Will you balance this ship more? Will you balance that ship more?

I think this is probably a good time to remind everybody that ship balance never really stops. Not in a massively multiplayer online game.

Yeah, the best way I've always thought to describe balance in any game is it is a constantly moving pendulum, and the best you can hope for is to shorten the swing arc, but you can never expect to stop the pendulum from moving. And it always needs that back and forth. And also in that same analogy, something being in an alpha, that is when you should expect and should want the swing arc to be as wide as possible, because that just means you're covering as much ground as possible, you're trying out as many different ideas as possible, you're iterating to really dial in on what is that appropriate range. So when you have the live product, what is your acceptable short swing arc of balance between, okay, this may be a bit more powerful now, but this can get bumped up later, but then that'll change something back. And you always have the back and forth, but it's just constraining that when it's appropriate to constrain it.

I think that's one of the things that can sometimes get lost for our project versus every other project out there. Because everybody else is playing every other game much farther down in its development, if not in its release, then in beta or in early access or whatnot. We are still so early in our development. Since we're lucky enough to have a live client, so we can have far more testers than just our internal QA team, that affords us the opportunity to try crazier things with each patch: to try bumping the speeds way up this patch, to try pulling all the speeds back, taking out crews, putting in crews. It allows us that freedom to try all these different things. What we're doing today is not necessarily 100% representative of what there will be when that day comes, when we're like, we're launched, we're live. But it's that thing that we want to test now, at this period.

You test what you have when you have it, and when you add something new, you retest it against everything else, and that's balance, right?

So that's one of the great advantages of this project, that everybody who plays it is a tester. It's important to never lose sight that there's Evocati, and there's PTU, and then there's Live, but our Live environment is still an alpha environment. All Star Citizen environments are test environments, every single one. So we're going to try all kinds of stuff.