Developers cover industrial gameplay: new mining and salvage resource-delivery missions, salvage quality-of-life such as a buffer-clear button, and ship-based refining arriving with crafting. They also cover cargo manifests, courier/delivery/hauling missions, security tiers, and combat chances in missions.
TL;DRThorsten says industrial loops like mining and salvage already work and are improving, with crafting set to tie them together and base building later; whether they're fun is left to each player.
Isn't it fun already? Well, so there are definitely things that can still be improved, but I think we already have some well-working industrial gameplay loops. So mining has a huge fan base, salvage has a huge fan base. They also specifically target different types of player groups. We have refueling somewhere still in the background of all the existing mechanics that are still there. There are some plans to improve it in the not too distant future.
So there are a lot of industrial gameplay loops that we already have and they work right now in isolation. Some work better, some can be improved, but overall then there's the up and coming. Some of you might have already played the tech preview for crafting, but that is basically the end goal that every industrial gameplay loop that we have will actually tie into moving forward, and basically that will be also covered by a lot of the questions that you asked. We will always come back to, because we have crafting now and because crafting is right around the corner, everything will start to tie into each other. And then we will finally have a full gameplay loop that is then called the industrial gameplay loop. And then way later, when we have base building, we will basically fulfill a full circle where we then start with the normal player-to-player ship-based industrial gameplay loops into crafting, into base building, and then with the location-based industrial gameplay loops. So to answer the question, is it fun? Answer the question for yourself. If there's something that you enjoy, it's fun for you.
Of course. That's the benefit of Star Citizen. We have so many gameplay loops. You can pick what you like and you can enjoy it and you can play it. Actually, we are one of the few games where you can, I wanted to say, waste a lot of time in just one gameplay loop, but you can spend a lot of time in that gameplay loop and enjoy your life.
I'm gonna step in here. You always come from a very pragmatic, a very self-deprecating point of view, but I wanna point out that in the years since cargo was first introduced, before your time here, the years since mining was introduced, these systems have evolved tremendously since their first versions. It's a bit of a Star Citizen meme, and there are many Star Citizen memes: this is T0, T1. We have seen mining and cargo and salvage as these industrial gameplay loops continue to iterate year after year after year. Mining is a far throw from where it was when it started. We recently just had another big revision to salvage. Salvage is in the best place it's ever been. Your first version of engineering: I was just in a meeting where you guys were presenting new improvements and the evolutions to engineering stuff. These things continue to evolve and will continue to evolve. 'What is your plan to make industrial gameplay actually fun' is a bit of a trick question, because it's literally the entire purpose of your existence here. It's hard too, because not every gameplay loop is for every person.
Yeah, salvage versus mining is actually one good example, where you have the hull scraping, which is more relaxing. You put on some music, you do something on the side, but you still feel productive in the game, versus mining where you have to pay attention. Do not blow yourself up.
TL;DRThey want more industrial mission variety, such as mining claims, scouting missions and quality-based requests once crafting exists, and are hopefully bringing a mission giver back later this year; current missions are only the foundation.
Yeah, so when we do some missions like this, we try to go at it and be scalable, so that as we build more and more systems and more and more locations, these missions can populate into other systems and always give players something to do. So our first delivery was that. It was something that was scalable, that was fun and open, that players can sort of choose how they come at it. However, we definitely want to keep adding to it and have things like Shubin asking you to go mine their mining claim. They own this mining claim. They own these pieces of rock. They've given you exclusive rights and they want you to go there and mine it for them. We want Battaglia back and we want her to have missions where she's sending you to go do scouting missions. So you don't have to mine the rocks, but she goes, I need you to find me 10 rocks that contain iron. And in the future when crafting comes online, it's like, I want you to find me 15 that have a quality over the value of 400 or something like that. So we definitely want more variety in our industrial missions, because what we've got right now is the base level, it's the foundation of industrial missions. It's the idea of: this location wants a bunch of resources, you choose how to get them. You use whatever tools are at your sandbox control to do it, whatever tools Torsten gives you, and then you look inward for the fun.
