We talked about the social module being able to tag friends, or later on the handshake, which will tie into something like a person of interest and the instancing problem. But what about enemies? Say I don't like someone over there for reasons. What should I expect the game to tell me about my enemies, as far as being online, their location and stuff like that?

Well, I'm not so sure about... Definitely when you go into instances, it's not like you only show up with your friends. Basically, part of the rule set is who are your antagonists, who are your friends, and there would actually be slots reserved for those groups, right? So there's slots reserved for your friends, and there's also slots reserved for your enemies. So if you happen to be flying around in space by this asteroid field, and a group of, I don't know, whatever the infamous pirate group is that you're locked in a deadly battle with, is flying around there too, they would spawn in, because it would be known, with your character, your organization, that would be a known antagonist for you, and they would be part of who would be in it. In terms of knowing where they are, that would be kind of the way: either, like I was saying, you find a place and they spawn in, or the same would probably happen on the planet side. I mean, you just want to know if they're online or something, even if you're not close to them?

Perhaps.

You can use the contact list like that. My concern there would just be the possibility for griefing. You get a group of players...

No, no, no. I guess what I mean is, knowing when your friends are online, that's fine. Friends is one thing, enemies is another. Having it out of fiction, knowing when your enemies are online, is not something that I would say we would do. I would say that when it's your enemies, that's all in fiction, as in you're in the right location, or you're seeing them there, or you've gone to where you know they are, or someone's tipped you off and said, oh, I've seen the dreaded pirate group over by this asteroid, and so you go, okay, well, here, I've set my nav destination, I'm going to quantum drive over there. And then you would go and see them. That would all be in fiction. So I don't know if that's answered the question.

This also comes down to the fact that space is really big. And if we're only providing the information about a contact, like if you're using your contact list to track your enemies, and all we tell you is that they're in Stanton, that's a lot of surface area to cover.

Well, I think the other thing is that there are specific missions and jobs that we're planning for in the Persistent Universe. So one thing could be, okay, I'm paying money, I'm searching for this person, so I will pay a thousand credits or whatever for good data, not made-up data. And then people spot that person and they send the information to you and say, oh, we've seen him in this location. And then you go there. And so that is actually adding gameplay to the functionality of that.

But that's also, like you said, not magically precise. In other words, if someone sees them at a location and then they take off and they have not been seen in the last five minutes, you have no good idea where they're at. Another thing, just to clarify, it seemed like there was a little bit of confusion on the instancing, what I was talking about in regards to shunting players over to common servers based upon their party affiliation, their friends, their skill sets. That's purely in regards to areas that have too many players. In other words, it's an overflow mechanism. If you go to a distant asteroid field and there's two other players there, then the server that's maintaining those guys has absolutely no problem basically merging you all into the same instance. It's only when you start getting a picture around Terra Prime. There could be 10,000 players flying around in space. You're going to have dozens and dozens and dozens of servers. Same thing for when you're actually down on Terra Prime, the city. There could be 50 instances of that city. So which one do you actually go into when you actually land at your hangar? Well, it would prioritize that and go, well, you probably want to go into the instance where your party members are. And if you don't have any party members that are actually already on Terra Prime, then it'll look and go, well, you probably want to be merged in with your friends so that you can actually walk around, interact, say hi to your friends, and so on and so forth.

So this has a benefit, right? And the benefit to players is that it makes it hard to grief another player. And the way that we are engineering it is such that you can still play with your friends whenever you want to, so that that's not hard to do. The thing we don't want to do is make it hard to play with your friends, and the thing we do want to do is make it hard to grief, and consistently grief over and over and over.

And that is the precise reason why, earlier on one of the previous panels, we were talking about how the mechanism that we're using right now to initially populate your friends list is not at all related to what we're going to be doing in the near future, because right now I can form a link to you regardless of whether you want it. And that goes into your friends list right now, and we definitely do want you to know where your friends are. And so that's the whole reason why we're going to wind up tweaking that whole system and going to the proper 'I invite you to be my friend, you have to formally accept'. And at the point you do that, then we get the automatic link between both of us.