In a recent episode, Calix and Dan said that "scheduling is your domain." How do you prioritize one bug or feature over another, and does the inclusive nature of Star Citizen's development change what gets tackled first?asked by Beer4TheBeerGod

That's interesting, because what production does IS prioritising what does come first. For example, we're on the cusp of 1.1, so when we have several critical bugs come through, we have to look at, "is this something we can bump?" "Do we need to fix this right away?" or even ask whether an implemented fix for this will break things further in other areas, or down the line.

It's contextual really, 1.1 for example has a few new features, one of which is the Retaliator in the hangar. If there is any issue with the Retaliator, it kinda bumps it up to a higher level, because this is a new feature, a new ship, people have spent money on it, they want to see it, they want it to be awesome. So automatically any retaliator related issue, in my mind at least, raises up a little bit. If there are balance issues, or something really out of whack, or user experience issues, we'd tend to prioritise those pretty highly, because the whole point of AC is to get things balanced and fun. That's the idea behind the modular system as well, we want to have space combat down, and fun, long before the release of say SQ42 or the PU.

It's also iterative, we might not address a certain bug, even if it's high priority, in this patch, because there might be higher priority issues that relate more closely to user experience, or we might just not have the time before this particular patch release. We may knowingly let a bug go into a game, see if it's something that someone else is working on a fix for as well. Sometimes it's "whack a mole" and sometimes it's just strategic... letting damage come through, knowing it'll be addressed later on.

I mean, the fix may be worse than the actual issue! As an example, the landing mechanic is a little broken right now, some ships when they come in to land will tip up on the landing pad. Which is not exactly what you want to do, there are a bunch of issues that are causing that, and if we try to address all of that before a patch release in a couple of days, we risk shifting the centre of mass, which affects flight balance etc as well. You've got to weigh it up, do we really want to risk breaking the flight of every single ship, just because it's landing on its tail end? Or do we try to fix it in the next patch?