Do you test a finished location to make sure a player can't get stuck in a hole?asked by Grizz

We certainly try. Very much try. Being stuck in a hole is one of the QA Ten Commandments. Can a player get stuck? It's one of the primary things they will always test for. First thing. The reality of the situation is that there's a whole lot more of you than there are of us. And you guys tend to be a bit more tenacious with where you try to get to than we can sometimes be. And this is true of any video game. I'm not speaking just of Cloud Imperium Games. QA the world over does their best to make sure there are no places where players can get stuck.

And of course, the scale of the game we're making means that it's much, much more difficult to test for every single little area that might be in the game.

It just reminds me of, depending on how long you've been following the project, in late 2015, we went live with 2.0, which was the first version of the Stanton system. And there was one item that wasn't bolted down, as it were. It was a Big Benny's vending machine. It was one single Big Benny's machine that was physicalized and could be moved. For months, maybe almost a year, all throughout 2016, we saw players just seeing where they could move that box, seeing where they can get them out of the space station, get them onto their ships, take them to other space stations. There was even a thing called the Big Benny's Challenge, where you had to get the box and get it back into the hab in which you spawned. And the hab that you spawned in was up a flight of stairs. So without being able to pick this box up, they had to just continuously go prone and roll and try to get the box to shift slowly up the stairs. And I saw people doing this for hours. Just hours.

There's one thing I know: players will do anything they can to put something where they shouldn't.

So that's always my example of when people say, why doesn't QA test for this? Oh, we test for plenty. But there's no way to account for everything that a player will do.

And they'll come up with things that you just never thought possible. Like what you just said, with the rolling.

Well, that's one of the key aspects of building a sandbox game. It's about building a world, or in our case, a universe of possibilities. So we are continuously surprised and amazed by what our community can do with the tools that we've provided them.

And it's always interesting as well to imagine, as we develop these tools and we make locations more versatile and we give players more control of things that they can do, what insane things are going to happen years down the line.