Given the nature of the persistent universe with fringe systems also being the most lawless, are PvP and exploration intrinsically linked?Will I need to always be ready to fight for my life while exploring and bring an Idris full of battle-hardened friends whenever I go?asked by Baior The Red

I don't necessarily think so, because that's making the assumption that if you're exploring and finding new systems, that the system is teaming with pirates or PvP. Which won't necessarily be the case. Some of the exploring stuff is gonna be off the beaten path, and therefore won't be somewhere that everyone will naturally go to.So in certain cases, in the exploration mode, we're probably going to have it tuned in such a way that the ability for a PvP encounter in that exploration mode wouldn't necessarily be as high as being in a notorious, lawless, pirate system.Now that's not to say there won't be any chance of it at all, 'cause there definitely will be. There has to be some risk, there has to be some tension when you're in the unknown, you don't know who you're gonna come across.I think that's definitely gonna add to the game experience, but the goal would be to balance that. There's a whole bunch of things that we're gonna try and do. I know we always have raging debates between PvP and PvE on the forums and everyone's pretty much dug in. It's intractable, it's like an argument on religion or politics, but my naive hope is that I have pretty good system that will hopefully make both sides pleasantly surprised and deal with most of the issues that everyone's worried about.But we'll see, we have to wait until we get there. So I would ask everyone that you wait until that happens and also we do key balancing. We've got some tricks up our sleeve, I think we'll make it work well, and everyone's got to remember there's gonna be a huge amount of people from both sides, PvP and PvE, playing this game.I know that everyone on the PvP side feels, "Well if there aren't PvP people there that I can fight, then who am I going to be able to take out easily?" Which doesn't make much sense, because there's no reason why NPCs aren't going to be as tough as a normal player, and vise versa on the PvE, "Well if everyone's PvP, they're just out to gank me." Which also I don't think is necessarily true.But we certainly can make sure that people that have a preference one way or another tend to be grouped together when they play, and that effects what they're doing in the game.It's sort of a delicate balancing system, there's a lot of metrics that will go into it. I have some pretty good strong ideas, I mean all I can say is that people should take faith in the fact that the game will be balanced in the way that I'd like it to be played, and the way I'd like it to be played is, I'm not extreme on either side. Some days I like to be competing doing PvP, and some days I like to be doing PvE and I don't want to be dealing with other people.So the game is going to allow you to have those experiences in such a way that it won't be detrimental to the other experience.There you go, I'm sure there will be a massive forum war raged on this right after this episode.