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Sounds to me like they are choosing to do what so many have been demanding... working on gameplay before they go all in on building out the backend economy. If they implemented quantum, imagine the grief every time they patched a bug in the gameplay... yikes! Still, it is ... concerning whenever something like this gets "put on hold"...
True "put on hold" is scary in normal terms but we are talking about CIG here :) and I also would think that if you have 1000 of players in a server system or having 100 players in one server and having 10 servers of this sort is having a big impact how quanta communicates with the game. It would make tons of sense to put something on hold then.
I agree completely I think quanta is basically done and ready to go but for it to work the way it was designed to work with required gameplay and features that are not in the game yet. So if they tried it would just break the game
@@b-l1969 it’s mostly for the economy and ai being able to do what players are capable of doing behind the scenes and in the scenes with out all the gameplay and features it runs off of missing and not complete quanta will never work it won’t effect our gameplay until we have everything in the game quanta is done and complete there would be no point in having quanta go live as of right now
This makes total sense to me. What's the point of the economy if there's no gameplay around it? I'm completely ok with his message and appreciate them being honest about pausing development.
Exactly my thought. Eve has amazing economy, but guess wht it's so good? Cause it has good gameplay to support it too. There are actual reasons to even bother upgrading your ship in that game. Economy just enhances those features and makes it more alive.
The Star Citizen community freaks out about every tiny thing, it does not surprise me that they make massive leaps in logic to make assumptions like it is "dead". Tony Zurovec (aka TonyZ) is the Director of Persistent Universe at CIG Austin, that is a bit more than just "only working on quantum"
Mike's community is a bit saltier than average SC communities to. I think it's like 20/80 actual dooming vs just trying to bait Mike into raging cuz it's funny.
At a Bar Citizen it was hinted that Quanta is done and they could turn it up whenever. Currently its on 1/100 due to server performance limits. I think its much further along than other features and until performance with server meshing can be accomplished there is not point in continuing to develop.
It feels like you're being sarcastic, but ... Yes. That also excites me. This is the closest I am EVER going to get to my childhood dream of being a citizen of a spacefaring civilisation. I'm fine with loading a ship, I'm fine with NPC's and Quanta waiting for load times.
@@CynicalMournings I'm all for Quanta, but if they were to continue working on it and implementing it for current game I feel like it would be wasteful. A huge chunk of game systems aren't even in the game yet that utilizes it, but hopefully they implement actual tangible gameplay like they promised this upcoming year.
This makes sense. And it's something I've pointed out before. Why build out the backend economy simulation, when the backend isn't fully implemented yet. To then have to redo the simulation again when the back end is implemented. The short of it is, quantum almost certainly will need to be simulated on the server but In a way that is mostly invisible to the player (outside of random encounters and prices) because of this that means it's inherently tied to networking. And servermeshing is litterally the foundation of the networking. Until it's done. Quantum doesn't make sense to be fully integrated into the whole game
It doesn't matter anyway right now. There's no real demand for any resources. This may become interesting once basebuilding and crafting is a thing but before that they may as well fake the supply and demand
I've been saying for ages that we won't get the economy or proper gameplay loops until meshing is in, as the quanta system needs to be able to work across all the server architecture, and then all the gameplay loops are going to touch the quanta system, as it dictates where you will find certain jobs, and how you'll be paid. While a lot of placeholder systems can be done for certain things, I always felt that the quant system was better off only coming in, in its final form, putting it in early just sets them up for redoing a lot of that work again after meshing went in.
repair and refuel aren't really needed until we have a distance needed ... the one star system isn't enough to really NEED a refueling system in place, and certainly not a 'at your place' repairing..when you can stop at ever station and get this
I don't understand why people are thinking that it's dead. What it sounds like to me is that they've gone as far as they reasonably can on the simulation, and in order to finish it. They need to work on the stuff that's around it. Once they do that, they can go back and finish the simulation.
