Nick Wardle

As I mentioned, shops are part of our job. So first of all, we want to make sure that every game loop, every career in the game is accessible. So every activity, I want it to be accessible. If you want to trade, you're always going to find a tractor beam, you're going to find a ship that has a cargo grid. If you want to mine, you're going to find an attachment for that multi-tool, you're going to find a Prospector. More than that, we try to keep everything tied to narrative, so you're going to find burritos in Stanton, and you're going to find rats on a stick in Pyro, and sometimes we just have fun with it. For example, Connor suggested that every farm in Pyro should have shotguns. He's from Texas, by the way.

And I think I sent a thread to Nick the other day about how, because Hurston was so salvage-focused and everything, maybe Hurston should have salvage items in their stores and whatnot. There's a lot of thought that goes into positioning where something goes, not just how much it costs.

Exactly.

Yeah, and that's actually the kind of thing that the narrative team would have a lot to talk about in this SCL as well. The narrative team has all of the history of the 'verse to date and also all the stuff coming. And so they have a pretty good idea of the context of each location. So when it comes to what goes in what shops where, it's about bringing life to the stories that we already have by letting players, like Andrei said, access the game loops that are appropriate in each of those contexts, but without stopping people from playing things. So enabling game loops that fit the narrative.

We are always using art, but there's a bit of technique that we apply to this, actually many, many techniques. Of course, we first use an algorithmic approach, otherwise it would be impossible to put a price or a value on all the thousands and thousands of items we have in the game, and again, those items in different shops at different price points. Once we have that value from the algorithm, then we start to apply our own intuition, we apply our expertise, we apply the experience we have from playing the game, and we do, let's call it a sanity check, whether we think that the algorithm is giving us the right value or not. And then we adjust the price or we adjust the algorithm depending on the situation. Nick uses this algorithm a lot, actually more than myself, because with FPS you have a lot of different items, you have guns and you have armors, and maybe he can tell us a bit about how he used the algorithm.

So it's like you say, the number of items and the number of shops and the number of locations, and then just even thinking about the future of the game, when that's obviously going to be even broader, you can't price everything individually, and it wouldn't be sensible to price everything individually. And in fact, everything is connected. All the prices of everything are connected. I don't think that's going to come as a surprise to anyone. But if you think of something like ammo, for example, you take assault rifle ammo. Well, that's going to be priced relative to the stopping power or possibly the desirability of the assault rifle itself, which has its own price on it. That's related to, say, the price of pistols or the price of railguns. Railguns is an interesting one. The decision to make railguns and missile launchers so you can't buy them in shops is a deliberate decision to encourage not just NPC shop trading; it's really, really important to us to have vibrant player trading. And we don't currently have the full systems to support that, but you guys are really resourceful and you're going to make it happen. We want to encourage that. Railguns are not available in shops, but they're absolutely available around the 'verse, and they have a value, and everyone knows that value.

Sometimes me and Nick will talk about it, we'll look at the black market. The org that I'm in, we do gun running and we sell. And not that I've infiltrated, but we use those data points from our org and how we do gun running to also influence it, because obviously we put our worth on it based on the effort that we put up front for you to get it, but then you put your own worth on it for you guys to get profit, and we take that sort of stuff into account as well.

It's super important. If you take something like the Antium armor set, for example, that has a value, it fits in with the algorithm, it makes sense, but the Antium armor set has a completely separate value to the people in the game because of its rarity, because of its availability in content. And that's why it's all related. So certain items are only available through content. There's a whole content waterfall of items coming from the dollar store all the way through into the game. And there's an appropriate level of when those things are introduced to various parts of the content in the game, et cetera, et cetera. And it's all related. And then on the other side of that is mission rewards and sandbox gameplay. And this is where EVR comes in, so that we can balance the risk and the reward of those kinds of things. And essentially both of those come together in the middle. Like I say, in the future, we want you to have a better view into how all of these things are related to each other. That's future work with UI and back-end data, so you can make meaningful choices about how you want to spend your money on particular resources or crafting or whatever it is in the future. Even though it's quite simplistic right now, that's not where we want it to end. And we need the player economy.

