend on players to go and fix it eventually this also means if there are no players to take responsibility in some certain Geographic part of the game eventually the game will still do that for you like a medical Beacon a Transportation Beacon or an escort Chris Robert says this much back in 2015 I believe on a reverse the verse episode General even if we have um millions of players playing the game as you move around you are probably more likely to encounter more AI than you are players because we're going we needed to have a world feel alive which is one of the big differences with what with we the Star Citizen setup is um building this alive world and to do it properly we need we can't rely on the player base because you know at you know a certain time of night there may not be that many players and then another time there could be a lot of them so that's why we're you know you know we have this rule that the player base is going to be no more than 10% of the overall sort of population of the universe and so at that point you know most of the people there a very definition if that's the case nine out of 10 of the people ships that you will meet will be AI there will not be players we don't know how closely this is all still intended to be a part of the game as it hasn't been explicitly stated that we're going to be a 10% part of the game since then but that's kind of what we've been acting on and the simulations that they've shown with quantum definitely give the idea that AI are going to be a huge part of the traffic the missions the people you encounter and the things that you do so that you don't really have to worry about the unpredictability of players yeah we like to we like to break things and this brings us back to those player made missions they could go much further than just commodity orders to a new location we're talking data orders to survey a planet or find points of interest for you and your org to go and then exploit delivery missions to have vehicles transported to a certain location or simple requests for good Engineers turret Gunners or deck hands that could help you build out your crew when you don't have any friends but in order for this to work they're going to have to rely pretty heavily on that reputation system that has been oh so slow to build out in order to make players even feel comfortable doing all of this and also I really hope that they do have actual job boards or public places on space stations where you can go and find your local missions that'd be a nice touch but I bet a lot of people would want to just use their Moby glass we'll see what they do but the point I wanted to hit here was that the economy is still in the works in a big way starim Quantum whatever you want to call it just not quanta is still heavily in the works and as we covered earlier this year with the video about Tony Z and the whole simulation I would I would go check that out there's more detail there it's something they want to rely on for a lot of the dynamic gameplay in the game and they've covered this in monthly reports and various talks throughout this year so that's not going anywhere we just don't know the details of it and I don't know when and we will honestly that doesn't feel like something that's going to be very significant until after server meshing is in a good place but this year they've talked about it way more than any other year so I do think with the economy team working the way they've been balancing prices across the monthly reports talking about boosting Mission payouts and figuring out how much risk versus reward gets you what you're paid things are starting to get at least dialed in to be tuned into this system I can't tell you it's going to be here soon but it's definitely still coming and this is ultimately good because it gives players the ability to affect the game affect the game Space and give other people something to do based on your own game play and honestly a lot of you have bought tons of ships that you probably don't know exactly what to do with when you're just out there playing casually maybe this will give us the ability to loan out ships to people to run missions for us start your own cargo company and just loan out all your cargo haulers to people who get a little bit of the cut when they deliver stuff and you just go off and do your own thing I don't know there's a lot of possibilities with this with player made missions and the fact that the economy is going to be dynamic and I I'm loving it but that's it for this feature watch I do want to say I released a video recently about the turbulent studio and I would like to make note that there are things in that video that are a little bit incorrect in terms of who's doing what in the company it's a little hard to get it all exactly right based on just inside star citizens and Star Citizen live but I appreciate the cig folks who have reached out to kind of correct some of that stuff and I hope to make more videos that talk a little bit about the teams and what they've been doing so if you are at cig and you want to clarify anything or let us know anything more obviously don't get in trouble my DMs are open I hope you guys have been enjoying this series please let me know more of what you would like to see from it I'm just picking topics from the previous week but there are all these little things that might get past me so if you see something that's cool hop on our Discord server come chat it out let me know or join us live for our deep Dives where we go into way more detail on these kinds of things than we do here in fact we did cover this episode just recently and I'll have that up on the second channel for you anyways hope you enjoyed this one and learned something new and I'll catch you in the next [Music]