10 For the Chairman Episode 22. May 26th, 2014

This would be really a question for the team that's focusing on the first person shooter. Which we'll be unveiling and showing some of that stuff later on this year, probably at GamesCom. But yeah, we're planning to do a whole bunch of stuff in zero-g. We already have some zero-g functionality in, which when you guys get your hands on the Arena Commander and the Dogfighting Module, you'll actually be able to do some level of EVA after you've ejected, which is pretty cool. But we're gonna have grabbing onto surfaces and pushing off of surfaces as part of the design. And I'm assuming that we'll have physical impulses. If you get hit, it could potentially knock you off a surface. I'm guessing if you had mag-boots attached and you got hit, then you'd expect to have your boots stay in place unless the force is really big.So all those kinds of things are planned to be modeled in. Hopefully with as high a fidelity as possible, but we'll see. We're actually kind of excited by just the first person shooter part. I mean that's the nice thing about what we're doing here with Star Citizen. It's crazy, it's ambitious, but we're really delivering 3 or 4 games rolled into one that hopefully people can play for a long time to come.

Yeah, essentially the idea is on some of the NPCs that you hire, there'll be different levels of it. The more expensive or more experience NPC is probably, if he's a pilot he's better pilot, if he's a gunner, a better gunner, and you'll definitely be able to see their status.I mean I think the way to think about it would be we're not going to do it in an abstract manner like you would typically see in an RPG where it would be like "this guy's got aiming skill of 20 and this guy's only got an aiming skill of 15." It would be more that you would have the review, so think of it like a hiring board for NPCs like you get on Craig's List or Ebay and you would have "I'm so and so and I love to shoot things in my turret" and then there's a bunch of sort of the equivalent of Yelp reviews where people would be like "He's fantastic, he's a crack shot" and you would get the idea of the skill level based on the price and the reviews. Some of those reviews would be the in-fiction level of reviews for the NPC.We'll try and dress up how good a pilot is based in the fiction of the world, but that will give you an idea. You won't necessarily know the behind the scenes numbers of how skilled they are, but you'll get a good idea of "this is an experienced pilot" or "this is rookie pilot." And you pay more for the more experienced guys than you do for the rookie ones, but of course the rookie ones potentially could learn and become a veteran guy over time.

We've got a really great relationship with Crytek, I mean we share tech all the time. We're always appraised and looking at their newest stuff even some stuff that they haven't released generally to the public or shown. We have a really nice position. We sort of openly share stuff. We'll give them some of the stuff that we do, back their way, and of course we're taking their upgrades to the engine.Double precision I don't know. We haven't had that specific discussion. It is a pretty big change because the whole engine works in 32 bit, not double, and there's a fair amount of things that have to change for that. So I'm not sure they would necessarily want to take that back into their standard engine because double precision really is needed for a big space game, but not necessarily for a first person game. But we definitely have an on-going technology sharing relationship where we go back and forth.

That's a pretty big question. There will be the simpler player created missions where it's like "I need to hire someone to escort me" or "I need to hire someone to take an item or items from planet A to planet B." Those are all pretty simple.In terms of hiring someone to--putting a bounty on someone. I mean you can't... like in general... There's two levels of it like in the real world. If I decide I'm going to pay someone $10,000 to kill someone, well I can do that, but that's not necessarily legal. I would have to go to some underworld hitman and pay him and I can get caught and in trouble for doing that.So in terms of the bounty stuff, I think if you're putting bounties on people like "I'll pay you so much to take out this pirate," then you're probably not going to get in trouble with the UEE, but if you put a bounty "I'm going to pay you so much to take out my rival trader" or "someone I just don't like" in this regulated space, then not only does the person who's taken the hit run the risk of getting in trouble, but if someone's commissioned the hit, then potentially they could get in trouble with the UEE.It all depends on a per mission basis, but generally I think there would be a certain amount of missions that players can request from NPCs and then there's the other level where you can also request them from other players and then you probably would be able to have a more nuanced mission for other players, because obviously you're not dealing with an AI or an NPC.For the last part of this question "How will information runners and smugglers know I require their unique skillset?" Well I think it sort of depends.There'll definitely be cases where getting information or a data packet from one place or another part of the universe is very important and there potentially will be people trying to prevent that data packet from getting there. It really is sort of like a courier mission is really what the information runner missions are like, and a lot of times if we generate them, there potentially will be another corporation trying to block that information, so there'll be some conflict along the way.And then on the smugglers skillset, things like a smuggler or putting out a hit on someone, which really is placing a bounty on someone unless you're placing a bounty on someone who's on the wanted list, that's where you would go to the shady areas on the various planets. A lot of our planets have, like Terra for instance, has a more shady slum area verses a more hoity toity area, and you would sort of go to one of the back alley ways and one of the disreputable bars, and that's where you could find someone you could sell or buy stuff on the black market, or do smuggling missions, or potentially take a hit out for you. It will be kind of based on the environment and context, just like it would be in real life. So we want to give that sense of flavor to all the locations when you're going around.It's not going to be a small amount of work, but I think if you get all that, this will be a much cooler, more engrossing world for everyone.

