In the live stream for Subscribers, Chris mention that players potentially can avoid combat entirely. I have tried to play many different games peacefully in the past, but most games almost "require" combat to advance or progress. The daily "work" was just a grueling grind– and my IRL job was more fun. How is the team working together to make peaceful occupation exciting, fun, and intriguing– and how big of a priority will this be moving forward?asked by Kieren Akari

I think the starmap does a pretty good job showing hostile zones as opposed to safe zones.

That'll definitely be a way for players to be able to plan routes around that and limit the amount of interactions they may have with unlawful forces so to say or hostile forces. The size of it too being able to see how much size between everything. So hopefully you'll be able to be like "alright I know there's something over in this direction I want to avoid stuff"

I imagine its being about being conservative. Otherwise if you want that high risk high reward situation that's where it's starting to get more dangerous but if you're going to be more conservative about it and get a steady flow then you're going to avoid all that stuff.

There's the PvP slider which will help you hedge your bets on that but ultimately you're probably not going to be able to completely avoid combat. However there's all these things in the game like the contract system. You'll be able to hire NPC's to come escort you places there's no reason you need to pull the trigger just run away from those things and let the NPC's take care of you. There's also all these support roles that we're really pushing on making interactive and deep and skill based and fun. All the things from mining, salvage to repair to running tactics in a larger ship. All these things where you might find yourself in combat you might be actively in danger zones but the thing you're doing is helping your people helping your side as opposed to harm the other side. There's the Endeavour for going for the research and hospital and the space farming even. We are building that out basically with each new ship, looking at new ways. WE got combat what else are you going to do with this ship? Are you going to do cargo are you going to do repair?

I'm just going to have our QA team guide me everywhere, they know everything. Or you can do what was super popular back in the 90's and early 00's running your own dedicated server cause we do support that. Then you have complete privacy which is super awesome and people forget about that we allow gamers to do which is very PC oriented and I miss those days cause you don't get to do that very much with games anymore.

From the lore perspective too we've seen the response from the community not everyone wants to be dog fighting or shooting all the time. The latest lore post was about the relief response to the attack on Vega and how there were merchant marines running supplies in people that don't want to fight but maybe want to go and help out if there's some kind of crisis, civil war or famine somewhere in the verse we understand that there's not only people who want to go in there and be a part of the action but also maybe want to try to help the community there get better. It's already in the back of our mind that we're planning mission that don't necessarily always need to end with you drawing your gun or firing a weapon that you can resolve things in other ways too. So we're very conscious of that we're ready to make sure that's a part of the experience to for those that want it.

I'm always impressed with how resourceful communities are even in other games. I've seen people running taxi services in other games and we are supposed to support that. Here's a thing we're going to do and we're trying to find as many of those avenues as possible and I have no doubt the community is going to show us new ways to do this.