For a long time, it was deemed important to cap the total amount of UEC purchased on an account. That appears to have changed recently. Can you talk about why you don't think this will cause problems for the economy at game launch?

Well, I kind of had it in the letter, but I think that in every persistent game that you'll play, everyone seems to treat [it like] everyone's going to be on the starting line at exactly the same time and they're racing to a finish line and there can only be one winner. And that is totally not the vision of the game. That's not what the game has been designed for. And in any MMO that I play, if I go and join World of Warcraft now or EVE Online now, I'm starting way behind people that have been playing it for years. It doesn't mean that my experience necessarily is bad. It's just going to be that I'll be doing different things and different challenges. I have to work my way up. And we already have a certain level of inequality, because people have different numbers of ships. Some people just have one Aurora and some people have got a massive fleet. 150 UEC, 1,000 UEC is nothing compared to an Idris or a Constellation or a Reclaimer. And also people could buy items, so they have as many items and as many ships as possible, but they had this cap. And the real reason why we changed it wasn't because we were all like, "Hehehe, we want to make more money." We actually don't really make that much money from UEC. Most of our revenue tends to be either from new people joining and getting their initial package, or the concept sales that we do. But we didn't want to be in this situation where people couldn't melt the items that they'd bought over the years at completely arbitrary prices, because back then we didn't have any idea. So we were like, "I don't know, that sounds like it's 10,000 UEC or something." And now we have a new model for our economy, and we're starting to bring it in, and that's going to be an ongoing process. But the way we value things is based on the raw materials that are in it; that has a value, the size of them has a value, the quality of them has a value. Then there's a brand markup. There's a whole formula that we have that will also play off in crafting stuff that we'll do down the road. So that means that we're changing the pricing of items. And yeah, if you bought something with 10,000 UEC and now that thing is 4,000 UEC, I would be pretty pissed. And so we're like, well, as we're rebalancing this, and also as we're wiping the database every time we do a release, we kind of feel like we should let the players melt the ones that they've purchased with proper UEC, and then they can buy whatever items they want at the new prices in the new economy version that comes out with each one of the releases. And so the cap was a problem, because there were quite a few people that were over it. And we were like, it doesn't make that much sense to penalize these people when other people have just stockpiled the equivalent of millions of UEC in ships. So for us, it's all the same.

And then in terms of the gameplay itself, like I said, first off, a lot of people seem to think of Star Citizen as PvP, "there can only be one" Highlander style, right? I put that in my letter. But it's not. Yes, if you want to participate in PvP or compete with other organizations, we are going to put that gameplay in there. But the design of this is to have 90% of the universe be AI. So actually most of your content in the game will be PvE, and it's certainly going to be fashioned in a way that if you don't want to engage in mano a mano, or person a person, or whatever I should say, the appropriate setup in terms of competition, you don't have to. And one of the reasons why I want a 90% AI population is that the problem with PvP is there is always a winner and a loser, and both those people are players that have paid money for the game, and not everyone is the best dogfighter, or not everyone's the best FPS player, or not everyone's the best trader or whatever. So the great thing about AI is we can make AI of all levels. So no matter what, even if you're a crappy dogfighter, you can still take down some AI pirates and feel like you're the man. It's like, "Okay, yeah, I got him. I took him down." I really want to make sure that that's there so people can have a good time, because if you're only ever competing against other people, then there will always be winners and losers, and if you're someone that's... So I want people that fall into that category to have opportunities to go out there and have fun and whip up on some pirates or do whatever they want to do without having to be forced into head-to-head competition. Based on that side, it's not head-to-head competition, the overall game. The game has that if you want it, and it has something else if you don't want it. So there isn't some master of the universe person that you're going to get to. And we're deliberately building the gameplay to have gameplay for people that want to play lone wolf style, or play with small groups, or play with big organizations and fight over territories; that want to be doing a more peaceful style, they want to mine or farm or trade or something; or people that want to do more combat-focused things like piracy or mercenary or bounty hunter. And we're building all those things to be in the universe and give you opportunities to do them on both a PvE and a PvP basis. And there will be areas where there can be crossover between the two. But it's up to you, whatever you're going to do.

You set your own win conditions.

Yeah. And this is just how I want to play, how I would want the game to be, how I want games to be. And so it's completely reflecting how I, as a player, would like it. So based on those conditions, I don't see whether it makes a difference. Maybe two organizations that want to go to war are all stressed about how many Idrises they've got and all the stuff at the start. But even in that case, it's not a sprint. It's a long-term race. The opportunity to earn money in the game, and even to get items that you can't get outside, is much greater. So it would probably help if people... I think they base what they know on past games, or they theorycraft and they all get worried and concerned about it. But I know what we're building, and it's built in such a way that I'm truly aiming to build a game that hits these different spots. And I think I said in my letter it has a really large tent for everyone, and it's just a destination; it's up to you. If you want to get up in it with other people, great. If you don't, and you want to just chill out by yourself, you can do that. It's really just a destination and a home, and you make it what it is. And in that case, yeah, there should not be a concern.

It's one of the things that first drew me to the project way back when: it's your universe. We refer to it as the first-person universe. You step in. We're building the sandbox. We're building a universe of opportunity. And the players come in and they decide what their goal is. They decide what their win condition is, and how you go about attaining that is entirely up to you.

Yeah, 100%. And that is absolutely the goal and the DNA. And that's the philosophy behind all the design decisions. And not everything is in there perfectly yet, of course; it's got a lot of stuff to go. But if you know that, then I think you should be a lot less worried about these things, because you're not forced into a competitive environment if you don't want to be in one.