Every MMO has a meta, whether the developers make it or the players build their own tools. Do you think you're working against what comes naturally to players?

I think, what a desirable experience... Yes, there is meta. And I think we're not necessarily working against that, because the players can still play the game and figure out the meta and make their own notes about it and try and learn about the game by playing it to then decide on what the meta is. And an ideal situation is a group of players play and they find that a certain configuration of components works really well. And then a different group of players start from a different starting point and discover that actually a different set of components is better. And that kind of variety in the community, that's desirable. And you're not going to get that by the game giving you just hard numbers. You're going to get that from people trying to learn about the game and quantify it and then having disagreements and discussion about it. That's what we really want.

One other aspect of this, too, is going to be scanning. Depending upon what you want to do, we're going to have different scanners give you different information. If you're a mining prospector or something like that, the scan that you're going to get on another ship is maybe not what its guns are. Maybe it's not any good information about combat. Whereas a fighter ship, when you scan something, it's going to tell you how combat-ready that is against you. Whereas a more security ship is going to want to scan and give you maybe how much bad cargo you have in there. So it also depends on what we want to give the players when you scan and what information to get based on the role of that particular ship or what they're trying to get at. A medical scanner is going to give you something different than someone who just wants to blow stuff up. If you go in the game and you just want to blow a bunch of things up, eventually the idea is you're going to run out of money. If you blow up a cargo ship or a Prospector that has a bunch of valuable cargo, you just lost it all. You want to disable that ship and maybe capture it, but that's going to make that Prospector maybe call in his friends. So a lot of it right now is how can you get away from just making the gameplay blowing people up? How do you incorporate different information so that different gameplay aspects can come out of it?

I mean, you're going to get the people that want to blow stuff up. But if you repeatedly do that, how are you going to get money to continue to blow people up?