Why did it take until 3.2 [for the new group and party system]? Why wasn't an easier way to get in there with your friends prioritized earlier in development?

It's hard. Every single feature that we... basically we have a hundred things to do all the time and the time and the resources to do 10 of them. And so you just have to make calls on which one at that particular time you felt was more important. And so the sort of grouping and friends was less important earlier. I think we've increased the player count. We went to 50 with 3.0, and hopefully when we get some of the new stuff that will be coming in, the object container streaming and the bind culling, we'll be able to go beyond 50. We also have some physics optimizations that we're working on longer term that should bring up the ability to also have more players on one server and decent frame rate. So yeah, when we did it, it kind of felt like we'd gotten to the point where there was enough people playing or stability and we should sort of focus on that and also sort of focus on the experience now. So I sort of feel like until we got to that 3.0 level of stuff, there wasn't enough of a game or world to go and explore and do with your friends. Now it sort of feels like there is, and you're seeing it with the mining, and with 3.3 we'll open up a lot more stuff. And so then it really sort of feels like, yeah, okay, let's get a device or a mechanism, a system in place for people to get together to talk, have their various chat in the game. And you'll just see that getting improved as we go forward. Like I said, for 3.3, we'll bring in the VOIP and the FOIP, but also you have more of the Spectrum side of it. So you can also be doing the chatting in Spectrum and you'll be seeing it in the game and vice versa and stuff like that. So it felt like the right time. With all this stuff, there's a whole list of things. I see it on the forums all the time where people go, why don't they do this? Oh my God, they're crazy or they're idiots or they don't know what they're doing. And it's like, we're aware of pretty much all of it. And honestly, it's a matter of priority. And it's always a hard decision to make. So for instance, there are quality of life improvements, like some of the things I've just mentioned, like making the UI or the HUD better or whatever. That takes time to do. But then it also takes time to do a new feature like mining. And then it takes time to do the debugging, making sure the game's running. Like when we're going to PTU, there's a whole bunch of bugs that come up that people have to fix. And so it's really just a matter of allocating the resources and time to that. And sometimes you have to make difficult or hard choices. I love to get new content. I love to get new features in. But if you're always doing that, then the other stuff sort of drops by the wayside. And so that was a conscious decision we made. That's why we did this for 3.2. Okay, going forward... and partly the quarterly release stuff forces us to do that. But we said going forward, we need to spend time improving the quality of life, improving the stability, improving the performance, so the experience playing now is fun and can be something that people are interested in, versus always thinking about what's going to be tomorrow, always about, oh, well, when it's finished, it'll be all this great stuff, but right now it's all a bit of a mess because we haven't finished everything. So we made a conscious choice to that. We're still doing that. It doesn't mean that there aren't some hard choices. We have our roadmap, which we have this whole thing that you have to agree to read with the caveats about how it moves and all the rest of stuff, specifically because we said we're going to be more date-driven than feature-driven or content-driven. And then the moment we move something from it, there's a whole bunch of people going, oh, I can't believe it. They're idiots. They don't know what they're doing. They're incompetent managers or whatever. And that's just the choice you have to make, because you'll come to these things and someone will say, well, do you want to get rid of these bugs? Or do you want to get the performance better? Or do you want to have the experience playing it now better? Or do you want this feature? And sometimes there will also be features that will come along where you go, okay, well, we really need this other feature to make this feature work properly. That one's not going to be ready for this release, so we're going to have to move both of them out. And we said that in our caveats. So the time we move it, it still does. But that's just the nature of the beast. I would guess that the majority of our community sort of get it. I kind of view the modern internet as the sort of Tale of Two Cities, the best of worlds and the worst of worlds at the same time. So the best of worlds allowed us to make this game and have all these people support it and push us forward and do something at a level no one can do. The worst part of it is that, of course, everyone can say whatever they want, and the filter of civility isn't the same as it would be in person. And you tend to focus on the loud people, and the loud people aren't always everybody. And it's just the nature of it. So you have to know how to filter all those. But ultimately on our side, we say, okay, this is what we want to do. Long term is where we're going. And we'll make some of these choices, some of these decisions I know some people are going to get upset about. But it's all in service of trying to make this game as good and fun and meet the vision of myself and everyone working on the game and also the community itself. But it's a journey. It's not something that like tomorrow is magically going to be brilliant. And so, yeah, you just got to learn to put a heat shield on sometimes when you go to the forums.