Zyloh | CIG@Zyloh-CIG
Today at 12:00 pm
Hey everybody,
On Friday we mentioned that we’d be making some changes to the CCU system with the Eclipse sale. Rather than raising the price of CCU's, we’ve decided to take a different approach.
The CCU and ‘melt’ systems were created to give backers the kind of choices they wouldn’t get from a normal publisher.
We knew that concept ships were going to change as the game’s systems were built out and balanced after their initial sale. So early on we ensured that backers could melt a pledge for the full amount of credit put towards that pledge, and then use that full amount of credit towards a different pledge. However a problem occurred when people wanted to keep elements of their original game package – say the physical goods, or the LTI on the ship, as melting destroyed the whole package. This created a major Customer Service overhead, where we had to add and change packages manually. So the CCU system was developed to allow backers to keep the current features of their game package, but swap out the digital ship. Between these two systems, in many cases it has become a game itself to navigate the system to end up with the ship of your dreams, but has also enabled some exploits that do not benefit all backers.
We have identified an issue related to the stockpiling of $0 CCU's. As we previously stated, there are more than 1.1 million unused CCUs in the system today. 1.05 million of these are $0 ‘cross trades’ and the vast majority of these are held, unused, by significantly less than one percent of Star Citizen backers. Some people have thousands of $0 CCU's on their account at this time, which is clearly an abuse of the system. A very small number of users are creating a scenario where they can get a limited ship in the future, without having put any value towards the right to do so. With a stock of $0 CCUs on their account, they can generate ships to sell to other users for their own profit.
There is also a potential design issue related to the number of ships in the universe at launch. We are getting to the point where we need to drill down deeper on things like ship rarity, overall dispersion and the like. When we don’t know how many ships may be present at launch, this makes it much more difficult. The implications there are far-reaching: if Carracks are the most popular ship then we need to put more resources on exploration… if Buccaneers are everywhere then we need to build missions that will be challenging and fun for Bucc pilots. It’s something that touches every part of Star Citizen.
All of that said: we’ve spent some time thinking about options to address this, which don’t include an extra charge. While we need to end the abuse of the $0 CCUs, we understand that these systems help all backers and reassure people who are just starting the game. We’ve settled on a plan that will eliminate $0 CCUs without impacting the benefits of the CCU and melting systems in general.
The first part is very simple, we will eliminate the $0 CCU from concept sales starting with this week’s sale. If you have a ship of equivalent value and you want to use store credit, you can of course melt it and purchase the store credit version. This should greatly reduce stockpiling of CCU's.
The second part is longer term, but very important: we will plan for a process to expire the unused $0 CCUs from the system. We want existing CCUs to be used as intended: to pick a ship that works for you, and not as a permanent ‘anything goes’ option. This will not happen immediately, but as we approach 3.0 it will be an important part of this process. And we want you to know in advance that this is coming.
This simple solution should address the issues we've discussed here. Our goal is to make Star Citizen the best game it can be for all players. As always, we thank you for your support.