We've experimented with mission givers however long ago, and then they fell to the wayside because of other priorities and stuff like that. But being able to bring back mission givers will be a nice new addition to that kind of stuff, because you can only look at a mobiGlas so much.
TL;DRThe new missions have factions ask for resources by any means, plus salvage missions to gather ship components and simple onboarding tasks; some bugs remain, and cave signatures now work after a marker fix.
So we introduced the new industrial missions and basically inside of that is salvage and mining. So what happens is a faction asks you to gather resources for them and bring it to their location. So they'll ask for sort of X amount of iron, X amount of corundum or whatever resources we have in our game, and the player is tasked to retrieve them by any means necessary. So the main way that players will engage with this is via the mining and refining loops. That's the most obvious. However, players can also purchase these and turn them in, or players could pirate other players and steal them and turn them in if they didn't want to engage with that mining. So they're kind of like this open Lego box and you choose how you build the mission yourself. You kind of go, okay, I'm going to do it like this or this. We also did other salvage ones. So we introduced FPS salvage, and by FPS salvage, I don't mean FPS hull scraping. I mean we give you actual missions that require you to gather components off of the ship, whether it be shields, weapons. We have missions that are like, hey, just go get me a bunch of size zero weapons or size-this weapons components. We have some bugs with it that we're looking into and we're trying to fix, to allow you to do the existing salvage claim missions that Adagio offer, so you can do those, pay for the salvage rights, salvage those ships, and then put them straight into the resource gathering mission if you so wish. We also put time into trying to do a simplistic intro for these, where the player is sent to a cave near the outpost where they have to drop off, and asked to go in and find one little gem of Aphorite, right? And the same thing with the salvage, we give you this first ship so you can understand it and how it works. Just so it's a better onboarding experience for new players who haven't ever engaged, or 'I'm a combat fighter, I've never done this. How do I do it?' So we can give them the tools to understand if there's fun.
Yes. We had this cave and we had a signature, so when you're going around scanning for it, it'd pop up. And the marker was never there, and the radius was set somewhere like four million. So four million miles away you'd see the cave, but it never popped up. For, I don't know, it's not been there since I've been here, so a good six, seven years. And then Dec looked into it and was like, the marker was set to be invisible. And we're like, fuck. Yeah, we fixed it. Game dev, it's just fun.
TL;DRA more precise cargo manifest is planned but not being worked on now; they are taking small steps toward hopefully a full MFD or screen showing what is on the cargo grid.
Yeah. So we have plans to do a manifest. We don't work on it right now, to do the precise manifest of you and your ship owning, you can have this nice overview, but there's a feature coming soon that also would benefit a lot from a more precise manifest, or you as the player knowing exactly what is on your ship. I don't want to say anything in addition to that. So we are working our way towards a better overview of what you have on your ship. It's small steps that we take here, because there's only so much time we can take off for some development to actually investigate here. But in the end, we will end up with hopefully a full MFD or full screen that gives you an overview of what is actually on your cargo grid or on your cargo grids, depending on the ship.
TL;DRShip-based refining will not be in the first crafting release; refining must be reworked for resource quality, with ship, station and base-building refining updated later, and refining by hand-held crafters is undecided.
That is correct. It is a very critical role for crafting. So it will not be part of the first crafting release. So what we want to do is, for crafting as well as for engineering gameplay, it's a more long-term investment from our side. So we will build up on the basis that we built, and right now what we have in Tech Preview, and some of you might already have played it in Tech Preview, that is the basis that we want to start with. So we start with mainly FPS equipment for now and then expand further on. And one of the bits is actually the refining rework, because we've talked about it several times, but the way that resources work will behave very differently to what we have right now in the live game when crafting comes in. So Elliot also mentioned it, minutes ago, where we have quality suddenly being part of the resources. And quality then also needs to be accounted for in the refining process. And that all results in: the refining that we have right now will not exist the way it exists right now anymore. It will all update. And we take that time that we use for the update to then also update the ship-based refining, the station refinery, and then as a last step, the base building refining step.
