It seems to me there have been a lot of lessons learned in online gaming over the last 15 years. My question is, have you been in discussion with former colleagues from your Origin or wider afield and has this influenced your thinking on your development strategy for SC? I ask because one of the truly enjoyable aspects of some of their games have been around player economy and socialization (thinking SWG particularly).asked by Vapor O'ura

Well yeah, no, absolutely! So when I started this I ... obviously Ultima Online's one of the original grandaddy's of MMOs. It was ... started development when I was at Origin and I know a lot of the people that led it: obviously Richard Garriott, Lord British; Star Long; and quite a few other folk too. Had a fair amount of discussions in the early days. A long time ago subscribed to Star Wars Galaxy, and World of Warcraft, and all the rest of them.Yeah a lot of that kind of shaped what I want to do with Star ... it's essentially I look at what other things do and I go "Oh, I like that bit" or "I don't like this bit" or "I really would like this kind of experience". That's usually why I make games: I see something that I would like a certain way and there isn't a game out there that delivers that experience so I go and make it. Which is really how Star Citizen came about because I felt like the technology was ready to build this immersive world that I've always wanted to adventure around in.And I have to say that the social aspects, which I think you are asking about here, is one of the things that's really compelling. And even in what you can see right now, in the early stages of the SC Alpha, where really you can't ... we don't actually have that many systems of gameplay to support the social aspects, but people are just doing it anyway.So someone get's stranded out at a location and they'll go into the chat and say "Hey come rescue me". We haven't ... we don't have any ... we are to have support where you'll have a rescue beacon, and it show up on a map, and you can pay people to pick you up, and stuff like that. But right now it's all completely informal, emergent behaviour that everyone that's playing is doing. So people are rescuing other people. Or people are getting together and crewing up ships and going off and getting involved in encounters and adventures. It's really cool.So we actually have a big focus of the world and system we're building. We're building play for people that want to play solo, definitely, right which is that old Privateer model. But there's a huge focus on how we build gameplay that is that "group of friends experience". Where you and your buddies are flying a Constellation or you're out there interacting with other players, like someone needs help: they need to be refuelled, or rearmed, or saved out in space.All these kind of things we are building systems to do that. We have a pretty exciting next stage communications platform that will unify what we are doing on the web and also what will happening in the game. It's still ... it's in the early stages and we're working on it so it's not going to debut right now, but I definitely think that's going to be pretty cool. Where you'll be able to organise your groups and chat groups and friends and organisations. And be not in the game or in the game and have full presence in the chat. So not the very rudimentary, basic one we have in the game now. We're going to basically unify it ... well the platform.So you could arrange on these chat setups for, and your groups arrange groups, and say "Hey let's get together for a game. Let's go adventuring together tonight at Xpm or whatever", and later on you go in the game and it's already set up. You set it up offline, maybe on your PC or maybe on one of your mobile. But it's all the same kind of chat so you could even have someone playing a game and could see, say on your whatever, your Android or iPhone, and you could be chatting with some people playing a game in the same chat thing. It's all ... and you'll see where they are in the star system. So we're going to have a pretty cool ... there's a lot of focus anyway ... the upshot is that we're focusing a lot on social aspects, getting people together ...I mean I'm definitely always impressed every time we have an event because all these people say "Hi, this is my new best friend and I only met him through Star Citizen!" And it really ... yes we're a computer game that everyone sits in front of a computer and interacts, but you're meeting real people on the other end. So we're thinking about how we can get people to work together, coordinate together to achieve things. As well as just have the "lone wolf" gameplay. And then of course we have the bigger organisation "meta" gameplay as well planned in there.So I'm thinking when all of it's in, which obviously takes time because it's wildly ambitious, it will be ... I think, socially, probably our goal is to be something that people would look at and say "That is how you implement social engagement in your game" and I think if you look at what we do with the web side of things, and how we do it on the Community side, that you can definitely see that that's our objective.And those were some of the big take aways I thought were really cool: the emergent behaviour and the social aspects that came out of Ultima Online. You see some of those in EVE but also World of Warcraft: I mean there's vast amounts of people that made friends, got together in World of Warcraft that would never have met otherwise. Which is totally cool.So yes! We'll look all of those and use it to inform what we're going forward and doing.