Tony Zurovec (aka TonyZ) is the Director of Persistent Universe at CIG. That title is a little broader than simply the economy. He is responsible for all the engines.
Honestly only thing I'm waiting for is functional NPC crew. Once that comes out and is pretty stable I'll be happy and probably jump back ingame. I think that's gonna be a huge mechanic to get over and if they do that then most of the game should be at a good state.
Npc crew is a big thing indeed. I think Npc Crews will make a lot of solo players in doubt if they want to play Sc, will swarm to login screen like flies on shit. Me personally don't want to interact on team speak with other players just to experience parts of the game. I will interact from time to time, but prefer solo most of the time.
I think this is just the right sequencing, they've built as much as they can in a closed system, everything moving forward now requires "integration" and given both the dramatic changes from server meshing as well as the various trading gameplay elements moving forward now would just require a lot of stubs and throw away work.
Why build the economy when you haven't finished the features, I figure in the finished game, people are not going to be able to afford every ship in the game within a couple of months, especially when alot of the features arnt implemented. Figuring out money sinks and trade at the end of features is easier to balance for. An auction house would be cool to have
I think they are going the full Star Wars galaxies way. Player Vendors (banu merchantman needs to be this), harvesters, crafting ingredients, crafting, player market, player-run stores. Hunting, surveying planets, and gathering resources, just to make in-game items is the way to go.
Thats not what they told us at the start, so if they do make such a huge change they need to be more clear on it. I myself already did 10 years of EVE, im more into players living in a universe not making one.
I sure hope not. Player run economies are terrible. Eve has had a steady devaluing of ISK going back at least 10 years. I remember when a Typhoon cost like 30-50 mil. Not triple that last I logged in. I'd rather interact with it and slightly influence it than try to control that. It was boring trying to sell goods at .25 an isk under so my product would get sold in the cloud of 19'999.98 isk items.
@NikolaiMihailov1 I thought that was the goal? Pretty sure they said the economy is largely going to be driven by NPCs with players only having a peice of the influence on that
Makes total sense to get the Player side elements of the economy - now that they have a framework for the NPC side. rolling out the NPC side of the economy 1st would send everything haywire when you unleash the player side of it because we are totally unpredictable. - It will be much easier to let us loose first and then phase in the NPC side
It just says they've done all they could without plugging it into the rest of the engine, and the engine is not ready yet. So they paused until the engine is ready, then they'll add it.
What Benoit wrote is the sensible approach. Server meshing is absolute top priority. Both server meshing and full quantum system both have replication layer as a dependency and the latter is not even in the proper PTU yet. The other stuff Benoit hinted at and Mike expanded on that "inform" the economy and focusing development on those ... also makes sense. - As to Lord Lucan's (aka Tony Z) whereabouts: One interesting observation from Citizencon is that neither he, nor other prominent members of the dearly departed USPU team seem to have been sighted at Citizencon. The Cargo Elevators piece was fronted by someone else (from Turbulent?)
In my opinion the only way to make this feel more like a game, since people can outright buy ships that just work out the box is for a total component system rework. Tiers and Types must be radically changed. Changes/ concept: - when losing to a player, all components may be salvaged/ stolen by them. - when losing to an npc your component will lose 1/5 lives, upon the 5th life, they will have a 75% of being immediately destroyed, 25% chance to resalvage. - all ships come fitted with F tier components, think of the current default components as a baseline intended for the ship statistics, F tier would be 30% worse than the current default. This would range to S tier being 30% above the current baseline, however S tier only has 3 lives. This would greatly improve the desire to hunt for the best in slot parts and give a sense of risk and reward vs the current system where everything’s essentially the same with slight increases and unlimited lives.
I have a feeling theyre also just waiting for server meshing. Quanta would probably put quite a load on the already strained servers, so server meshing would help.
My bet is that Tony Z was needed elsewhere, likely in Server Meshing. Might have been why we saw progress on the Quantum ai system, up until shortly before we saw progress on server meshing.