TL;DRThey want reputation to unlock rewards like blueprints, skins, items and missions, with a full design existing, but they are only taking baby steps toward it for now.
Everyone is aware that obviously the progression in our game right now isn't there. 100%, the way we're going with reputation is that as you grind it out with whatever factions, you get rewards, like new blueprints to craft, you'll get skins, items, and also new missions will unlock via that. That's the ultimate way. So if we think about the industrial missions, as you start crafting through that, maybe they give you the blueprint for making the mining heads that you currently have to purchase. They give you blueprints to make mining bags that are empty, and bits and bobs like this. And in the future, they give you the blueprints for actually being able to make the ship to engage with that kind of gameplay, or improve your ability in that kind of gameplay. Going from a Prospector to a Mole, things like that. So 100% it's something that we want. It's something that we're trying to take baby steps towards, because we want it sooner. We have a full design, but the full design is harder to get to. So we do, as the memes you've said, tier zero, tier one, all that. So we'll do baby steps towards it.
TL;DRDynamically generated salvage claim contracts for abandoned ships are wanted and planned, but only as plans; a trash-bin reward system is on hold, and time and resources are the limit.
Yeah, no, it's something that we want to do. There are plans, just plans. We want to have it so that we can have missions spawn dynamically based on this. So if you leave your ship outside anywhere, we can have an intelligent system that goes, right, this one's going to be a salvage claim. It's not going to be every ship; for performance reasons, we need to just clean some of them up. But there will be ships that we go, okay, right, this one we're going to keep and we're going to assign: Adagio are going to sell the rights to it, or a player is going to get a mission that takes you directly to it. Because obviously, apart from just a forceful cleanup to help with performance, we also can utilize players via missions, paying you to have you clean the game up for us. One thing I would love to do, because I keep seeing it on Reddit, is when people go to a shop and there's a load of bottles around the shop, and they all pick it up and put it in the bin. And I'm like, I want to make that bin work so much.
Chris is always very into systemic solutions instead of artificial rules for stuff. We have cleanup rules because it's a necessity for where we are in the game's development. But he has talked repeatedly over the years about wanting, if somebody leaves a ship, that should become a salvageable thing. If somebody's leaving trash, there should be gameplay to pick it up, what you just said, and put it in the bins. He would much rather design systemic solutions that the players can engage in, in order to maintain the performance of the universe, rather than these artificial rules that just come in and magically make things disappear and stuff like that. It's the amount of conversations that have happened over the years about cleaning up bottles and putting them in cans, and salvaging ships that are abandoned or wreckages that are left over and stuff. It's all there. It's just like anything else. It's finding the time and the resources.
We have plans for sure. We've prototyped it once or twice, but there are issues with it as to why we don't want to release it just yet. Edge cases we need to sort of clean up so that it's not abused.
No, high on the list just means: with every feature we release, we always have lists of things that we want to improve. And if we get the allowance to work on those things, then we work from top to bottom. And I can tell you this is definitely in the top five.
Station refinery right now will not be the refining method that you will have on your ship. But also moving forward, station refinery will not be what it is right now. So back to what we were saying earlier. So it will be the same gameplay. Full stop. So the moment that the new refining method comes in, it will be shared between player-driven and station-driven. The only thing that the station does for you is it's done by an AI. It's done by the station versus you have a player doing it for you.
TL;DRIndustrial play will never be risk-free, but systems will differ in security, with safer low-reward areas and riskier high-reward ones; they say the law system is not yet where they want it.
