Mark Abent · Gameplay Programmer, Los Angeles

Well, it's that age-old thing where, when you try to get out a release, you have to do a very basic implementation to do a subset of features. And one of those was: if we have a ship, we wanted to make sure to solve the problem that someone can't just go and run up onto the platform and steal it. So we made sure to lock the ship to you and only to you. And then as more stuff came on with the group system, we extended it out to allow other people to take control of it. But it's one of those things where you start working with a little system here and a little system here and they don't link together until you throw the problem at a designer and they go, "Okay, I see the whole big picture. I want to connect it here, here, and here, and here." And the good news is we have thrown this issue at some designers and they have picked out a way to solve this, but we needed some systems like the group system, better faction, and how the player reputation system grows and how you get things and how they interact, and then how they talk to Subsumption. So we have all these little pieces that are slowly getting built so that we can develop them all and have them interchange. So the big answer is, it's coming. The small answer is, we're having these little pieces built; the building blocks are coming, so that we can get this interchange working.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We talk a lot on this show and other shows about the advantages of having a live game environment in the middle of our development. One of the biggest challenges is having to work with these intermediate systems that can't be fully fleshed out before they go to the players, and then finding that one system on its own works okay and one system on its own works okay, and then when they combine they tend to have some unintended consequences. And I think that's what the question here is alluding to.

Mark Abent · Gameplay Programmer, Los Angeles

Oh, yeah, and we implement little by little because we don't want to break things, and we don't want to add some weird complex behavior until we know that those things work before we build on top of it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So while we have nothing to point to directly right at this moment, this is one of those times where all we can do is say that we're very aware of it. We've got a couple irons in the fire, and as soon as some resources free up and some more systems come online, we hope to have something out for you that'll be a much better experience than what you're having right now with getting CrimeStat for defending your own ship.