This makes sense. As far as current systems such as fuel, repair, etc I believe the current iterations of these systems don't have the right connectors to accommodate a 'Dynamic Economy' for now. When connectors/receivers are available it should be as plug-and-play as previously demonstrated. I would like to see a mix of player and dynamic Economies. Game systems first is the best option in my opinion.
I think that if this was posted a few months ago, it would be a bigger red flag. Based on the person who wrote it, the way it was written, the things we saw at Citcon, and the possibility of CiG turning a new leaf, I would say I have a lot more confidence in quanta being fine. Honestly, I think the statement that they’re focusing on gameplay is a huuuuuuge W for SC fans everywhere. Fingers crossed but I’m holding on to the hopium that SC is about to enter the golden age we have all been waiting for in the coming months/year 🤞🏼
Mike, nice to see you back to a more reasonable, level-headed state now that the CitCon euphoria is dying down. BTW, great advice... let's keep our eye on the ball and see that it moves forward without crying "The Sky Is Falling!" each time we see something that appears to be a setback.
I think his explanation makes a lot of sense. You are right they could implement a part of it into the current game, but that would likely be "wasted work" since server meshing will require a wholy different approach.
Sounds to me like they've got the basics of the simulation in place... the economic nodes, the 3 archetypes of quanta, how things react to different events n such. What they don't have is all the content that simulation will be interacting with. To me that's the Base Building / Crafting system they mentioned that's starting dev Q1 next year. If you go back and look at the 2019 video, there's a heavy element of crafting in that one. Like the quanta had to bring together several different resources to produce a specific drive, then they could build it and transport it to a store for sale. So now you need 1000s of recipes and resources; producers and consumers. You need places to build them. You need all the outputs. Basically you need the game there first, before you can hook up the sim (which sounds like it's pretty ready once the game is) to it.
The economy directly depends on the gameplay systems and options players have. Those systems need to be defined first before a reasonable economy can be set up. The economy is a flavor system, that should enhance the gameplay. Not the gameplay following the economy sim. Its an MMO not a singpleplayer sim.
I praise game companies for making good, forward thinking decisions like this, instead of making dumb decisions that are obviously going to take time and resources away from what's needed in the forefront.
The only reasonable answer from CIG after these many years and previous comms should be: quanta is ready, but the rest of the game is not so we just can't connect it. The amount of cash spent in this just to hear "we will r&d later" is the answer backers should not tolerate
Everyone complains about how dead and empty Starfield feels. Quanta will be important to completely change that feeling, and make the world feel dynamic and interesting with things going on with or without you there.
I pretty much agree with you. While developing the code to compute the Qd, the Qs, and to reach equilibrium really isn't that difficult, from my point of view adding that code into a server without a replication layer and server meshing will just overtax the existing servers. It's best to finish the latter before introducing the prior.
Trading needs to be fleshed out more in terms of commodity types and the overall trading experience. The whole back and forth with the buying and selling part is time consuming. I would be less annoyed if the time spent in that section was better reflected in the profit. With loading and unloading this is going to add more time or cut into profit more with paid helpers. We need more locations in Stanton alone as most of the time only a single location is the best buy/sell point leading to having to wait at a terminal to sell your cargo. Additionally we dont have a stock market app in the mobi, commodity alerts i wouldn't touch that shit with a 10ft pole and 3rd party websites cant be used as the data is now locked down even more. I would rather have them fake it or have simple market system for now so we are encouraged into different locations and commodities. Additionally more commodity types would just shake up the whole trade experiance.