When the game goes live we will let players buy some UEC with real money. I think we've stated before that we're going to put a cap on that. Whether it's a daily or a monthly cap, it will be a certain fixed amount that you'll be able to put into the system, and that's really to allow a couple things.One, once the game's out, since we're not charging a subscription, we need to figure out some way to bring some revenue in so we can keep the servers up and we can also be adding content as we go on. Because our plan is to continually add more and more features and more and more content. You know, it's space, so it's infinite so we can keep on building it out and making it a lot more going on there. We really want to make it reactive to what the players are doing, which will require quite a lot of game master staff and people dedicated to building content that riffs off what the players are doing in the universe.You need money to do that, so we are, our revenue plan if you want to call it that, is new players are coming in and buying their initial package or existing players who maybe don't have 20 hours a week to be flying around and adventuring and making money, but just a few hours on the weekend and they really like that cool ship so they just want to fly it and they don't mind spending a little money to buy the UEC. The philosophy of the game is that there is nothing in the game that you can only buy with money. You can earn everything playing the game, but you can also purchase some credits and shortcut having to spend the time running missions to earn some money.By the way, running mission is the fun part of the game, so that's not a grind like it would be on most of the games that would have this kind of thing. That's the core, that's the core of what Privateer was, that's the core of what Freelancer was, but we do recognize that there's people like myself who are now older and I don't have all the time in the world, so sometimes I don't mind paying a little bit for convenience I guess would be the way to say it. Those are the two ways that we think we'll be able to generate enough revenue to keep the servers on, and content flowing back into it.But, as to the question of whether it's going to unbalance the game, because we're limiting it, and because there's also a whole bunch of real world simulation or dynamics to the universe, for instance there's a cost to doing business, there's landing tariffs, there's sales taxes, your equipment has wear and tear over time, you can see it get older and then you've got to maintain it, and you've got to fix it up occasionally. All these things take money to have happen, so essentially they will balance out, even with people bringing new money into the system, these things will take a little bit of money out, and then of course the other big concept is that the player base in this universe is only a small portion of what we're really simulating. We're estimating that the player base will be no more than 10% of the economy we're simulating and the number of AI or NPCs that are running around on a big meta basis.So at that point you don't have a large group of people who... If someone comes in and everyone decides to buy some UEC, which they're not going to do, they still wouldn't be able to bring enough in to effectively unbalance the economy based on the other credit sinks that are happening in the economy and the ratio of real players to NPC players, and the fact that we also limit the stuff.That's what our plan is, I mean obviously we're not at that point yet, so it could have some flaws, but we think that it's a pretty good approach to take at the moment.

In the bigger battles, that's kind of one of the ideas of having the bigger ships that have landing capacity, so you could potentially land your fighter on board and refuel it, rearm it, potentially do some patch up repairs, because the full repairs would have to be down on a planet.We're thinking about in, not the dogfight that's coming out right away, but what we're calling dogfight v1.1, that we'll have some platforms, I think Dan was teasing it when he was doing the little dogfight reveal. We have it in our internal test stuff where in later game modes you can land and then you can rearm and refuel your ship and get back out there in the combat, because obviously some level of the ammunition you use, ballistic weaponry, missiles, are consumable, finite, right. And then there's fuel which would be consumed mostly by your after burners.So we're gonna actually put some of that in the dogfighting module. Not right away, but down the road as one of the things to do.That's really just laying the ground work for some of the bigger battles because when players will have a bigger ship like a frigate or destroyer or whatever the bigger ships will be, you'll be able to land and do the same thing, and then also we're gonna have some level of ships that potentially could do in-flight refueling or or would have some level of repair ability, or that kind of stuff. Those are all things we're thinking about to try and make some bigger battles where you have mixed use of arms. You've got a couple of big capital ships and some fighters and people have to do all sorts of different things in it.It should be pretty cool, that's one of the things that the UK team will be spearheading, the bigger ship stuff because it's a primary driver of Squadron 42, so they're working on that as we speak as well as helping out on the Dogfight.

