The monthly report talked about ship renting in the PU. Is this still on track for 3.3?
TL;DRRoberts says ship rental and purchase is intended and being worked on for 3.3, but he won't promise it will make the cutoff and it may slip.
So our intention is to get the ability to rent ships and purchase ships in. I know that we are working on it for 3.3. I don't want to make a promise that it's going to make it, because it's one of those features where the team's working on it and they're saying, "Well, we're right up against the edge." Because we have quite a few features where, once they start to get into it and we're assessing where they are on their sprints, they start to flag the feature for us and say, "Well, this feature, we're coming in past your cutoff date." Because what we do when we have the release is we have a cutoff date, a month before we want to go live, and the features should be feature complete then. And then what will happen as we get into it is some features will start to project that they'll be feature complete after that date. And a lot of times we'll be like, "Okay, we'll be able to just push that, or squeeze that in, or make it work." And sometimes we just go, "No, it's not going to get there." And then that's when it would move out. So it is our intention. The goal is to get all the item purchasing and ship purchasing and rentals into the game as soon as possible to create the proper loop for persistence that we're going through. Personally, depending on how we do on our economy balancing, I don't want to be wiping the database every time we do a new patch. That's more for if we had something that was horribly unbalanced. We may not be there soon enough, but our goal is to get to a persistent state in the game as soon as possible, where people can earn money doing various things and use that to upgrade their equipment and ships, and be much closer to the final, proper game loop.