Will players travelling in fleets be able to send out ships to scout the route ahead? How do you envision this working with instance and the matchmaking system?asked by Eschatos

Yeah! If you're travelling in a fleet and you send a friend of yours out in a ship ahead, they can go to another area. The way this system is going to work is we only hand you off to another server if there are too many people in this area of space: in this server. So at the very beginning if there are only two people in the star system and, say you can have 50 people at maximum in any one server, just giving an example of the numbers that's not necessarily what the final numbers will be, those two people will be on the same server and that will continue; if there's ten, it would still be those ten people on the same server; and once you get over the server maximum, say 50, and we move to 60 at that point we can't fit 60 people in one server we'd say "let's look at the locations" and say "here's an area that's fairly dense, say, a planet" say it's Earth; so in Earth that would be it's own separate server zone and then people near or around Earth will be talking to the server that's controlling that; and then people on the other side of the solar system, around Pluto or flying around generally out in space would be talking to another server. And so you split out player to additional servers as more people come into the solar system and then when we have quite a few servers running that's when you have to deal with the instancing. We want to keep people together if they're part of the same organisation or they are friendly or they know each other as a person of interest. In most cases unless you get into huge battles and loads and loads of people you can send someone ahead to scout an asteroid field and they can come back and say "yeah it's fine" or "you know what, there's a couple of pirates out here!" and the rest of your fleet would come to where you were; you'd still all be in the same server and you'd have an encounter. Even if you were on separate servers because there were too many of you in the solar system if the asteroid field was handled by a different server from where the rest of the fleet is, we always try to keep slots open on servers for friends to join and so the message would go out from your scout "hey join me" and there would be a certain number of slots available for the fleet and the ones that would be available would be filled and if there were too many people then we would just have to make the decision do we keep the fleet together or do we split it up and we haven't really decided on how that would work. On that you can have an argument both ways so make it user-definable or we may try it one way and see how it plays.