There had to be some concerns, some dangers inherent. What were some of the things we needed to look out for while we were working? What scared us about this?
TL;DRPerformance was the biggest concern and remains one; the team is optimizing AI and tuning enemy and capital ship counts, is pursuing server meshing, and expects big improvements over the next few quarters.
The biggest concern from the beginning, I would say, was going to be performance. We knew performance was going to be an issue. It continues to be an issue. We've got a number of initiatives underway to basically improve that. And then we're also attacking it from a completely different angle, which is not just the per-server performance, but the whole server meshing initiative is intended to eventually allow us to distribute the workload over as many servers as we need. And so that was always something that we were aware of. We've basically tweaked and refined things. The maximum number of enemies you face, in other words, do you face 50 enemies at once or do you basically face a dozen and we keep replenishing them as you destroy them or take them out, make them flee, basically replenish them quicker? How many capital ships can we put at a time? There's been a tremendous amount of focus on optimizing everything from turret AI to even seemingly unrelated things like social AI. Any time you're saving there is basically additional time that you can inject into these events that are intended to basically draw lots of players together and have an enormous amount of AI active. If you think about it, this is definitely the biggest such event we've done to date, and we're putting more players and more AI and tons of turrets operational. You have a lot of stuff happening in one area. And so it's like with most things, which is your first iteration of these things is never as mature as you would like in terms of the performance. And we're going to keep refining it. I think you'll see some big improvements over the course of the next few quarters. And we'll go from there.