How do you do that knowing new systems are coming down the pipe, like Master Modes and resource management? How do you take that delicate calculus you just described and do something for the game today, but also leave yourself room for tomorrow?

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the really difficult things about doing this: we've got to think about the game now, we've got to think about the game we're going to have for the next release, but then we've also got to think really long term as well. So we have a base understanding of where the current game is and where the ships are. And we try and do our best to maintain that, but also include a little bit of future-proofing in ourselves, really, so that we don't have to go back and redo every single ship every single release, for example. So we'll try and move certain ships. That's probably why sometimes we do get questions about a certain ship's balance not quite fitting, because it is a work-in-progress game. This is a game where we can't just retune a hundred and something ships every single release. It's just not possible to do. But we do try and keep it as one unit that's moving. And then we look at things like Master Modes and stuff like that. So what we try and do is we try and have these things in the game now for us, and we will balance the game for the future as well. And then when it comes to it, we can turn those systems on for the players, which is what we've done with the experimental modes. We've got the Gladius there. Well, we did have the Gladius there. And basically what we did was we just turned it on with Master Modes on, and the tuning was there. So we're moving the game towards that for the future like that. But it is a very fragile piece sometimes, and it is quite challenging. There's days where you're like, oh my God, I've got to throw out all the balance that I've done over the last five years at this company for these new features and stuff, because we've got so much coming in the game and so much is going to change. But it's also really exciting because it's a constant challenge as well.

So sometimes, John, you tell me if I'm wrong here on this. Sometimes when a ship performs one way, whether that's good or bad, it's performing that way because it's been tuned in anticipation of this thing that's coming down the line. And because this thing that's coming down the line hasn't arrived yet, it may be underperforming today or perhaps overperforming today, because whatever this thing is that's coming down the line is either going to bring it in line or it's going to bring it up to where it's supposed to be. It's not always a bug. It's not always a missing feature. It's not always just an idiotic decision by somebody on the team. It's just like the sources of the invisibility bug we talked about. It can actually be multiple sources all conspiring together to make a particular ship or vehicle perform a certain way at a certain time. And it's one of the big never-ending challenges of running a live game in the middle of our development.

Yeah, for sure. With all these features that come down the line, sometimes you need to look at the balance. What would make it perfect or really good now? And then how would we want that to be really good in the future? And sometimes the numbers are so different that there's just no hope. Or you can try and get the numbers somewhere in the middle, or you can have one set of numbers and then a completely different set of numbers. And yeah, because we have so many ships and so many different systems, sometimes some things just are how they are.