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Jey

le souriceau: Hello, Jey! Thank you for accepting our invitation!


Jey: Hi.



le_souriceau: Before we jump into the billionaire part, can you tell about your gaming roots? DU attracted people of very different game backgrounds, that sometimes deeply influenced their interests and passions (take EVE and Landmark vets per example). What is your story before awakening on Ark?


Jey: There are few MMO I havent at least tried, but I tend to stick to open world games with an economy and some kind of crafting system in place. MMO I played the longest in the past 10 years would have to be Archeage. If we go further back, then Ragnarok Online would take first place by a huge margin. As far as non MMO games, my 677 games steam library tells a tale of its own, but my favorite / most time consuming would have to be FortressCraft evolved, Ark, Factorio and Dwarf Fortress.



le_souriceau: I like dwarf-fortress-like games too!.. So for you the sweet part is construction of a system and observing how it works?


Jey: More so the designing of a system and how it handles external influences. The specific system doesn't really matter, may it be a colony, a city, a factory or even a single player. Anything that let you design something and put it in a world is interesting in a way.



le_souriceau: And in DU you are a solo player, that wanders the road of industry to become filthy rich. Money is your goal or only tool? What is your end game plan?


Jey: Money/Assets with no purpose are worthless. My initial goal is for my factory / project to not require multiple maintenance per day, for that a lot of capital is required to handle the buffer involved. As for long term / end game goals, it will heavily depend on the game development. I tend to live to invest in people's objectives and with more money I get to invest in things that are riskier without needing to ruin the involved players if it fails.



le_souriceau: So, you will be like an angel investor, right? Do you have any particular projects you are most interested to see blooming? Like large-scale construction or maybe something in terms of in-game lua software?


Jey: Yes, I suppose angel investor would be a proper way to look at it. As for the particular project, no I haven't seen anything interesting enough as of yet, but that's mostly because what can be done in DU is still too limited. Cities are probably the most interesting currently possible prospect, but the inconveniences from “using” a city would far outweigh the benefit right now.



le_souriceau: Yep, cities are... complicated thing : ) Can you show you a holoshot of your factory?


Jey:


le_souriceau: Impressive! How hard is it to organize and run something like this? Because I encountered a fair share of industry people, who posed like they did something 1000 IQ worth...


Jey: Time is the biggest thing really, especially to decide what to do/determine if it's worthwhile/how worthwhile. May it be learning/finding existing tools, or writing your own to determine cost and factory design. I wouldn’t say it's easy, but it's definitely not hard, if you can design a spreadsheet, you have the necessary knowledge to get it done if you so desire it.



le_souriceuau: I wonder, with spending so much time around industry... Do you ever desire some new useful/mechanics expanding elements to be added?


Jey: I'd like any kind of new content added to the game, but what I hope most to see added, are fixes for the huge lag and glitches that come with running a factory. From the stupidly long lag whenever adding / deleting links to the industry just stalling left and right.



le_souriceau: So, If I understand correctly, the principal scheme is to: buy iron from players, produce steel honeycomb with maxed indy skills in truly monstrous quantities and dump it into botshops? That's it?


Jey: That's merely for marketbots sale. They are a reliable way to turn a profit from ore but not the best way. Currently what i sell to marketbot is sold at a profit margin of about 15%, the amount while certainly high, is also not infinite (assuming NQ does not refill the marketbot orders again). Marketbot sale represents about 35% of my ore consumption and 25% of my proffit, the rest is from selling tier 1 items in mass quantity to players via market. Things industry element, containers, engines etc still hold the majority of my proffit and ore usage.



le_souriceau: How much does it make you in a day? If it's not a secret.


Jey: It varies from day to day, but on average it would be around 70 millions.



le_souriceau: Not bad at all! Competition is tough? Constant rise of hematite prices is quite noticeable. It’s like over 30 already by the time we speak?


