How long do we expect it to take to earn a ship in the finished game?

That's a really good question. And it's also a really loaded question, I think. There are a lot of things that go into that. The economy team is here in ATX and we have a lot of discussion about that kind of thing. I'd say that we can't really say exactly which of these ships will cost a certain amount of time, but I can talk to you about what kind of things go into the price of the ships and what goes into the economy behind them where players will be able to buy these ships. So when we look at the ships, one of the things that we're looking at right now is not necessarily the UEC or the dollars to earn it, but we're trying to figure out the time to earn it. So we look at items in such a way that we don't say, oh, it's a certain amount of UEC or a certain amount of this or that. We look and say, oh, it should be three hours to earn this thing, or it should be one hour of effort. And of course, if you're a better or worse player, that amount of time that you'll spend will be more or less, right? You can't just sit around and log into the game and do the wave emote for hours on end and still make the money required to earn whatever item you're looking for.

So a lot of things go into what causes the ship to have a lot of effort. One of the things that we're really concerned about right now is making sure that the progression is correct. We put out these ship prices to the community, and we had surprising feedback, actually. Some people thought that the prices were too much and a reasonable majority thought that the prices actually worked. So the community is kind of divided on this based on the feedback that we've been watching in the Evocati and on the forums on the website. But really, there's a lot more to the economy that we have yet to add to the game. That's part of the thing that players are probably feeling: right now we put these ships out with the amount of effort that we expect the game to take.

Today?

Well, actually, we delivered them with what it will end up being in the future. That's a very hard target to hit because there's a lot of things that aren't in the game currently that will be in the game then. And the reasoning behind that is that the economy has a lot of things going on. And at some point we have to say, look, we've got to aim for what the game is going to be, not for what the game is. And that's why we made the decision for this particular thing. We are looking into ways to kind of mitigate the effect of having a very expensive, fully completed game kind of price on these ships right now with very alpha ways to earn them. So that's one of the things that we're looking into, and we're currently looking into the best way to do that.

So you're saying have these ships at what we anticipate their final costs to be and then adjust the ways that we can earn money in the Alpha right now to an accelerated rate, so that people don't have to nickel and dime their way up to get them, because there's only so many different opportunities to earn money in the game today.

Exactly. Well, consider the Stanton system, right? This is a relatively secure solar system with very few risky business opportunities to engage in. There should be a very low risk, low reward kind of thing going on in the Stanton system. Now whether or not that's actually the case right now is a different story, but that's kind of the idea of this. And so we don't want to have these low-level courier jobs being the kind of thing that will finance a Hammerhead. So the incomes that players see currently in the game are not sufficient to earn these ships, and we know, because that's what this system is about. This system is not the kind of thing where you can start up a company and do that. We have to look at the big picture and see what kind of things are going to happen in the very far strategic view of Star Citizen, not just what the game currently offers.