Will all of the different controller types be balanced when the games comes to release, or will we face significant advantages in any?asked by Alan Parsons

Well, I think with the different controller types now, obviously trying to maintain controller balance across the board, with a HOTAS, people use X52, X55, KBM, whichever gamepad they decide to use, the aim will be to have something that is balanced enough for everyone to be able to have fun with and enjoy, and not feel that there's one that's quite hax over the other, not feeling that overpowered if you're using mouse and keyboard or launching missiles just like rapid-fire. Ways that we'll do that are still something that we're trying to perfect.

And there's a couple of avenues. You've seen the first iteration of what we called ESP, giving people with sticks the opportunity to have a little bit finer control as you move closer to your target, so we can do things like that, attenuating the acceleration curve on the movement of the ships themselves, we can also do things from a game design perspective, like the refactor to gimballed weapons and sizes, so gimballed mounts and the more they gimbal having lower sizes that they can accommodate, so sure you can move around with a mouse and have pretty good aim with the gimbals, but then we'll reduce your ability to do damage based on the size of your weapons, so there's a couple of different avenues, and one of the things I've seen a lot of talk on the forums about, specifically mouse vs. keyboard, and I know we did that... on Around the 'Verse... there was like a controller summit with some of our designers, and one of the things I want to make clear to everybody is that it is super important to us that everybody is able to enjoy the play experience, so everyone can participate and be competitive no matter what peripheral device they choose to interact with the game. That said it is a work in progress, it's still a pre-alpha, controls are normally something you wouldn't do until right near the end of the game, where you start to refine and hone, right near the Beta phase, so while we are actually making efforts on this balance ahead of time, because we are released with Arena Commander, it is something that we will have to continue to balance and continue to tweak and tune, and we do have some ideas about doing more community involvement about that, so stay tuned for that. A little too soon to say, but we have an idea for how we'll actually get you guys to participate more in helping us to tune control devices.

Yeah, and you guys have been really good so far, giving us your feedback and everything you've listed out. I've seen so much detail from the backers already on what they believe should be default configurations, and different types of preferred control types, so yet againTD: And we're listening. Cause how many times have we gotten emails from Chris, cause he's reading the forums, and he's like...'hey, is this real? Is this really a thing? Can you verify cause we've got to change this!'

Yeah, those are... something... those emails. Good to read. But it's good cause it keeps us on our toes, and it makes us believe that hey, we're looking at sometimes a particular feature in the game, and it brings us back to controls, so it's like how can we do better to balance.

Exactly, helps us keep focused better.