Yeah, it's a balancing act, right? Like most things. We always want to try for a mix of: here's a mission thing, it's really cool and you can only get it via missions, because obviously then it incentivizes the mission; and then we'll have some items that you can get via a mission or you could find as potentially a rare drop inside of loot boxes; or it's something that you can't get via mission, you can only get via loot. We try to achieve a nice mix of it all, but we always want to make sure that some items are visually distinct via the methods of getting them. This is so, say I'm walking around in my Stormbreaker uniform that I've got from Wikelo, right? And Nick Wardle, who obviously doesn't read very well and hasn't read the contract, comes up to me and goes, hey, I've put my glasses on and I really like the armor that you're wearing. Where do I get that from? And then I can slowly walk Nick through and be like, hey, you need to go do the Stormbreaker event. I know your reactions have degraded and have slowed down, but I'll come and help you a bit, and we'll go through it together, and I'll help you get the items you need.

So Elliot is absolutely right. And I think it's important to discuss what we mean by value, because something can have value to someone and it's nothing to do with UEC. So the mission rewards have value to people, not because they're worth UEC.

No, you won't have to load 101 one SCU boxes. You might have to load six one SCU boxes. But the missions are designed so that the amount of SCU and the size of the box is based on the ideal ship for the grade of the mission. So you can do the mission in one run if you have the appropriately sized ship.

So the ideal ship for the grade of the mission. So you're saying that each of these missions are designed with a certain size or scope of ship in mind?

When we go over them and we're planning out the grades and the difficulties, we will look to go, right, this one is one that we class for, say, a Caterpillar. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to have a Caterpillar to do it. It's just kind of the grading that we do. So we'll go Caterpillar, that means this much SCU. You could do it in a Pisces if you want. It's just going to take quite a bit longer and you might have to leave the back door of your Pisces open with a 32 SCU stuck out of it. But that's how you want to play the game.

It's just a statement, yes. So I guess the person doesn't like theme parks. Theme parks are meant to be fun, so I guess you don't want a fun game, right? No. No, how we see missions is, missions are, and I know people take the piss currently, but missions are meant to be more narrative-driven stories in the game, but we also use them as a vehicle to introduce players to the more emergent aspects of the world. So the hauling missions are meant to show players a connection of commodities between locations, which then, now they know that this place trades in iron and this place wants iron, and they can look at the commodity terminals and go, well, that sells for this much, buys for this much, I could actually make a profit if I ignore the mission and just do it without the mission. That's what it's there for, it's to expose a gameplay route. It's something we found very successful when we first did salvage, and Thorsten Lehman loves me for this, but when we first did salvage and we put out the hull scraping in its first release, we saw some people play it, but it wasn't as much of a boom. But when we released the missions, which acted as an easy way to show the players the salvage gameplay, we saw a huge spike in people playing salvage. And that's just generally how we look at missions. It's to introduce players to the sandbox nature of our game easily. So then if they wish to break away from missions, just start doing sandbox things, they can.

And I mean, you don't need a mission to ask someone to escort you either, so it's not like they have to have an escort mission. So if you're thinking about the balance between missions and emergent gameplay, then hauling missions with an escort is a good example of those two things working together.

So, we do have player beacons, and I know what the current state of that is, but that is a system... To answer the question, the beacon system is something which provides for players to contract other players, and it's a system we will be looking to expand upon in the future. Personally, I think that this side of the economy is fundamental, given that we are having a hybrid economy, so player-driven systems.

