Internally, has that [tractor beam item attaching/detaching] been a smooth addition to the game?

Not at all. There are several issues that we were facing, right? So I think the biggest one is actually how do we get items comfortably out of the inventory and then place them on your ships, right? So your station inventory, how do you get the items out of there and then have them accessible. And there we had a lot of painful sessions. I was talking, I think in our last ISC, that we had the Cutlass Black prepared with all the mining heads in there. Yeah, we can do that. We can cheat. We can spawn items. We don't have to do the annoying part of actually equipping one of your ships and then pulling the items off. So this is something that we uncovered. But I think the most drastic one is, and me as a player, I'm really not so happy about this decision, but me sitting here with my CIG hat on, I think that's the only decision we could come up with: deactivating tractor beams again in the green zones. Because in one of our earliest Fleet Week test sessions, we had players basically ripping out all the items, and the entire Fleet Week hall was just impassable because everything was lying around. And that's not fun for players, even though you couldn't even carry the big weapons out through the elevator, so you didn't even have a benefit from it. It was just bringing havoc to the world and making everyone else's lives miserable. So yeah, we had to jump in and come up with this temporary solution and deactivate the tractor beam in the green zones. But yesterday we activated it at least again in the hangars. Shout-out to Jaro, who just jumped in and did a quick fix for that.

I think people were going into the showroom and pulling the components out of the display ships. Is that what I saw?

Yeah. Even from the display stands, shops weren't secure anymore. They'd tear apart every shop and every item in every shop. And also because in Fleet Week we always allow you to enter those ships and explore the ships that you don't own, and that also means you can sit in their pilot seat. A crucial aspect of the tractor beam functionality is that you first have to unlock the items, so that we don't have players griefing one another and just basically tearing your ship apart even though you don't want it. So in Fleet Week you could sit in the pilot seat, unlock the items, and then basically strip every item away, and then another person would come in and be like, why does the ship look so empty?

This is what we always do. We add new things into a very complex environment and set of systems, and there will be some points of failure. And then we look at those, we try to fix them. With the tractor beams being usable in green zones, there will have to be some updates to the law system that needs to support some things. As Torsten said, the shops will need some updating. This is what always happens. You try something and then you realize there's a lot of things that get set in motion. It's an avalanche, and then you have to kind of get all the pieces fixed.

And that's because we build everything systemically, though.

No unscripting here.

All as functionally and diegetically within the universe as possible, so that those mysterious interactions are what generate emergent gameplay, but they also generate a lot of the, oh, okay, we're going to need something to address that. Turning them off in green zones is a temporary thing.

Yeah, it's always emergent gameplay for the players and headaches for us. We'll get them done, and we'll move on to the next one.