How do you work if you can't do this all at once, knowing you can only put out part of the picture each patch? What are the benefits and drawbacks to this approach?
TL;DRReleasing in stages helps the team see what the new combat system, with balanceable shields, weapons and thrusters, adds overall before tuning individual ships, which can only be judged in real combat.
It makes our life a little bit easier in terms of basically understanding the changes we've made to the game in terms of the feature set. So the big change for 3.14 is we've got a brand new combat system where you can balance your shields, weapons, and thrusters. And that's a new system. So basically going backwards a little bit helps us understand how that system is influencing the game. Rather than being bothered about how it works on the individual ships as much and being caught out by tuning it to a set ship or not, we get to see an overall experience of what this has added to the game. And then we can look at it from an experience point of view and go, right, what does this feature allow us to do on this ship, on that ship? And where does that ship need to fit? Because we've done a rough guide of where the ships fit, but until we see it in the combat situation, so we see all the ships fighting each other and the different weapons and different missiles and torpedoes all come together in terms of the combat, we don't really know, because there's so much to test. There are so many ships.
It's worth pointing out as well that we don't, we also don't want to... And it just so happens, I think, especially in the case of 3.14, making the game fun for this particular feature set that we have now also helps us understand the features that we have changed for this release, which is what Rich and Yogi are after.