Cloud Imperium Games and Chris Roberts have finally responded to the growing tidal wave of player feedback that is grumbling that Star Citizen has made a huge mistake.
You see, the whole issue is about UEC, United Earth Credits, are the primary in-game currency in Star Citizen. Previously, CIG had a cap in place of how much in terms of UEC a player could own at one time. The primary motivation on CIG’s part was seemingly to prevent inflation from taking hold in the game economy.
CIG announced recently that they would be removing the per player cap on hoarding wealth in-game.
The cap prior to this change was 150,000 UEC. And this all sounds well and good, until you bring in other mechanics. You see, players can directly convert in-game items into a reduced amount of UEC via “melting” the items. But since CIG made the decision to remove the 150,000 UEC per user cap, that method of inflation control may not be enough.
Since the obvious opportunity to control RMT couldn’t be passed up, CIG decided to sell UEC directly to the players at a rate of $1 USD per 1,000 UEC. The devs also instituted a cap on purchasing UEC per 24 hours. This meant that players could purchase up to 25,000 UEC per day, and yes, this purchase cap will remain in place.
Chris Roberts brought up that PvP in Star Citizen is not a required game mechanic, and that players can endlessly stockpile physical assets as wealth already, giving them a direct advantage. In his mind this mean that limiting UEC didn’t really have any impact. While that might be a valid response, there are always exceptions. It will be interesting to see how the PU is affected by inflation once it reaches a critical mass or users, or actually has an in-game economy at all for that matter.
Since Star Citizen has “no specific win state”, as pointed out by Chris Roberts, the outcome of this cap removal can’t be accurately predicted. Even the closest analogue to this kind of game and wealth issue, EVE Online, can’t really be compared to Star Citizen. That’s because PvP is constant in EVE, and assets and wealth are removed consistently in EVE in ways that they aren’t in other games. There’s also the issue that in-game wealth doesn’t directly translate to PvP skill. But since there’s no constant PvP in Star Citizen, it’s possible that in-game wealth will be more useful in this game than others.
In other Star Citizen news, the latest Around the Verse video is live, it talked all about player events and upcoming features for the game in the 3.3 update.
Check out the latest Reverse the Verse livestream down below. To see the explanation about the UEC cap removal in more detail – skip to 32:40.
