Will you be able to manually change instances? And as far as servers go, is there going to be one global server, or how does the localization work?

So you will not be able to change instances. The instancing all happens in the background. So basically, from your standpoint in playing the game, in most cases, you will not be able to tell what server is taking care of you. So as you fly across the star system and you go from area to area, in the background you'll actually be handed off from server to server to server. It's how we manage to have all the players in one universe. So you don't know what instance you're in. The only way you probably would know is if you and 100 or 200 of your friends all decided to come to the same location, like orbit around Sol, and of course you wouldn't see all 200 of them. And as far as the infrastructure goes, it's what John was talking about. I think we've mentioned before that we're doing a lot of work with Google and Google Compute. And one of the reasons why we're doing it is because they have an infrastructure between their data centers that does not go through the internet, and it's very, very, very fast. So we've got a lot of different servers, but the game server is the real-time server that takes care of the simulation. So right now, when you play Arena Commander, you are playing on a game server. And then there's a bunch of servers that go above that, like the system server or the economy, or a bunch of services that we have that are layered on top of that, the matchmaking server and stuff like that. But the game servers themselves, the concept would be they would be able to spin up or spin down around the world at different data centers if we're inside the Google ecosystem. And then they would all communicate back to the bigger services, which would probably just be located in one location. And because we're inside the Google infrastructure, we don't have to worry about essentially the ping times and how long it's going to take to go through the internet, and it's much more reliable data-wise. So the whole idea is if you play it as a player, it should feel like you're in one seamless universe. And your performance in general should be fairly decent as long as you're close to one of the geographic areas where there's a Google data center.

Just to add one thing that didn't get mentioned there. The primary reason why you would typically want to physically go to a particular server is because you've got a friend or a party member or whatever, and you want to basically play the game with them. And so there is a bit of logic behind the scenes that will automatically try to place you into the same server instance. It'll go through this whole cycle of: is it a friend? Is it a party member? Skill levels will be considered. What you're actually doing, like I mentioned earlier.

What your location is. So generally it will go, okay, well, you two are in North America, therefore you could be together.

Your location. Or earlier I mentioned a mercenary responding to a distress call from a freighter captain that's under attack by a pirate. And so what he would be able to see is basically all of the activity within that solar system, but when he actually selects that event as being what he wants to respond to and engages his quantum engines to go there, that is basically a key that's going to shunt him into the same server instance as that freighter captain that's being assaulted by those pirates.

Even if you were in Australia and you wanted to play with your friend in the UK, you can specifically say, I want to play with my friend. And at that point, you're basically overriding the matchmaking priority that says, well, the ping's important. At that point, the ping would be less important than who you want to play with. Generally, it should be fair. You should not feel the matchmaking. You shouldn't realize that this is happening unless you actually got coordinated with a bunch of people. It should feel totally seamless.

And just to put it in terms of priorities, the party system will override everything. And so if you're actually synced up with five other players and you basically go and land at ArcCorp, then when your other friends land five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes later, assuming there's free space on that server, and it will tend to reserve a few slots for friends and stuff that follow right behind other players, they will be thrown onto that same instance automatically. The whole idea is basically to give you the effect that you want without forcing you to do any sort of manual manipulation.