People have heard that we're starting to work on the very beginnings of persistence. What can you tell us about where persistence is and where we're going?

Persistence is the ability for your game state, the state of your items, your inventory, your ship, your person to persist beyond the game session you have. And so up until now, that really hasn't happened. So you have a set of items, but really that's what you've pledged for or backed and you have sitting in your web account. And then every time you load into Crusader or you load into Arena Commander or into the Hangar, they're instantiated there, but if you take your ship out and it gets damaged, and then you leave the game and come back, everything's pristine, it's not damaged. You don't really have the ability to have reputation persist or money really that persists. We have the REC implementation in Arena Commander, but it's kind of slightly hacky because you earn it in the game and it gets written back to the web platform. And then the web platform communicates with Arena Commander when it comes back. Getting persistence in is a pretty massive step. In the next full patch we release, all the temporary stuff goes away and it's communicating with a persistent database that's sitting in the back end in the cloud. And we will be serializing out your states of what inventory, what's equipped on what item port. And that will persist. Because right now, you can kind of change things around in the hangar, but that just writes it out to a local file. So if you went to another machine and logged in with your account and did it again, none of the changes that you made on the original machine would actually [be there]. And so all those things will now persist. So whatever you set your loadouts, how you set your ships, that will persist. So there are several levels of things that we plan to persist. I'm not sure if everything will make it in for the next release, but over the next few releases, it will happen. But we'll be persisting your money. So we're going to go with what we call Alpha UEC for the initial period. So that will be money that people can earn doing missions and doing other stuff. And they can use that to buy in-game items, so eventually the Voyager Direct store on the web is going to go away and you'll be buying those things in the game. Not all of that will happen right away because we have to implement the shops for that, so we'll have some of the shops and then more and more will come online, and once we have the full set then the Voyager Direct will go away on the web. So you'll be able to buy and sell. And then states will persist. So if your ship is damaged or your item's damaged, you've got to repair. So we'll start to move to a game model where if you fly, you've got to pay for it. Right now, you get rearmed and refueled for free. And so it actually affects gameplay. So the intention of the gameplay is things like ballistics or missiles should be actually pretty hard-hitting and powerful, because their downside is they're finite. You're using ammunition or you're using your missiles, and so you have to go back and buy some more. And so that's kind of the idea where ballistics are a little harder-hitting. They go through shields. But the downside is that you have a finite amount of ammo, whereas an energy weapon may do less damage or gets deflected by the shields, but you have essentially an infinite supply of the ammo there. So what you ultimately want is, when you're flying around in space, you would switch to ballistics or use missiles in a case where you need to quickly inflict some damage, because if you don't, you may be in trouble. Because it's a commodity that is expendable, right? So you have to replenish it. And so that will actually change player and combat behavior, because that doesn't happen right now. People just fire all their ammo and then they can go to Cry-Astro and get it refilled for free. If they're in Arena Commander, when they respawn, they just get their stuff back. So the idea would be to manage your belongings in a way that you would in the real world, which would be, OK, make sure that my ship's repaired. Ultimately, we're going to have age and wear on the ship, so you'll have to keep them maintained. Like right now, if you owned a jet or a helicopter, you would have to rebuild the engine every so many hours of operation. So we'll start to move all that towards persistence, which will actually start to change the gameplay dynamic. It'll be much more like a real universe. But we can't do that all at once, but it will be starting to come in over the next X number of major patches that we're going to come out with. And I think that will be big, because then you'll actually have things to work towards. We'll open it up so you can start to use Alpha UEC to buy ship components and even upgrade ships or buy new ships. And the way it's going to work is Alpha UEC, which means that we can wipe at certain periods, because what happens if there's a bug or there's an exploit or something that we do? So the downside of Alpha UEC is what you've worked towards at some points will potentially go away. We'll probably make it so you can spend your normal UEC that you have, and then we won't wipe things that you've got in that case, and we'll probably allow you to take your regular UEC and also sell those items back, whereas with Alpha UEC it will be more like the final game implementation where if I buy a car, I drive it off the lot, and then I want to come back and say, oh, I don't want this car anymore, they're like, well, OK, but it's depreciated or whatever, where that probably wouldn't happen with the regular UEC in the alpha. But we'll start to roll that out, and all of a sudden that will start to change the feel of the world and the universe very much. So persistence is very, very important, because you can persist reputations or relationships or what you've worked towards. And so that, hand in hand with... we're working on the back-end server tech to enable persistence, to allow you to have seamless handoff between servers. You can have more people in one area, like if you're in the Stanton system, and there'll be dedicated servers in different areas. And if you fly from Port Olisar to Port Correa, you'll be handed off from the server that's managing, say, Port Olisar to the server that's handling Port Correa. And you won't realize it on your client side, because it'll all be seamless to you. The authority is the server over at Port Correa. And so all of that will open it up. And then the universe that you're playing in, starting with the Stanton system, will feel like a living universe and more persistent. So persistence is huge. I mean, that's persistence and then server transition, so you're not just on one instance like you are right now. Those are the two big things that make it a proper, fully fledged living MMO.