How is the background data going to be made available to players, either through the game interface itself or through API support where we can mine information with third-party programs, such as general character metrics, kill data, organizational statistics, or even short- and long-term statistical trends of the economic data being run in the simulation?

I can sort of take that first, at least. There's two pieces of that. When I listen to your question, there's some information that's already available from the website today, and a number of industrious fans have figured out how to access an API that already exists to pull a lot of the organization data and do some very interesting data analysis and data mining that I like to read on various Reddit posts and forum posts myself. So we'll continue to expose more and more of that API as it exists on the platform. That would also apply to leaderboard information, your citizen dossier and the information that's available on there. We'll continue to push more data onto your citizen dossier as we expand, further information about kill data and pilot data and pilot skill and preferred ship and a bunch of stuff that's already available in the leaderboards. As far as what you do in the game, that's maybe a question for Tony and Chris: from a design standpoint, how much of that would you want to make available in an API? Because from a technical perspective, it's not that hard. We already have an API. We can deliver it. It's kind of a design question.

Yeah. I definitely think that we will be reporting elements of the economy, just like if you read a paper you can see what the stock market is doing, what they're forecasting the economic growth is going to be. So I think that we would probably have some of that, and may even have a live ticker on the website or something. So that level of stuff we may do. Basically, I would say the rule of thumb would be the sort of stuff that we would expose on the website or we would expose to a second party. We've talked about having something like an iPad app, a tablet app where you can go and check your character out and what its inventory is, and maybe look at what missions are available out there, and basically do some busy work that wouldn't be flying around in space, that wouldn't require the power of a full PC, like organizing a mission that you and your friends are going to do. All those kind of things we would probably expose to a tablet app or the website, and those things would, I would think, be available via an API. I just don't think we would have the full systems exposed at all, because that would potentially be very problematic, with someone looking for an exploit or something. I don't know if that answered your question.

It was mainly about exactly how much you wanted to make available outside of the game. I understand that if we go to a trade hub or so on and so forth, it'll seem like a living stock market where we can see a lot of that information, but what would the support be for organizations, for third-party applications outside of the game?

Yeah, I definitely think you'll be able to do inventory management, mission management. You'll probably be able to see big economic trends. And then the stuff that John talked about, which is organizational structures, leaderboards, all that. That will all be exposed, because that will be our public-facing stuff.

I would say all of the macro data from the economic simulator in regards to unemployment rates of planets, population sizes, commodity prices.

Essentially that's going to get fed to the star map on the website. Exactly. Stuff that we're feeding to whatever you want to call it, a third-party app. It's not really a third-party app.