This makes total sense to me - why waste time on quantum now if all the other systems aren't in place yet. You can't calculate repair costs without crafting recipes as you can't simulate the flow of the needed goods to repair. you can't simulate trade if there is no consumption of products in order to create new ones. All they could do would make some half-assed system based on pure mockup data that they would need to totally redo anyway as soon as stuff like Blueprints is finalized. The quantum demo we saw ages ago alread had production facilities etc. included in the simulation but just as mockups so it seems believable to me that quantum is just too far ahead of the rest of the game atm and needs to hold for SC to catch up
I dont think it's dead. Sounds like it's more just a matter of not wanting to half-ass it. Yes, it can potentially affect fuel, trade, and some other current game loops but they are also considering what affects quanta. Theres alot thats not in the game yet, including server meshing that would drastically affect the functionality of quanta. I personally dont think we need it half-assed just for them to rewrite it several time like the components mechanics or flight mechanics.
yeah as much hype and content there was at citcon, theres still a lot to be added to the game that they didnt show, and it will take more than 2 or 3 years for us to even see a hint of these things, so as excited as some of you are for new things... get use to waiting :)
Quantum never really felt like a blocker to me, it always sounded like a feedback program for dynamic events and economy sliders. That’s cool but not really an invention that needs to be in place for Star Citizen to work. Like you said many games get buy just fine with player driven economy and conflict systems. Server meshing tech always felt like the moon shot invention that was needed to make the dream happen and given that it was just demonstrated I couldn’t be more excited. A simulator system like quantum will be a big bonus in the medium to long term but with all the back end updates needed for server meshing and the replication layer it’ll likely be more efficient to hold off on simulator integration until those systems are in place.
i see the Quanta sim isnt just economy it is a CORE part of the PU systems its what controls or dictates AI mechanics and movement in the game and behind the scenes ,we were told that encounters happen due to this backend systems simulation its not just a Economy system . it ramps up UEE navy/ security or AI pirate responses to behaviors in game on top of the flow of materials goods . with out this system the whole of the PU literly falls apart
Isn't the current status that we are about 100 people per server? That would mean implementing it now would just mean a lot of server power being used for NPCs trading with each other, with barely any useful information to them for tweaking it. And they still would have to remake it later when more stuff are added. So, putting it on hold until more of the stuff it is supposed to hook into, and there can be a lot more players on in the same shard, sound very reasonable to me.
Here's the thing... The way it was described the NPC to Player ratio is supposed to be 10:1 for the system to work properly. They can't even get a NPC to walk across a station properly yet without Server Meshing and there is no way they are going to hit that golden 10:1 ratio they want. It makes perfect sense and I did not even expect Quanta integration until at least Static Server Meshing is in place. There is no way they would be able to integrate it without it.
Their reasoning seems solid to me. There's not much for the quantum system to be impacted by nor impact player action. I would think we'll see quantum well after we see server meshing.
I mean now that we need to take into account massive orgs farming resources 24/7 on there un-taxed hive cities it would seem that they probably need to re think the economy in a lot of ways
Man, they are focusing the things needed for SQ42 first, and I don't think Quanta is on that list. I even surprised they manage to finish server meshing, as they would just need the object container entity streaming for the game. But they did, and there would be time for Quanta too. I would rather hold onto what they clearly said, that those feature they showed, in the next 12 months. If they can do it, maybe then they can tackle the next big thing.
I took this as a bicycle quantum is one wheel the game engine is the second wheel and they need to create the chain connecting the two wheels before continuing to make the quantum wheel
This Citizen-con is proof we will get there....Eventually. SQ42 doesn't need Quantum, even though SC dose.....But more than anything else, SC needs SQ42 out and out of it's way.
Maybe we need a separate server to "direct" stock or maybe even NPC couriers to ship entities around the verse, a closed system might just be something like that... a system that pulls telemetry but has no interaction with the game state. Maybe that is why there are currently still server ticks for all the shops as well.
I believe there focus right now is to get Squadron 42 out of the door, so star citizen is really only gonna get shared assets from squadron then after release all work force can actually concentrate on star citizen. That’s what I would do in their position
Eve blueprint system is easily the best way to go, I can even link a post I did on spectrum 8 odd years ago, suggesting cig do both crafting and Eve style blueprints and they amount of abuse I got, not disagreeing to the idea, but simply telling me what in there opinion was cigs official stance is. “Cig will never do crafting, go play Eve if you want that”. Well, suck it spectrum.
