Champions Online Interview
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 840
How will you be dealing with the high price of a substantial retcon?
We've been analyzing the overall economy of the game. The huge challenge here is that we've only been up for 17 days and we needed a reasonable amount of time to pull post-launch, Live Shard data on global resource flow. This then means we have to work with ratios of these numbers and address the relationship of economic ratios between synergistic and disparate systems. As with any economic model, it's far more complex than you imagine. So during the past couple of weeks we've been working on tuning the entire economy of the game, but we haven't pushed any changes into the live environment.
Our concerns that we simply weren't giving out enough resources to meet the requirements of certain areas of the game were confirmed. We're attacking this on multiple fronts and are pushing a new economy model to internal QA test tonight and (if all goes well) onto our Public Test Shard this weekend.
Amongst a host of other things, we're also making the retcon pricing curve 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 intention is not to just let 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.