Jey: Not really, to be honest it feels like most competitors left the scene or stopped trying to compete with my prices. I've been having trouble filling the demand on most items more and more as time goes. My prices are set based on my own personal supply, the more I have in store, the lower I drop my profit margin on said item, and vice versa, whenever I run out of something, i increase the price a bit, until my stock start piling up again, and right now, im unable to pile up stock and instead it all sells every few days.



le_souriceau: Not everyone is happy where we are now with the economy -- there is regular resurfacing of wipe-related topics on grounds that game balance cannot be salvaged with less radical means. What is your take on this? And a bit of questions volley-fire: how do you think, how much of current economic design is “problem of settings' and how much is “failure of concept”?


Jey: The economy is definitely in a weird situation, but the thing with a dynamic economy is that it adjusts on its own. The method we were given to inject currency into the economy certainly leaves to be desired, but the result is still there, there is quanta to go around and allow transactions. Injecting more merely devalues it and means everything costs more quanta, having too little to cause deflation. That's all there is to it really.



le_souriceu: And there is also a factor of finite (or more correctly - semi-finite) resources into the economy that eventually do good or bad in the long run? Both? I encountered different perspectives on this. What is yours? Also this promotes hoarding...


Jey: I can't speak for higher tier, but for tier 1, there is still an humongous amount of resources left to be mined, at least, from what i gather from the people who mine for me and see in trade chat. Meganode of t1 ore still get found and sold daily and that's not even considering that you don't need a meganode to mine a fair amount, it's just the easiest / fastest source.



le_souriceau: How do you think the arrival of DACs, this ultimate commodity will roll out into DU economy? It's an extremely strong, yet dormant factor.


Jey: No idea on that. It likely won't really affect the economy much, it's merely an item people will fight over, it may end up worth a bit of quanta, but that's all.



le_souriceau: Let’s assume NQ is NOT going to press the big red button (this is the most likely scenario). What realistic ways to gradually heal the economy you see? Considering limited resources and pressures devs are experiencing.


Jey: If NQ fix the faucet and sink for the economy and properly balances both sides of it, they can control the economy to keep it at their target level. Money and assets only have value when they're used, so it's no problem if some people want to stockpile, it just means those items are out of the economy until they change their mind or lose them.


As it is right now, we have a huge amount of faucet spewing quanta in the economy, namely in the form of marketbot and the daily 100k . Whereas the sink are pathetically limited, as in, the market 1% tax, market storage tax, voxel pvp destruction, scraps, fuel and players quitting.



le_souriceau: Sinks (in one way or another) are obviously a life and death issue for MMO sandbox. Do you have any ideas that can be realistically implemented? Maybe JC or Entropy will be reading us : )

Jey: There has been plenty of good suggestions over the time I've been around, the obvious first step is element destruction instead of allowing scrap repairs left and right.


Getting rid of the safezone would bring pvp to the majority of players which would in turn cause a huge jump in consumption of scraps. Implementing some kind of permanent damage to elements, that can't be repaired with scraps, like losing 0.1% max durability for every 10% repaired.



le_souriceau: NQ already working on “lives” for elements, how much they can be repaired before permadestruction. Speaking of PvP in an economic sense (beyond loss of material). Some people also want to move not only resources into the “PvP realm”, but also factories, by making certain high-tier items produced in less secure and more logistically difficult places. Can it work? Or something is missing in this logic?


Jey: Offline defense (or protection) are a must if we ever hope to see factories that aren't extremely short lived, in a pvp zone. Even the largest of groups will have a lower population timezone and being stuck on “guard duty '' 24/7 is not fun in any fashion.



le_souriceau: And last one! Traditionally, a little bit on the philosophical side! DU was marketed (and perceived by many players) as a civilization building game. And how we buy and sell always was quite a mirror into societies: eastern bazaars, malls in their golden age, even nowadays Amazon Empire -- they all say quite a lot. You are (in one way) close to the heart of current DU economic activity. How does it feel?


Jey: Right now, I wouldn't say DU is a civilization building game. There is nothing to build, DU is in its current form, an art display tool and a dynamic market mostly feeding in that. Those large ships and factories don't just magically appear and is where most of the demand on things still comes from I believe. Once this is over, there will be very little left to do.



Le_souriceau: I still hope NQ delivers some content and not left us completely dry! Thank you, Jey, for your time and interesting insights! May your enterprise prosper : )


Jey: Cya.


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