Yeah, it really is. Like I said, I'm going on 10 years here now. I've had 100 conversations with Tony and with everybody else who's involved with this stuff. And I cannot overstate how important the player-driven aspect of our economy is to us. It's just things like the player beacon system and stuff, it's just waiting for the eye of development, Sauron, to turn its eye back to it, resources to free up, new technologies to work on. A lot of this stuff, you don't want to put in a whole bunch of work when you know this other work that you also have to do is going to invalidate that. So we're forced to kind of sit there and grin and bear certain aspects of this while we're waiting for other new technologies and other new works to come online.

So the short answer is yes. And when we are ready to talk more about that, we absolutely will. You will be the first to know about it. And I mean, the reason we're doing all this now is because we don't want you to have to wait any longer for this kind of gameplay, but everything we're doing now, even though we're doing it manually, we'll be able to plug into the implementation of StarSim when it's ready. So we're not wasting work, but we just wanted to get this gameplay in so that you don't have to wait any longer. But yes, the short answer is yes.

You make a good point. All that work to spec out StarSim and to design it, to figure it out, that's there. So while it's still hardening and becoming ready, we can sit there and say, OK, this plugs into this, this plugs into this. We just fill in our own values based on the spreadsheets and stuff that you showed on SCL last week. And so we can still build missions without having to wait for it. And then when it's ready, plug right in.

That's a good question. I think there's a timeout, right?

Yeah. So missions as they currently are, they generate based on eligibility and then they stay around for an amount of time. So if there's a cargo hauling mission, it will stay around for, I don't know, maybe 30 minutes. And if no one accepts it, it shuts itself down and will try to generate a new one. There might be changes to that in the future with maybe StarSim that Nick might want to talk about or might not want to, depending. But right now they just shut down and then they'll regenerate after a period of time.

So, yeah, what missions are available and what opportunities they present to players is a balance that we're going to have to judge as we go with StarSim, because it is a hybrid economy, and that means that player-driven is really important, but we don't want parts of the universe to be abandoned or to lack input if there aren't enough players there. So it will be player-driven, but it will be system-maintained.

From a mission design point, you can. This isn't something I want to limit. I want you to choose. I mean, it was way ago, but back when we used to have the old delivery system where you could chain your own cargo missions together, that was exactly the point. Players could have this huge ship and take quite a lot of small jumps and then go, oh, this one goes to this location and then I have a pickup from there and it goes back over here and I can make my own round delivery loop. From just reading contracts and understanding where everything is locality-wise, I know that this outpost is right next to this outpost, so I'll drop off here and I'll do a quick hop, grab it and make my time more efficient. But sure, Nick might have some other reasons as to why not. It's not the most efficient route. You're wasting your time.

No, no. I mean, you're absolutely right. Obviously, not only can you do it, but you definitely should be doing it. The question isn't so much whether you should or shouldn't be using a C2. Why would I ever use a small or a medium ship? Maybe that's all you have. Maybe you only have a small or medium ship. Not everyone has C2s like Salty Mike. So if you only have a small or medium ship, then we wanted to make sure that you still had access to the hauling gameplay. The other thing to bear in mind, of course, is that there are only so many of each type of mission in each part of space. If you are in a very trafficked part of space and there are more people who are doing hauling and they have small or medium ships, they may have taken all of those small and medium-sized contracts. So there may be one or two you could grab, but you aren't going to be able to fill a whole C2 with them if you're in a heavily trafficked part of space where everyone else is scrabbling over those same missions. And then, of course, there are the more economy-based answers. So can you make an efficient delivery route? If you have to go back and forth and forth and back and out of atmosphere and back up again, and sometimes you quantum, sometimes you're using hydrogen, fuel costs alone might make it not economically viable to do eight different small missions when you could just do two medium or two large ones.

Also, depending on where you're going, a C2 is a really big target. If you're seeing a C2 fly between big commerce areas, people are going to start to figure out that that's what folks are doing, and those become bigger targets. And imagine losing not just one mission's worth of cargo, but four simultaneous missions' worth of cargo to four different providers.

