Chris Roberts · Founder, CEO and Project Director

Well, obviously mining, that's a huge one. And I think that sort of creates a gameplay loop that is what people... I mean, there's a certain amount of, you can run missions, you can take cargo and sell it and trade it, but we don't have all the other stuff that we want to do. Mining is another pretty big chunk of that. So I've seen that people are having fun with the first, what we call tier zero implementation of mining. There's still a lot more stuff to go and you'll be able to mine out in asteroid fields and all the rest of stuff. But yeah, so it's really nice to see that. Rolling these out is very important to the overall sort of PU plan, because essentially we want you to be able to... it's a big sandbox and it also should be up to you to do what you want to do in it, and we don't want you to have one way to play it. If you want to be sort of a miner or you want to be a trader or you want to be a pirate, you want to be a mercenary, you want to be a bounty hunter, all those, or if you want to be a farmer or something, all those things are possible. So you can be someone that's more focused on non-combat or someone that's focused on combat. Basically, it should be like the real world. You should have the options to do all the kind of things you can do in the real world and it's up to you to decide what you consider fun and what you consider success.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Now, you said, of course, mining is the big tentpole feature. And it's not the only feature. There's quite a lot of cool stuff.

Chris Roberts · Founder, CEO and Project Director

Well, the grouping stuff is important. That's, again, tier zero. So there's still a level of implementation that will be continuing on in the subsequent patches. But it's very important. I think everyone voted on it when we had the survey. And it was actually one of the things that when we got 3.1 out there, we were like, okay, looking at quality of life, we said there's some things we'd like to improve right now because we want people to be playing right now and experience... because in some ways we look at the game as a live product that's happening right now. And yes, it's still got bugs and crashes and it's still missing a lot of content, obviously, and missing features, but it should be a whole game cycle and everything. But all of those aspects, it's important for us to make the experience of getting in, getting in with your friends. And in some ways, some of the funner content that I see is sort of all player driven, right? So like there's that Daymar rally that they were recently doing. And so having tools for people to be able to get their friends in easily, communicate with them and do it all is really important. And also some of it's foundational for the VOIP slash FOIP stuff that's going to come. So that's another big win. And of course, there's the new ships and there's some new weapons and items you can have. But those are good. And then we've been working on things like, I'm not sure if we've cracked it properly yet, but we've been trying to make the turrets better because they need a lot of help. We were fixing some issues on the IFCS that were just broken from before. I think it's not all done yet. And just some other sort of quality of life stuff and laying some of the groundwork for 3.3, because 3.3 is, of what we're doing this year, the big one, because that's the one that's bringing a whole bunch of critical tech that will allow us to sort of go beyond where we were.