Cloud Imperium has reversed course on its plans to renovate Star Citizen’s Cross Chassis Upgrade (CCU) system in time for the sale of the Eclipse concept ship.
CIG’s Tyler Zyloh explains that the CCU system was originally designed to allow package purchasers to “melt down” the theoretical ships they’d bought in order to buy different ones without sacrificing other package components or causing customer service overhead. Last week, the studio introduced plans to raise the base price of CCUs to $5 in order to encourage players to spend the more than a million unspent CCUs floating around in the system, aid the design team’s metrics on ship desirability, and reduce future stockpiling and what Zyloh calls “exploits that do not benefit all backers.”
But CIG is now rethinking that plan:
“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.”
Reddit is pretty torn on whether the new system is an improvement, perhaps depending on how much skin the posters had in the game, which might just mean it’s a fair compromise.