So Star Citizen is a living and breathing world. So the ultimate plan, the plan that we're aiming towards, is we'll have systems that have different security rankings, right? The idea that we talked about at CitizenCon was Stanton is a high-sec system and Pyro is low-sec. So because of the current implementation of law, and we don't have the law ships coming in and responding as we want in Stanton, right now players can pirate in Stanton with little to no consequence at all. It's the exact same as Pyro. There's little to no consequence at all. So what we want to go towards is, say you're going to, I don't know, craft something, right? And you need X amount of this really rare material, right? It's in abundance in Pyro, but it's not in abundance in Stanton. The idea is you can mine in Stanton, but it will take longer. And it's quite likely that you're gonna be safer because of the law system; when we evolve it, you'll be safer, but it's not impossible. You can still get pirated, you can still get attacked by players. You could even still get attacked by AI pirates, right? Whereas if you go to Pyro, the goods will be in such abundance that it's easier to find, but it's so much higher of a risk for you to get attacked by AI or players. So the answer is, ultimately, there's always going to be a risk of being attacked by another player or an AI. The difference will be per system, it will be either higher or lower, so you can make an informed decision. So in Stanton, you're meant to be pretty much safe, but it's not going to rule out the fact that you're going to get attacked.
The short answer to this, and Elliot, you actually acquitted yourself very well there, thank you. The answer is the law system is not where we want it to be. That's essentially the slug line, the 10-cent version of that. There will always be conflict. There will always be some chance of having your day rained upon, just like there is in real life. But if we do our job right and we continue developing the game the way that we want to, the systems that we're still waiting on (remember how long we waited for server meshing), if the systems we're waiting on come online as they're supposed to, eventually this will grow into a place where those changes in security and everything are obvious to the players, and you will be allowed to make those decisions for yourself. Do I want the high risk, high reward of Pyro? Or do I want the safer, more secure experience of Stanton? It's never going to be as simple as PvP players or PvE players or Care Bears or griefers or whatever pejoratives you want to throw. It's never going to be that simple. It's not that simple in real life. We're not aspiring to build something that simple, in black and white, for Star Citizen. So it's just one of those things that's hard. It's hard to always picture where we're going based on where we are and where we've been. But I actually think we've been rather consistent in this messaging. The question says that we're not, and I think that's more about people hearing this part and not that part on any given stage, or people regurgitating this part and not that part, or maybe there have obviously been times over the years where we haven't been as clear as we should have been. It's a mixture of everything. But the goal has always been the same: a living, breathing, diegetic universe of risk versus reward. Where do you want to go and how do you want to play? We intend to cater to as many different groups as possible. I think Rich Tyrer said it two years ago: we're not a PvP or a PvE game. We're an everything game.
We just want to have areas where you feel very protected, where the security has very short response times and is able to arrive in time before you explode. So those people that are not that into PvP, they have the AI protectors helping them.
TL;DRA design already exists to split or combine boxes at the station inventory level, probably for a fee, but it is waiting on engineers; contracted cargo was left uncertain.
Yeah. One of the problems we have, sorry, we're going a bit off. One of the problems we have is, so you know when we did the Alliance Aid event, right? And we had the cargo missions, and we had to give players 8 SCU boxes. That's because I want to serve an average player ship size, and 8 SCU is currently the average player ship size. So what I'd prefer to do is go, hey, here's 200 SCU you have to do, and then they use your system and go, okay, right, I'm going to unpackage and repackage. And then I can choose it for the massive Raft I've got, compared to I'm going to move 200 1 SCU boxes because all I've got is a Pisces or something.
Well, good news. So there is a system already in place. So the design is already written. It's just waiting for some engineers to be able to start working on it, which is allowing us to actually split larger boxes into smaller, or even combine smaller boxes into larger boxes. It comes with a fee. That's at least the intent as of now. So we want to give the possibility on the actual station inventory level, that you use it there to repack your boxes into smaller or bigger boxes.
TL;DRCourier missions are being brought back, split into courier, delivery and hauling by box size, all offered from the start, along with same-location delivery missions between wings of the same distribution center.
