For Ben Lesnick: How much do views, like/dislike ratio – as in, factors outside of direct community outrage – affect your decisions concerning Youtube shows, articles and so on?For Dave Haddock: When millions of people play a game, inconsistencies, plot holes and so on are bound to be found. So when that happens to Squadron 42, how would you react? Ignore them? 'Patch' them? Retcon them in the next act?asked by Oberscht

[Re: Part 1]

To be honest, specifically, the likes, dislikes does not especially matter to us. We're still in a very much gut feeling in terms of reaction. After doing this for a couple years we kind of have our sources for how people, the sources we trust to actually represent the community so, I know when this person is outraged and they're complaining that I should definitely listen to them and we should think about things different, but pure numbers for, "They didn't retweet this enough" or "This ship sold 80% instead of 90% of what we expected" not especially valuable to me personally.

So it's not metric based, it's more instinctual.

Yeah we started to the do the metrics, the whole company has changed so much, we got out the metrics, we looked at them, but I would say at this point we still do a lot more with just the human feeling.

Right, right.---[Re: Part 2]

Well there definitely isn't plotholes. [Smirks]

Yeah this is like a pre-problem. You're gonna screw this up!

I mean It's one of those things... I mean we do the best we can to try and troubleshoot that sort of stuff? Like among the internal reviews and make sure that logic is tracking and people, you know, and again, it's the tricky nature of storytelling in general. Like those connections between logic points can work for some people and they can't work for other people, so to the people that it doesn't work for it becomes a plot hole, but other people aren't bothered by it. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.I mean I don't know if there's something that's conceivably fixable, just as a hypothetical. I don't know, I think we would have to gauge it based off how glaring the plot hole is. If it's kind of inconsequential, maybe we would just probably ignore it or and then try to address it maybe in the next section or game or whatever.

Yeah I'm kind of curious about that. So let's ignore like giant plot holes, but something really really minor like say you say Tanyia has a hair colour or different hair color in two different places, do you go back and fix something that's already published or do you explain it later? What's your preference there.

I mean I try to... Personally I dislike retconning especially with what we're doing because we're building it in sort of public view that everyone is getting really involved in this stuff and the last thing we want to do is to basically say like, "Oh yeah that? Yeah, forget all that" you know kind of start over and this, they're not made of marshmallows, they're made of sponge cake and people go "Oh, but I like marshmallows".

Stop spoiling the Kertack.

Sorry, sorry!But yeah. I mean if I think it's easy enough, I mean we've found inconsistency within you know Jump Point articles and you know between Jump Point and old news dispatches. So when possible we just go back and we'll just fix them to consolidate and at least be consistent with them. So far we haven't had anything really egregious that's really come back to haunt us. It also in the early days as you remember, we would aim broad.

YeahDH: So it was all just sort of like "It's kind of this, feeling" rather than it's specifically blah, blah, blah, A,B,C, and D. So we gave ourselves wiggle room to hone it down later because we knew we would come back to it.

We kind of run into a side problem with ships where we want to continue developing new ships that are also old ships and "Oh wait now we have three years of fiction where we don't mention the Anvil" or whatever.

Yeah.

We just had that in a meeting earlier this week, we were talking about a ship we can't name yet and we're like "Okay this feels like one the military has been using for years"

For a while, but I think to a certain extent I mean because we're, again we're developing it. No one has done that, that's kind of the crazy thing that I keep circling back to. Star Wars came out and now it was Star Wars, there was not you know, the book on the universe of Star Wars and the different races and the different factions and stuff before the movie came out. So this is the first time that we're doing it backwards. I feel like to a certain extent we have to go "Oh yeah, that ship has been in service for 80 years and we just haven't imagined it because, we didn't know about it".

this is only barely in a side, but just this last weekend I was asking myself, "What was the Star Wars universe in 1978"?

Oh wow I would be fascinated to know.

Well I looked it up, there were three children books, a novelization and it's crazy looking back. One of them is after the movie, Luke Skywalker is a planetary settler and he's at the space academy and it's so different from anything anyone would have thought of.

Wow, so there was no plan of or it didn't seem like there were alluding to any kind of set up for Empire Strikes Back, it was just like done!

There's even a part where he thinks back to Obi-Wan Kenobi and he's like "Oh yeah, the force he mentioned something about that".

That's crazy.