Absolutely. That is a really good point. I mean, imagine there is a trade lane, a small trade lane, which is traditionally Nomads and maybe Cutlasses or whatever, Hull As, hauling this lane. And maybe there is a pirate lurking. If they see a C2, which one are they going to go for? The Titan or the C2? So there are considerations. But by all means, take multiple missions. Be as efficient as you can.

And the rep hit to that: if you do get caught out, there's four missions that are going to fail, and you get a rep hit times four. You might have a bit where it's like, right, I can't play cargo missions for the next hour or so.

Yeah, absolutely. This is not proprietary tech. This is the way that you would approach how to balance the player's activities versus the reward that they should be given in any game. I mean, if Star Citizen were a traditional single-player game and we just had characters with levels, then it would be relatively easy to work out how much gold we should give you, depending whether you're a level 12 or 50, 70, whatever it is. But because Star Citizen is not only an MMO of a very large scale, but we also have a mixture of structured missions and sandbox gameplay, and we don't have a traditional leveling system per se, then EVR, which is, for people who didn't see the SCL or the ISC, effort versus reward. So it's basically time and difficulty on one side of the equation. How long it takes you to do something, how difficult it is to do it, will always be equivalent to the amount of reward that you will get for the time and the difficulty. So that could be UEC, that could be reputation, that could be the amount of loot in an area. And it allows us just to balance the universe, whether that's a mission or an area like a distribution center or sandbox gameplay like piracy, for example. It's really important that people doing any kind of activity feel that they are receiving appropriate reward for the effort they're putting in. That's part of what makes the game fun. So Jared actually had a brilliant description of it in the last SCL: a par for the course. It's not the final number, it's a design discussion, and it creates an expectation for what the reward level should be for the player activity. And there are additional factors that we need to consider, like for example, how do you handle the risk of players stealing the cargo that is given to them in the hauling missions? So when we're designing the hauling missions and the reward for that, we have to consider what to do about that. And that isn't directly a question that's answered by EVR. It's a question that has to be answered by design, around the mission design. And all of these conversations happen with the mission designers and the economy. We work really closely together so that we can apply it to all of the different behaviors, all the different activities across the world.

Part of the conversation that we have is, Nick's tool will generate this value that we look at. And then on the design side, it's not exactly that we know the numbers and we know all of the economy, so we know how it fits and we know it balances. We can just go as simply as, this doesn't feel like it's enough, or this feels like it might be too much. And then from there, we have a conversation on what part of it and why. And then we rebalance from that. And we've done multiple passes. Even since everyone saw the SCL, me and Nick have sat together a few times and we've gone over the sheet that balances every single mission and sort of gone over how it feels and given some more information, being like, right, this one's insane, right, because it takes into account you'll get a CrimeStat. And then if you get a CrimeStat, inherently you either go to prison and serve time off, or you have to go to Kareah, do your hacking, people will come kill you, PvP, you've got all the AI there to battle against. And then because of that, it's like, right, well, every illegal mission baseline should have this value, and then anything that's extra gets put on top of it. So it's not like a cold and unfeeling system. It's something that is nurtured with love.

The advantage is that because it's a combination of maths and design, we can make bespoke decisions as we need to, but fundamentally underneath it all there is an algorithm. So in the future, when StarSim, when a system is making these decisions in a more algorithmic way, the entire system can be balanced at once and then tweaked and designed accordingly, which is a really important place for us to be when it comes to balancing an entire universe.

I just want to reiterate again that every aspect of Star Citizen is still a work in progress. We're in alpha. We're going to try some stuff, and then we're going to try some other stuff, and we're going to try some other stuff. Even Master Modes has some changes coming down the road, which we'll talk about in a bit. Don't get too excited, it's just more evolution. We try a thing, we listen, we try another thing. You can say a lot of things about Star Citizen. I don't think anybody can say we're afraid of trying new things and afraid of taking a different direction after we try something. So I just want to caution you again, when you see these numbers, even when 3.24 goes out, when you see those numbers on those days, that's the number then. And we will continue to review, we will continue to discuss, we will continue to iterate. So feedback, feedback, feedback, always. Doom and gloom, the sky is falling, less helpful.

