How do you imagine players will be able to affect the lore of Star Citizen? Beyond participating in the elections for Imperator, as far as just playing day-to-day Star Citizen, what influence are you envisioning players would have in affecting your lore?

Ever since the very earliest days of this, the example that always gets brought up is the Dread Pirate Roberts thing: if you're the pilot who kills the notorious Dread Pirate Roberts, that goes down in history, you were the person that tagged that person. For me, we're not really creating any kind of 'you're the one' type scenario here. You are just one of a couple-billion-person universe. So we're trying to figure out ways that the players can affect the flow of the lore, but it has to be something of note and significance. We've talked in the past about discovering jump points, even trying to figure out ways that we can add gameplay to existing jump points as well, so there's additional stuff for explorers to try to do in the meantime. Can we make routes more efficient? The tried and true path is stable and dah, dah, dah, but can we do unstable routes that you can discover, that can show up and then disappear? Stuff like that. We're trying to figure out a bunch of different ways. Obviously, all of this needs to go by design and be tested out to see if it's fun. But trying to figure out ways to have the players affect the world around them has always been a thing on the forefront.

We saw Tony and Jake's presentation at CitizenCon with the new economy stuff, and the narrative team is very excited about that coming online, because that's going to be another tool, hopefully, that we'll be able to tie into, from the perspective of what the players are doing. So again, the idea that they're a small percentage of the population, but if enough players, if a big enough org starts interrupting trade to an area, we hope in real time to be able to have that area affected, so that you might see a city get dirtier and the crime rates start going up and security start coming in. That's one way that I see the players interacting with narrative and design on the same level, seeing the world change slowly because of what they're doing.

Conversely, with that same example, an area starts getting affected and starts going down economically, and they start putting out a bunch of ads for hired guns to come in and help restore security, and players come in and fulfill those roles. Then they feel responsible for bringing the economy back up, because they've kicked out the outlaws and swept the area clear and stuff like that. So yeah, there's a bunch of different ways, basically.

And even on a simpler level, we love your input on Spectrum, everywhere. We read a lot more than we're able to comment on, unfortunately. Reading is faster than commenting, because we have to be very careful with how we respond to make sure that it's canon. It takes a little bit longer, so we're not as active with that as I would like to be. Apologies. But I love hearing your thoughts, and it does influence what we do. A lot, like the election stuff, where we're reading everything that you guys are saying on it, and it's really fun and it makes us think of stuff. So that's great. Keep doing that, please.