Will they go back to releasing design documents, and if not, why?

Todd doesn't think so - they've changed the way that they develop things and are also at a different stage in development. A lot of the time when they're talking about features like Law, or features that they're currently working on, they have an internal document of what they want to achieve, which Todd would call almost like a one-pager, which has the very high level beats of what they think they can hit for Tier Zero, and what they need to hit for Tier Zero. The previous documents used to go through Tier Zero to Tier Four, so there were a lot of things that would happen when they get to Tier Zero and release it, and then it would change, thus making Tiers One through Four completely moot. Todd's more than happy to talk about what they're working on, and how they're moving forwards, and sharing those design ideas with the community, but he doesn't think that the deep-dive documents are worth putting out any more. Chad adds a more programmer perspective, saying that the sync-up between programmers and design would often reveal technical considerations that hadn't been fully considered until they started implementing the design, as well as more design questions that hadn't already been answered by the document. So now it's "more Feature Teams" and programming is working closer with Design, allowing them to be more agile with said design to the benefit of all, which is to say that the programming side gets an earlier view into the design process to give feedback, and design has a better source of information in terms of what's possible and what's reasonable within a certain amount of time. This reduces expectations on the programmers too who would previously be looking at the potential Tier Four implementation and seeing that they've got to hit that long-term goal that they're not confident that they'll do anyway, which might then affect how the programmer does the implementation. As such, switching to this more agile method has felt like a good set of changes. Jared adds that the design documents worked against agile development, and worked against one of the biggest benefits of Star Citizen, which is having the Live Game Environment where they can put out iterative things, see how they work, and get feedback. He uses an example of the Proximity Assist that will come in 3.7, as an iterative improvement to the Hover Mode that was released previously in 3.6. So their more agile development allows them to adjust between their implementation of Tiers, to create a better system that wouldn't necessarily be possible with the long documents because they would either lock them into something that would deny them the feedback of the community, or be what was the case for most of them, which was that they became wildly inaccurate.