Yeah, and I mean, on that point, to the hundreds of days point, if you were to take the numbers of the early missions, and let's say at the moment we're imagining those numbers are around the 20k per hour, for example, but like Jared says, these numbers change, and then you just did a straight times this by that, what's an 890 Jump, then you're getting hundreds of days or whatever. Okay, but you're not going to be doing those missions. Well, I mean, for starters, we're an MMO, so we're not like a 40-hour game that you finish in three weeks. But even so, this is not a linear scale. This is a curved scale. The whole point of it is, the further you climb up that scale, the more rapidly you accelerate, the more rapidly you make more. That's not only to reward players for their progression through the system, but it's also to account for the fact that an extremely difficult environment is going to require multiplayer. It's not going to be soloable. So it can't just be the case that I get this reward when I do an easy one and I get this reward when I do a difficult one. It needs to be one person gets this reward when they do an easy one and three people get this reward when they do a hard one, split up between them. And you still progress that way. But it's not a straight line. It's quite a curve.

For the first part, I know Nick's got his answer to it, but in the real world, if you're a hauler, you have your vehicle and you get your petrol paid for. The time it takes you to get there is your own time, right? And if you take longer than necessary, it won't be worth it, because it's like, oh, this is meant to be a two-hour haul, but instead I stopped off and had a meal, so it's actually a four-hour. That's on you. When I'm working here, they pay me from the second I'm sat at my desk to the time when I finish at my desk. They don't pay me for my walk in. They don't pay me for my stop at Mackie D's for my breakfast. So for me, there are bits we'll pull into the payout that make sense. But there are also bits that just don't make sense.

I was actually going to reply to this more from a design point of view as opposed to just a cold numbers point of view. Star Citizen, like any game, you can play it as a min-maxer. You can play it as a, I want to make absolutely the most I possibly can. I want the best reward. I want everything in every minute of every day. Why aren't I getting the best thing I possibly can? But we're building an immersive universe here. If you want to spend time walking around the station, buying your food, getting your burritos, doing your stuff, you shouldn't feel guilty that you're somehow not earning enough. You're going to take your missions, you're going to do your sandbox gameplay, you're going to get a fair reward for it because of EVR and because of the ongoing balance and because of the feedback and the fact that we work with the community to make this happen. And if you want to just chill and not earn money every second that you are playing the game, because it's a game, go for it.

So we're in a strange situation right now where we have hundreds, in fact, we have thousands of missions. And in order to get them all into the balance with EVR, there's quite a substantial amount of manual work that needs to be done. And that is ongoing. You're experiencing that moment. Some of the missions are in the new system in EVR, and some of the missions are still with the original designed rewards, which were kind of put in by whichever designer put those in at the time. When everything is rebalanced to EVR, then there will be a new reality, if you like. But it's not doom and gloom. You've just only seen certain parts of it. So, for example, the hard retrieve consignment missions. What are those called, Elliot? That's the name in DataForge.

Retrieve Consignment, they are the missions where you go to a UGF and there's a box dispenser. You have to find a code from the body, enter it into a terminal, and it pumps out random commodities that you can sell, and you're looking for a confidential item that you then have to deliver. That's what those ones are. I can't remember the narrative name because it's got a few variants, but that's what you do in the mission.

Right. So the original reward on those was set by the designer, but they didn't perhaps understand quite how long those missions would take, because EVR is time and difficulty. The original designer was only slightly out, but EVR takes into account the time. And so we have that data now, and so they're getting a bump. They're getting about a 50% bump. And the multi-three and the multi-four hauling missions, they're like up in the hundreds per hour. And the illegal missions, like Elliot was saying, because they are additionally complex with the CrimeStat and the difficulty in those is always higher, they're going to have a bump. And those crazy, very, very low-paying missions, for example, the box delivery missions, they're getting a bump as well, because they take a certain amount of time more than perhaps they originally thought. So it's not all doom and gloom, but it will be a new normal. And we will listen to all the feedback and balance everything so it's rewarding.

