14 Feb, 2010, DemonAlucard wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
donky said:
KaVir said:
quixadhal said:
The folks running the game hired an economist to analyze their game's market (he's actually a full-time staff memeber), and discovered that the price was kept at an artificial ceiling because shuttles were purchasable from NPC vendors, and it was cheaper and easier to simply buy shuttles and reprocess them into tritanium, than to mine the low-end ores needed to make more.

They needed a full-time economist to tell them that? They didn't consider perhaps checking where else the players were getting their tritanium from?
You're reading a lot into a little. It's kind of like having a pet peeve bug in a game you play and posting "Why haven't you fixed it? It would only take one line of code?"

The fact is that in development of a large commercial game like that, there are numerous tasks that would be nice to do, but no matter how many people are hired there is never anyone who can concentrate on them. The economist was hired to be a specialised person for the market, otherwise it would likely only get partial attention from anyone else who had some spare time at some point. Up until the economist came on board and discovered problems like this, the market was probably considered to be working well enough, that no-one had to be taken away from other pressing areas. If I recall correctly, before the economist came on board, one of the graphics programmers was researching economics in his own time.


I gotta agree with donky on this one, commercial games are run by numerous people and a game like that with so many different features that require constant attention to make sure they keep working. Updates to the game… bug fixes for problematic things… emails from players about all sorts of subjects pertaining to the game… emails NOT pertaining to the game that have to be filtered out by someone… the spam filter isn't going to pick up every single junk mail that comes in. Administration of the game itself… GMs that actually sit on the game nearly all the time.. are PAID to punish cheaters and ban people according to the rules of the game…. if one link in the chain becomes weak the whole chain is then in danger of losing cohesion and breaking apart. It makes sense to have someone who specializes in economics and marketing to come in and help with that part of the game.

As for the game concept, sounds awesome… hope to see something more on that.
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