You've described your vision for this game quite thoroughly and the outpouring of support means we agreed. Your experience with previous games seems to influence SC's design quite a bit, but as far as the MMO experience, are there any specific games that you're drawing inspiration from? For example, I really like the way this functionality worked out in this game... or this really didn't work well in this game, we are going to avoid that at all costs!asked by Sansight

It's kind of hard to say because on the sort of online MMO side I played a whole bunch of them I've always found it very hard to really get into it say in the way people spend years playing World of Warcraft and I think partly it's a, I sort of wanted the world itself to feel more real. One of my biggest complaints with the old school MMO's or rows with Everquest onwards I felt like everything was a bit of a theme park world and the world seemed very static. You would venture round, you would go to the castle and kill the evil demon and everyone else was going to the same castle, killing the same evil demon and it didn't feel like it was a real world as much.So one of the big goals with Star Citizen was to try, and we're still obviously working pretty hard on this 'cause we're not there yet but to build a world that's more emergent, more dynamic and feels like it's got persistent places, locations, characters and you felt like you could be part of the fabric of it and your actions potentially could have some impact on how the world, or the story universe unfolds during your playtime and I felt like i'm not really seeing the bigger online games being able to do that.There's elements, EvE actually on its side actually has some really nice stuff in terms of allowing the players themselves to generate a lot of the drama and therefore the content for the game and that definitely is partly an inspiration that happens in Star Citizen just in terms of making it player centric. So not necessarily of all the EvE mechanics but I do think it's really good to have your playerbase generate a lot of potential action and drama and missions. You can even see it right now in 2.1 if you're flying around even though we don't have that much stuff going on and there's some basic missions, players themselves are almost creating missions out of nothing. "Oh look i'm stuck out here at Port Kareah can someone come and rescue me and take me back to Port Olisar?". That kind of stuff is great because the actual actions of the players cause other, can cause other things or other players to respond to them in certain ways or do certain things.So very much the focus of the structure of the Star Citizen Persistent Universe is how to push that, how to get people to play together and do things together or how they could be in potential opposition or in opposition to NPC's and their actions will cause reactions. I think doing that will create a much more dynamic universe and something I think that we won't be overwhelmed with trying to provide content for.We can never keep up building new scripted content to keep up with the demand of how quickly people can play through the content. I think that's the lesson you'll see if you look at World of Warcraft. The new expansion comes out everyone re-ups and now they're back up to ten million people playing it, they blast through all the content and bam it's back down to seven million or six million people playing it. You see that as a pattern in the more, the older school MMO's. I don't think you really see as much of a pattern in EvE which is a bit more dynamic. That definitely is one of the fundamental ideas in goals.In terms of play style I definitely like you to earn the rewards you want in the game. So if you think of Demon Souls, i'm going to use this as an example. That's a pretty unforgiving game but when you actually achieve something you really feel like you achieved something because it was hard to get there and you risked a lot when you got there. I think that's another longer term goal that I want to make sure is for Star Citizen you don't feel like everything's just given to you and everything's easy. You feel like if you're going out to earn some money on a dangerous mission you can earn some really good money but also you're really risking a lot when you do that. I think that combination of that really works well with this reactive sandbox design . To some extent DayZ had a bit of that where you died, you died, you lost everything. So people really were, It's the emergent player behaviour that came from that was fairly interesting. I'm not sure it would necessarily is going to be anywhere close to as harsh as that but it definitely highlighted the fact that, the advantages you can get from permadeath in terms of people feeling invested in what they worked for.So all those things have bubbled together into what I want to do with Star Citizen and I also want to make sure the world feels alive. Which is why we have this ninety-ten rule of AI NPC's to players is yes I want you to play with your friends, I want you to engage or interact with other players but we need a living universe you can't be one hundred percent dependant on other players to provide that. so having ninety percent of your population be AI means that as you move around this universe there are traders going about their trade runs no matter what, pirates doing pirates no matter what, mercenaries protecting people or escort missions, or bounty hunters going after people. Miners mining, explorers exploring all this is happening like it would in the real world.No matter what the playerbase itself is doing. The player base can influence what say these NPC groups do but you feel like you're in a live world and the NPC's will react to you and depending on what you do in the same way that maybe the players will and I think putting all that together hopefully will create a dynamic universe that will just feel more alive and more real a lot of the past online games. We'll see we're not quite there. I'm pretty encouraged by just the feeling of running around in 2.0 and 2.1 and seeing what players are doing and seeing where it is when we've got such a basic barebones in there.So I know with all these extra things we're going to layer it in with the detail and fidelity we're going to do it's going to be an experience like no other one. I hope anyway! That's goal it feels actually pretty good. We've got a lot of things to do obviously along the way and to make things like the user experience more friendly and welcoming to the new player but also make sure keep the challenge and depth that the more experienced players and so these are all things i've talked about before and that we're working on and that was a very long answer for this question but it was a pretty open ended question!