What benchmarks do you use to determine how a particular build progresses from Evocati to PTU to Live?

It's a very collective, democratic call. The way it works: whenever we are in the mode of releasing, we have the live sync meeting, one of my favorite meetings. We get to have it early in our day, towards the end of the day in Europe, and we bring up a lot of data. Whenever we go to PTU, there are several types of reports. One of them is a stability report. The stability report tries to model how much disruption we are causing to the player experience. And then we have player feedback. That comes from the player experience team, and it takes into account all the Issue Council issues, the feel of the game, if there are specific features in the gameplay. QA also goes and takes that report and goes through it and tries to reproduce, by the next morning, all these... Data gets collected, we have performance data, and then everyone has a case, right? And it's a lot of conflicting factors together that decide. Sometimes we want to progress faster between waves because we need more players to see how things are going. And you get to decide what the messaging is going to be like, what's the trade-off. Okay, it's going to be amazing in all these areas, and this feature is going to be really bad. I think our players, our backers will understand that. We can just explain it: avoid this area. It will be all right. And yeah, it's a lot of moving factors. When it comes to benchmark, it's quantified, collected crash information, stability information, performance information, resource usage information, all collected together, all abstracted in a number, in a model that we call the stability score. And on the same side also, we have hard-working teams that try to collect and summarize the game experience. And both of them get together, and then we have different goals and different groups and a very democratic way of deciding how things would go. And yeah, hopefully we make the good decisions every time.

Even development teams like some of the game service guys are going to be watching live PTU builds to see performance metrics and get a sense of it. And so that's also in the mix. So you're right. It is a hodgepodge of different pieces of data.