Yeah, no, we are. We are. We're working on... We split it up into three. So we do courier, delivery, and then hauling. And the idea and the separation between them is: courier will be one-handed items. So I don't want to say a burrito, but an example would be a burrito that you can put in your backpack. A two-handed box, which people who played this game a while back might remember, the little two-handed boxes you walk around with. So that's courier. Then delivery is how we bridge the gap between courier and hauling. So delivery will start at one SCU box and it will go up to a total of six boxes of one SCU. We don't go above the one SCU size, which will help bridge that gap, and then players can do the hauling. When I say it links them, it's not that you can't do hauling until you've done a bunch of courier and then a bunch of delivery. We'll offer them all straight away. But the idea is, if you're a new player and you've only got the Mustang or a smaller ship like the old Aurora or whatever, you'd start there, you'd earn money via doing this gameplay, and then you'd rent a new ship or buy a new ship from New Deal or whatever.
Mentally connected, also coming. So the DCs, the distribution centers: one of the things we're going to do for the delivery pilot missions is you're going to get missions to move boxes between the wings of the same DC. So you get your little vehicles, load it up with boxes and truck on around, and then take them off again.
TL;DRRacing missions broke with a past update and need engineering, UI and other work to restore; they also want a more accessible experience, but no date is given.
We have a bunch of missions, like the courier ones, that, I don't want to say died, but broke when we did 4.0. The systems changed and it was quite a lot to get back. The racing missions are also one of them. It's kind of a multifaceted thing to get them working. It requires a little bit of us, a little bit of engineering, a little bit of UI, to get it all together. However, we also want to look at the experience of it. One thing that we found really frustrating, and I know players did as well, was: I get my ship, I fly 30 minutes to get to the racetrack, I bungle out on the first fucking corner, and then I'm like, right. Let's get that flight suit, let's reclaim that ship, let's wait. We want to try to get a nicer experience for racing missions than what is currently. Ages ago there were all these talks about having some form of a little landing bay right next to the station, maybe a little med zone, boom, boom, back in the ship, round the track. Because yeah, we want racing in, but we also want it to be fun and accessible.
TL;DRMining multi-crew already improved through instability, salvage is harder to make multi-crew, and the goal is to tie roles together through crafting so players rely on each other or pay others.
We did already a lot to improve the multi-crew experience there. I think we did more on the mining side than we did on the salvage side. So one thing we did was making use of the instability, for example, for mining. Multiple lasers being able to shore up the rock. So if you are in different ships, multiple lasers will increase the instability. If you're on the same ship, multiple lasers actually won't affect it too much. So that encouraged players to use the Mole, especially for the instability rocks or the harder-to-crack instability rocks. At least that was our intention back then. And it somehow worked. There's definitely still room for improvements in regards to true multiplayer gameplay. I think not industrial, but engineering gameplay also already moves into that segment. For salvage it's a bit harder to achieve, because of just the mechanics that we have for salvage, because either you point a scraper beam on the surface or you basically align a ship into a deconstruction field. So there it's a bit harder to find meaningful multi-crew or multiplayer gameplay mechanics. But especially on the salvage side, we have huge ships where it's very, very beneficial if you have a lot of players on the ship. Talking about the Reclaimer, it is very useful if you have someone in the cargo hold already unpacking the filler stations. But moving forward, what our goal is here is also less being in these island features where we want to have the multi-crew, because we really want to tie all the features together with crafting. And that means that players will have to rely more on other players to do their job in a very, very good way, so that they also can benefit from it. What I'm talking about is, if you have a miner that basically is very effective in finding and mining the high-quality resources, and then in the far future, or in the not so far future, you have then the refiner that then brings in the refining process they have on their ship and then refines it, even increases the quality or retains the quality, or does something that helps the crafter to actually be able to craft the perfect gun, the perfect ship component for you. So sure, you can do it alone, but that time and effort you have to put in alone is just tremendously lower if you have friends, or if you even don't have friends and you just pay people in the 'verse to do your job.
