What is your feeling about the recent Star Citizen 2.0 PTU testing experience? Is there any downside to publishing new patches so frequently?asked by Banjo

Well I think the only downside is that we spend a lot of money on CDN costs. Every time we push 30 gigs to thousands of players we're paying for all that data bandwidth getting pushed down from our CDN provider who is Amazon AWS.So that is kind of the down side but the upside is we get much better turn around and iteration. We were looking at the stats and the last PTU build, before we went to live, compare to the first PTU build was over 100 times more stable than the first one. Which is a pretty massive change in a fairly short period of time. And a lot of that was because we had a large group of players stress testing in a way that we just can do internally. Currently we have 24, 25 QA between the UK and the US which is not a small amount of QA but on a game this big it's really hard to cover all the features and stress test it. But when we are out on the PTU we can have 1000 people concurrently and that can really be pushing what we see, push the engine, have cases created that we wouldn't seen in an internal test case, and allow us to see some of the problems. And we're continuing to add, to improve on stuff, so we're going crash reporting automated stuff built in in some future version of the clients we'll give people so we can see, the call stacks and what was going on on the client side as well what we see on the server side which we already do.I think the 2.0 PTU testing experience was really great. The one that we spend a fair amount of time on the PTU comparatively to what we've done before. It's also the build we're delivering that probably stresses the engine and the game the most we've ever done. Just the sheer scope and scale of it. A lot of features like the Zone System; the Local Physics, Local Grid: they're all very new systems and of course we've flown around on them but we haven't got all the edge cases you get when you've got tens of thousands of people playing it and seeing if it can break or not.So it was pretty impressive to go from where we started to where we are releasing it live and that's really due to the PTU iterative process: getting a new build out; seeing if things worked; or even sometimes we put things in there that may have made the experience a little worse, because we actually had some extra bug-tracking, memory walking to see if there was memory corruption, and stuff like that.So I thought the PTU experience was great so we kind of want to focus on more of that where before we do a patch we are on the PTU for at least a week or so, so we give it time, we get enough people hammering on it, we can fix some issue and then we go live. So that's going to be our newer model going forward starting next year.