But it's not all happening in 3.24?

Absolutely not. No, no. This is very much ongoing work.

We want an MMO. We want gameplay. We want opportunity. We want years of Star Citizen. We don't want 40 to 60 hours, I got an 890 Jump, I'm done, I'm going to go and play.

You feel more connected to things that you've had to put more time into getting. There's other MMOs where you do raids that take absolutely hours, and the rewards you get from them feel even better because of the effort you put into it. And it is effort versus reward, right? The grind is a part of the effort, and your reward is how an item makes you feel. There's a really popular community event we did a while ago, which was kill 50 players and you get a Vandal mask. That Vandal mask means something to those players because they put in that time, they put in that effort. The ones who actually did it, not the ones who just had all their mates on a server and just killed them. The people who put in the grind, it means more to them. And it's the same thing that we've been going forward with with some of our other events, where we've been giving you a set of armor that shows that you've done a bunch of stuff for it. It feels more rewarding to you as the player. And that's what a lot of MMOs do. You put in time, you put in effort, and you have something to show for it.

One of the weird challenges that are unique to Star Citizen is that we're running a live environment in the middle of our development. In the development of any game, many things will start easy and then become hard. Some things will start hard and become easy. It's this continuous sculpting and reverse sculpting. And most of this is done in secret, most of this is done in private in any other game. By the time they open it up to the players, they're well along, and a lot of those big sweeping changes have been done. We have this continuous thing where, because we've run a live game environment since late 2015, November, December 2015, to this day, these growing pains are experienced not just by us, which is normal, but by our players, which is not. So players who have played a long time, players who have played a tremendous amount, can get used to things being a certain way. And when we change, that almost never feels good. Whether it's a good change or it's not is a whole other discussion. It's just when you become used to something, when you've been accommodated to it, when you've decided you like it, and then it changes, that can cause consternation. We see that with everything from Master Modes to these economy changes and everything else between. That's not the same as saying that the feedback is not valid. I want to be real clear with that. Feedback's valid. Some of these changes are going to be too sweeping. Some of these cuts are going to be too much. Some of these bumps are going to be too much. Some of the things we did for Master Modes, like hover mode stuff, are going to be right where we want them, and some aren't. And we're going to keep tweaking. This is all of Star Citizen's game development. I see it from everybody, from good people, from the best people who struggle with this. And it's unfortunate, but it's normal. It's a part of our process here, and it comes part and parcel with running a live game environment in the middle of our development. So as always, we just encourage you to be patient with us, to help us, to keep testing, to keep giving us feedback. Like I said before, the doom and gloom stuff doesn't help so much. The 'hey, this could be more like this, and you would get this', that's the sweet stuff.

Something to add is, we're very much aware, obviously, as Jared says, with us being live service, and we talk about being an MMO and grind, the reactions we get, we understand why for most of them. We're making a grindy environment in something that we constantly reset and wipe as it is currently. And that obviously isn't fun, because you're not getting that long-term reward out of the effort you put in. But eventually, when we're closer to done, you will, because we'll have solidified a lot more of this, so therefore the grind and the wipes will go, so that you can put in the effort and get the effort out. I understand right now that it won't be as fun to put 80 hours into getting somewhere up there in the hauling things just to find out next patch that we need to wipe because of a bug or because we're balancing. It's part and parcel of just having to lay the tracks while we're still running the train down it.