TL;DREvent missions use smaller boxes so every player's ship can take part, based on average ship size, and this is temporary until players can choose box sizes themselves.
Did we rewind to the conversation me and Torsten just had a couple of minutes ago? Same thing, I'll go over it again. So when we do an event, we make it for everybody. We want it to engage every type of player we have, because we have so many different types of players. And one of the fun things about events, and we saw it with Alliance Aid, is all of these people from different walks of life coming together, right? Everyone being in this station in Levski, running around, all doing their little bits, whether they're going out to go murder a load of Moraine Gang, or maybe they're transporting goods. So with that, we look at the average ship size that's owned by players, and the SCU comes out around 8 SCU. So we sometimes go lower than 8, sometimes we stay at 8, but we don't want to give really big boxes, because then some people can't engage in some form or fashion. But that's only a temporary thing we're doing until the system Torsten was on about comes online, where you can choose the size of your box. Because that means in the future, when we do these missions, we're just going to tell you how much SCU we need at the end destination, and how you split that up into box sizes is completely up to you as the player doing this.
Yeah, the problem with the mission auto-detecting it, right, is: say me and Torsten are mates and we're both playing and we've both got a dead small ship. We then want to split it up, maybe for his ship because he owns a bigger one, or maybe we're going to do one run at the same time in two small ships. So instead I want to break it up into smaller boxes. So yeah, we know it's not perfect. It's something we want to get better at, but we need the system to be able to do that.
TL;DRRefueling missions are being worked on, with an AI-to-player beacon refuel and a player-to-AI refuel contract planned for the first release, and the team intends to make player-to-player refueling more accessible.
But there haven't been missions for it. Refueling is interesting, because I've been talking about it a lot, because there might be a new refueling ship coming. There is a new refueling ship coming. In a while. Not soon or far, just in a while. So we've been talking about this as a loop. Refueling sort of sits with the medical gameplay as this one where it's not really supported by the story and the gameplay we provide; it kind of relies on other players. You have to wait for another player to get shot and wounded before you have something to do as a medic. And with refueling, you kind of have to wait for another player to run out of gas.
So we're actually currently working on refueling missions, and we're doing two types for the initial release. We're going to do player-to-AI refueling. So this is where I have my Starfarer. I can take a contract from the faction, which I'll leave as a surprise for later, not because I forgot the faction name. We'll offer you the contract, you go, there will be a ship that's out of fuel, and you will go up to it and you'll fill it full of fuel. And depending on where you are, potentially what system you are in, you might turn up and they didn't need fuel, but they want your fuel bags because maybe it's valuable. What? Someone abusing the service beacon system? How dare they? We might also have ones where you've refueled the person and then maybe some people come to finish the job off or something, some pirates or whatever. And then we have the opposite, which is going to be AI-to-player refueling. This is where you put up a beacon. And this is because the work to get the PvP beacon done is just a little bit extra. So what we're going to do for the first release is have it so you can make one, but we have an AI ship come to refuel you. So the AI ship will come. You'll ask it to dock. You'll dock with it. And then it will give you your fuel for a sort of set fee.
That second one is certainly interesting for the broader community, but having the missions that spawn an AI who's run out of gas, and actually having something to do with your Starfarer and other potential refueling ships that isn't just waiting for another player to choose not to backspace...
TL;DRSiphoning fuel and oxygen from wrecks is on hold because refining, scooping and the life support generator cover those needs, while breaching charges are still discussed but lack time and people.