"Lots of players and quantum is a bonus" goes directly against the whole "90% NPCs" thing we've been hearing for years, and which is a major factor in my backing of the game. I don't want a PvP-first game. And it just keeps sounding more and more like we're getting Rust-Tarkov in space. Which is extremely disappointing. I did my 12 years of EVE. If this is going to be more of the same, I would never have given the project a single dime.
Well, there was really no news to give on it that hasn't already been said before. And this citizencon was all about showing what was coming to the game over the next 12 months. I'm sure when it's ready, they'll roll out tony z to give a 5 hour geek session over it.
this doesn't sound doomish to me it sounds to me like he said "quanta is as ready as we can make it at this point in development, now we have to prepare the other systems to hook into it. once that is done quanta will be implemented."
all i saying is if the economy even comes close to eve it will be a disaster it was fucktup, prices tend to run out of control and this in turn ends up in a vicious cycle we need a system to keep this in check
Take this with a grain of salt and with the knowledge that this requires some “reading between the lines hopped up on hopium,” but I think the problem with Quantum not being implemented yet is at least in large part due to scale. From what I have seen time and again the Q system has always been described as watching for a bunch of player input in one area (selling tens of thousands of SCU of Gold somewhere, for example) and then making a change to the economy somewhere else far away to balance out what players are doing. These changes are supposed to be - it sounds like - happening many systems away in order to cause players to quit the action where they are all doing it and going somewhere else. So you saturate a place with one commodity and then the system being flooded changes the purchase price to very little to disincentivize sales and then a system 6 jumps away greatly increases their purchase price so that players go sell there. With this in mind it seems like Quantum literally can’t work in any noticeable value in one system (say Stanton) and that they probably need at least 3-4 additional systems to have any semblance of an economy with any sense of dynamic action. Now with all that said I think at least a small bit of player run economy would be fantastic and is not dependent upon the Quantum system. Edit: This also explains why when they said Quantum was working in the background in the PU for a while, nobody saw any real changes. The Stanton system is too small to balance the amount of economic activity going on, and I’m willing to bet there is some redundancies and failsafes that prevent insanely wild swings in prices (players will eventually figure out how to partially manipulate the system and try to benefit from that, we all know it). If the system can’t make wild changes to balance out the economy then the next choice would be to make everything the same price, or so close as to be. This idea seems to fit with what has been seen and what has been described mostly.
This is a nonissue. It sounds like they are trying to lockdown the gameplay loops first before they attach the quantum system which makes sense. Why increase your workload by attaching a system and therefore having to make more changes as you work out the gameplay loops. This is an effective use of time and money imo.
I am glad it is on hold. Imagine they spend hundreds of hours on development of system, that impacts the PU in an underwhelming way. Like swinging prices by 2%, because it is so early. I know Quanta is is so much more than prices, but the dynamics of the world have to come after the game is fun and stable, so that you can actually enjoy it.
Would be quite dumb business wise to implement the economy to then have to re-engineer it completely once server meshing is live and then again when all the other systems come online. Doing work twice or thrice or more is why this development cycle takes this long also having to change engines mid-development is not minor. I'll just wait this out, long time backer, until it is more fun to play it, but all they have showed is really promising, they're getting there.
they are litterally already trying to work on everything at once at this point dont be surprised if something is put off i dont even expect anything if we aint gettin the merchantman we aint gettin shit else
That is a completely good and fair answer by Benoir makes me really excited for quanta in the future. Turbulent were always the guys who deliver on time ... what is funny to me since they are now so deep in CIG. I think it is also a bit of unlikely if Tony Z who runs Texas as far as I know would only be involved in quanta. It is his baby and I hope he sees it growing up but he has to manage the whole household for doing so. I also would think that if you have 1000 of players in a server system or having 100 players in one server and having 10 servers of this sort is having a big impact how quanta communicates with the game. It would make tons of sense to put something on hold then.