Although I want to add to what Elliot says. I've had a dozen conversations with Rich Tyrer about this topic. We want to try to avoid as many wipes as possible. That's always the other thing. People don't want to invest time, people don't want to invest effort knowing this thing is going to wipe. It is our intention from this point forward to not wipe for anything. That's not the same as saying that we're not going to. I want to be real clear, because every time we say what we want to do, and then something changes, people are like, CIG promised. No, we told you what we wanted to do. What we want to do from this point forward is we want to try to avoid any wipe. If we have to wipe from this point forward, it'll be something severe. It'll be something that we've all come together and said there's just no other way forward. And so that is still a possibility. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and say it's not. But the intention from everyone at every single level is to do every single thing we can from this point forward to avoid any more wipes.

And of course, there are some other things which are very important, pieces of functionality which we haven't got to yet, which will, like Elliot was saying, let you enjoy your progress and your status that you've earned over all those hours. And it will become even more meaningful with Death of a Spaceman, where it'll bring a bit more consequence, more meaning to decisions you make. Server meshing, where we'll bring more players together interacting in the same place, which is going to bring a lot more life and collaboration to decisions you make. And StarSim in the background makes the universe dynamic around you. So at the moment it might feel like it's a grind and it's Groundhog Day, but we're building for the future.

There'll be areas where you're safe and there'll be areas where you're not. Places that have armistice zones or green zones, you'll be very safe in. But ones where you don't, you won't be. It's the intention, right? It's going to be an experience you have in Pyro when you're trying to do these sorts of missions. You're unprotected. If I go to an outpost that has a freight elevator that doesn't have a green zone, I need to be aware of it and I need to be ready to defend myself. Whether it's I leave people in the turrets of my ship while I load, whether I hire myself an escort by talking in chat and trying to get some people that I don't know or do know to help me out, there's meant to be some risk. And that risk is calculated when we do the reward. We know the locations we're sending you to, we know all this sort of stuff. So that risk is inherently calculated. No, I'm not here to hold everyone's hand through the unloading and loading process and make it all safe. There will obviously be things to aid you. I believe currently if you try to steal a box, say I call up a freight elevator with my cargo on and Nick, who I don't know, tries to take it off, they should get a crime. There'll be a way in the legal system for us to defend and to allow you to sort of enact justice yourself legally without consequence.

And as you mentioned, obviously where you operate is important. There's the green zone stuff, but even in a place like Pyro that doesn't have any green zones per se, you can align yourself with one of the factions there, and if you're aligned with the Citizens for Prosperity and you're doing your loading there, you'll have a certain amount of protection from the folks there. But if you're aligned with Citizens for Prosperity and you try to go to one of the Headhunters' trading posts and try to load up there, you're going to have a worse time. So these decisions are part and parcel of the process. And even without green zones, there will still be places for everyone, based on the decisions you make for your character, to say, okay, this is less risky and this is more risky. The choice is yours.

It goes into, like in real life when they do shipping lanes. If they know that they're going to go through pirate-infested waters, there are mercenaries on board to defend against it. And that should be the same thing. The players, if they want to do these missions, at some point they'll have to adapt and understand that, oh, this location I know of, because it doesn't have a green zone, that means this portion of the mission I'm safe, but as soon as I'm getting close to this location, I need to be prepared for anything, right? And it will be something that comes with the player's knowledge and then building their game knowledge: they'll understand that this location isn't safe for me, I need to make sure I've got protection.

And while we have some version of it now with these new missions that are designed to link to go from this place to that place to that place, natural trade lanes are going to start to form. As server meshing comes online and we begin to increase the number of players, these natural trade lanes will start to harden and they'll start to solidify and you'll start to see more and more ships. That will create a lot of interesting opportunities for players on both sides of the moral compass, for protection and for piracy.

Absolutely, and in the long term, the very long term, when there is a broader system of law across the various solar systems that is being managed, so the original Quantum demonstration that Tony gave us shows how different action areas can be spawned in response to different types of activity in an area. If there are a lot of pirates, then there's a security response. And that could be player-driven or it could be system-driven.