So I think back in the day we talked about siphoning fuel and oxygen from derelict ships or from recently deactivated ships. So we didn't find a meaningful place for that in the entire gameplay loop, because right now on the fuel side, we would rather encourage refining and the fuel gathering. I think there was also a scooping question in regards to that. So we would rather focus on those gameplay mechanics. So mining to get Quantanium, refine it into quantum fuel. Also then the scooping part, to get hydrogen out of gas clouds or atmospheres and then refine that into the corresponding fuel, rather than you invading ships and then putting in a plastic tube and moving it from one ship to the other. So all jokes aside, I think the more interesting gameplay here is more on the scooping part and on the refining and mining part. So we decided, okay, this is not the most necessary part of the salvage gameplay. So we put it on hold for the time being. Same for the atmosphere. When we were talking about that, the concept of the life support generator as we have it right now with the engineering gameplay wasn't that well defined yet, or wasn't at the point where we are at now, because it also went through a lot of iterations. And right now, with the actual life support generator, with the filter items there that can actually generate the oxygen or the gases for the ships, this is also unnecessary at this point. About the breaching charges though, they are still on the table. So we are discussing them very regularly, but then we realize we don't have the time to do them or we don't have the people to do it in time. And then we're like, oh yes, that's sad. And then we move on, and we talk about it again at a later point.
TL;DRThe team says combat is only a chance, which varies by system and law level and is stated in the mission, giving players a choice of risk and reward rather than combat everywhere.
Commander Tanith, I'm not saying we're going to add combat into every aspect of the game. That's kind of a gross misappropriation of what we've been talking about here when we talked about this earlier. There will be a chance, is what we said, and the chance changes depending on what system you're in. As the law system continues to develop, those chances will reduce in the systems that you expect it to.
But didn't even Elliot say that there are missions where you can get [attacked], but there are also others where you will not? So it also should be very clearly visible in the mission.
There's a continual struggle in building an MMO out over the last... the PU has been up and running since December 2015, so about 10 years at this point. Running a live environment in the middle of your game development and stuff. And it's this constant pull between developing for today and developing for tomorrow. Anything that you build for today is almost guaranteed to have to be redone because of something you know that's coming down the line for tomorrow. So when possible, you're faced every single day with 100 little micro decisions that are: do we build it this way for today or do we build it this way for tomorrow? Because we know where we're going. And most of the time, you want to build for tomorrow. You want to build systems that can scale and that can evolve into this vision that you're going towards. People have noticed I've mentioned Terra a couple times. I'm simply referring back to the Road to 1.0 from Rich Tyrer's presentation at CitizenCon two years ago, where he said the Road to 1.0 includes five systems, with the last one being Terra, the safest of all the systems. The idea being it's towards the middle of the empire. You're safer, and then as you get farther and farther out from the Empire, you find more and more danger and risk. That is not the same as what Commander Tanith says, adding combat to every aspect of the game is lazy. It is building a living, breathing system of measured risk and reward that you then get to choose. You get to have the agency of playing in the areas that you want to play in, and accepting the risk versus the reward that you want. It's not lazy. It's allowing you the agency to choose. And that's what we're building towards. That's not always easy to see at this moment. And so I understand where the frustration comes from. I mean, I've experienced the frustration myself. You log into Twitch streams, you see the frustration every day. I just encourage folks to remember that decisions are often made based on where we're going, not necessarily where we are right now. It's just a continual balance. I think we're doing a pretty good job. Last year, two star systems. We've got the crafting system on the way, inventory rework. It's hard. It is hard to look at some aspects of the game today and be like, oh, why don't you just fix that and whatever. It's like the issues with the Moth right now. There are people who have just bought a Moth and they have the issues with the buffer size being wrong and the salvage beams being slow. I don't have the Issue Council here in front of me. And these are all things that are being adjusted and worked on for 4.7. That's the next time we can do major code additions to the game. We can't fix everything with a hotfix. It's difficult. And I saw some of the responses there. I want to encourage people, rewatch that section. Elliot was very eloquent in his answer, and I encourage you to see it again. It's about giving you the choice to play how you want, and with the amount of risk and the amount of reward that you seek.
One more thing to add on to that is Star Citizen is very unique because of scale. And when you're building content for something that's got an infinite scale, you need variability. So chances of other things happening, so that it doesn't get stale. And that's what it is. And it will be controlled, as you've said, per the systems, per the law. But we need variability to achieve the scale and make it feel not the same old, same old.