Ok, so I basically answered this question when I answered Qwik's question about UEC money because I sort of did it two parts, I explained why we wanted the real money and essentially said what our funding methods were which were once we're live, then our goal is to bring enough revenue in by new people joining, buying their ship package, or existing players who don't have the time to spend playing around building up enough money and they just want to buy a cool, fancy ship or something so they're gonna spend some real money on UEC, but UEC is, that ability will be limited, time limited, for all players.No one can just buy a ridiculous amount, and of course everything in the game you will be able to earn. There's no sort of artificial barrier between something you can buy with money or something you can buy with your time essentially. Time equals money, there you go. We just sort of view them as fairly interchangeable.That's how we're thinking of funding the verse, maybe it's crazy, maybe it won't bring in enough money, but I'm hoping it will, because I'm not a big fan of forced monthly subscriptions. I don't mind it being an optional thing that you do, but we'll see. Our goal is to have something that's strong enough, that brings in enough money, to allow us to continue to add features, build out the universe, you know, we've talked about things like procedural generation, all this kind of stuff, and also a high level of interaction with the players and make them part of the universe and react to the actions that they do. All that will require a decent size team even after we go gold.This is an online game so it's much more a, I know it's a "trendy" thing to say now, but it's more a game as a service than a one-off game that you'll play for a week and then put on your shelf. So for us, it's pretty important to, right now, make sure that we've got enough money to make it, which you guys have been so generous and helped us do. We've got a great amount of money and more comes in, which is great, 'cause that just allows us to do more stuff and make it bigger and better 'cause that's our goal, to just make this as cool as possible.And then after we have all the features are in and working, you can fly fully around the universe and do all the rest of the stuff, then hopefully continued revenue comes in and allows us to just continue to build it and expand it, which is pretty much what you've seen on things like EVE Online or World of Warcraft, so hopefully we can be in, if we're lucky enough, we can be in that situation and just keep on building this really cool universe together.

Actually our though is there's a lot of potential inside Star Citizen, so Arena Commander would definitely be something that would be a place where people could essentially compete and show off their dogfighting skills without having to risk their actual ship in the way that you would out in the Persistent Universe. And then we've got some other things that we're thinking about, we're had a lot about Murray Cup racing, and we've been focusing. We've got some races and we want to do a race course.We'll probably release something with Arena Commander, not v1.0, but just after that we'll have some timed racing courses and stuff that you can fly your ships in, which I think will be pretty cool. And yeah, both those things could be very suited to that e-sports set up. I think what we would probably do 'cause we always like to do everything in-fiction is to sort of have the e-sports part of it almost feel in-fiction.So if you're competing to be the best dogfighter or you're competing to be the fastest racer, you're really competing in the Murray Cup in our universe. You're competing in some big, fictional, invitational tournament or whatever for the dogfighting. We'll sort of do e-sports in our universe. Kind of like Inception one level inside something else.But yes, we think that would be fun, we're also going to do a certain amount of support for people to watch stuff, so not right away, but we're looking at ways that we can have sort of windows onto action, so you can maybe log in to the website and see some cool battle happening out in space, and definitely if we have a competition or e-sports scene we would figure out ways to broadcast the combat or ways to broadcast the racing, and maybe once the Persistent Universe is up and running, you could even be in a bar in the persistent universe looking at a TV and see basically our Twitch broadcast of that which you could also see direct on our website.Hopefully that sounds cool, that's kind of what we're thinking about.

That's a good question, I don't know on the ship naming whether you'd make it unique I mean in the real world, I don't actually believe, I could be wrong, but I think that lots of people could name their ship "Chris" or "Chris1", so we may end up not having it unique, we haven't made a particular decision about it because the thing is if you make it so it has to be unique then you get people going things like "Millenium Falcon 482ABC," which also is kind of immersion breaking.So we're probably going to let people name their ships how they want to name them and not make them unique. Of course every ship will have a unique ID code, sort of the VIN number in our world, that will identify it. But I don't know, I think if someone becomes really badass and customizes a certain ship, then maybe it can become more famous than its pilot or other ships of the same name.

Well we actually have an exploration kind of science ship, so we'll definitely be able to do ship optimization, over clocking, all the rest of the stuff.I think there'll be some level of explorer, artifact hunting/searching stuff which we haven't fully fleshed out yet, but we've got this whole salvage and exploration mechanic, we've got certain ships specifically for it, we're gonna have some sort of space hulks and some ancient ruins, and space wrecks from long ago space civilizations.So there'll be some cool stuff that you'll be able to get some equipment and you'll be able to take that and maybe take it somewhere else and essentially get it built into some special weapon or special item that will give you some abilities or powers that you may not have with the standard off-the-shelf stuff, so I think there'll be that level of stuff.I don't know exactly the mechanics of it 'cause we're still at early stages of working it out, but we definitely want to have that sort of varied feeling, so there's a whole profession where you could just go exploring and looking for artifacts and maybe occasionally there'll be one or two of them that'll be useful and they'll be used for something else or at least you could sell them. So there will be some level of analysis, we'll see. As far as lifeforms go, I don't know, there's the... The fiction in our world is that finding or interacting with new lifeforms is kind of regulated, so you're not really going to be able to discover them.We're gonna have a fun commercial up and coming, not the Freelancer one, but the one after it which kind of plays with this idea, but I don't know so much about really discovering new lifeforms.Although we have discussed that, when we introduce one or two of the new alien races that we're discussing, we would actually let a player make the first encounter. We'll build it all up, but we won't announce it. We would open up an area of space, and one of the first players that would discover that jump point and go through it would actually encounter this alien race for the first time.But that's not something that will be possible for all the players, it would just be possible for one player, or if we have a second one, another player, and that wouldn't be very frequent. But that would be super cool were you actually the person who made the encounter, actually a real player and he gets immortalized in the Galactipedia and in our in-fiction news casts.