Economy can't be finalized until you have server meshing at the very least. The whole point of quanta is to have a universal economy, how would that be possible without server meshing. It would otherwise be highly exploitable with server hopping because you would have to run economy for each server. Then what happens with base building? Will we even need quanta? What if server meshing works so well that there is no need for it.. (because there is enough player interaction to drive the economy). IE. we need to wait until the game is done before we implement quanta.
All I read were a bunch of green flags. To me, it does not matter how solid the economy is if there's no actual gameplay system and loops. Economy should ENHANCE gameplay. And we know that other than server issues, lack of gameplay is another one
They don’t even have the material layout, they said the san tokyai is coming with new materials. I think updating an economy system with materials that are perpetually added would be terrible
This is the only game where I will say. They need investors to kick Chris Robert's butt to stop wasting resources. The man is out of control and he is indecisive and is OCD. A big kid with no direction.
They lost the one guy and it is probably 1-2 years to replace him. It also makes a lot more sense like you said, get the systems built first then add the simulation layer.
A dynamic economy has always been one of the things chris roberts had in his games. I dont think this will be dropped, but I really dont think it should be prioritized rn... There is too little to produce and buy for that to work. After base building, manufacturing, resource extraction and exploration THEN you could make a basic economy.
I'm sure you are all overjoyed CIG have a huge PR team working overtime to spin stories like this. This is a classic political tactic. Have a great event generating lots of goodwill towards your organisation. Immediately after, in the warm afterglow of said event, release details of the really toxic stuff that would normally cause a huge backlash, safe in the knowledge it will be drowned out by all the other positive noise. Hope that team gets big fat bonuses from the next sale of blueprints or whatever in-game items are next to be put on sale. They earned it. 🤣😂🤣😂
This makes sense. Server meshing is the most important thing right now by far, everything else breaks without that working well and making performance good. It's very likely to impact how quanta would send data to servers so pausing dev on it makes sense.
Quanta is pointless without the NPCs flying, fighting for, delivering, and be the 100% indistinguishable from players when it comes to doing stuff like mining and cargo. Untill then, there's not the players to have a real economy. Server pop needs to be maxed first.
Hey SaltEMike, ever consider that the Quantum Economy system is already done? After all they showed it off like 2 years ago or something, maybe 3 I don't remember. Algorithms like that aren't too difficult to write and test and I think that was the demo we saw already. The only thing left I am guess is that they just need to link it into the server meshing system and they can tie the bow on top. Is that crazy?
.@@saltemikereacts I just remember watching one of Ryan's (Supermacbrother) videos where he mentioned that Tony Z was now transferred to a newly created Gameplay/economy department. Thats all i know.
I think you are kind of wrong here. Is it possible that Tony has built a system that is way ahead and at the same time needs to be updated due to recent improvements and they do want to create the economy before attaching Quanta to it? Because, updating Quanta now would mean updating Quanta in a couple of months again and in a year and.... As you do, I prefer creating the economy, first.
I mean how does somebody think that that means it's dead? It's not dead. He just explained it fully. People are so stupid. They blow things up because they have no reading comprehension.
Hard to focus on an economy when CIG hasn't fully defined all resources, crafting, and gameplay loops. Get those in and then you build the economy sim. Ideally the Quantum system for law and NPC behavior happens then that at a minimum is a win until its complete.
What Benoit is telling me is that they built a system and realized that they couldn't utilize it, and so they're going to develop more underlying systems and then drop Quantum in when its ready. But what he's really saying is that they built a system and realized that hey couldnt utilize it, so theyre going to go do something else for a few years and maybe later they'll come back and either try to resurrect some years-old code or just rebuild the whole thing from scratch, making all of the original work a huge waste of time. Surprise. Tyrer sounds like he's downplaying the importance of the system. No matter what, they wasted years worth of time.
