Will we see quality of life patches for 3.8, or strictly the new ship content patches?

For 3.8.1, you'll definitely see some quality of life fixes. Basically, we don't want to mess up our feature development time too much. So we have what we consider live must-fixes, or things that are associated with the gameplay experience, that I've already gone through and triaged. And then we'll be focusing on those. And then obviously anything that doesn't make it there will go into 3.9. The way that you guys kind of saw it last year, we weren't so strict on our feature lock date, and what that did is that kind of cascaded into releases not going out on time. Now Aaron and I are very strict on our feature lock date. And that basically comes in the middle of February this year. So then that means that basically from now until mid-February, these are features that will be worked on, and some of them had already been started in 3.8 and even 3.7. And this is when everything comes together and that feature is locked and it's ready to go out and it's ready to go to the Evocati. And since it takes us a certain amount of time to basically go from Evocati to Wave 1 to Wave 2 to live, we can't shortchange that time. And we've seen that's what happened in the past: we tried to shortchange it and it didn't work.

This is where things like the quarterly release initiative and the staggered development initiative hit. Everybody should be working on things on a six-month cadence with the staggered development when applicable. So when we hit that quarterly release with consistency, we have to have those cutoff days, we have to have those feature lock days and say, you know, we wanted this feature for 3.9 or 4.0 or 3.6 or whatever, but it just didn't make it. So instead of holding the date, it moves.

Yeah. And I mean, we're trying to do that for everything, whether that be features or content, so content is, let's say, levels that are coming out or ships or so on and so forth. We want to make sure that everything that we know is going into that release is hitting that date. Obviously with our schedules right now, we need to kind of adjust things, but we're trying to go through and make sure that everything hits that date. So then that gives everybody the proper time to react to bugs and issues that come up when testing.