Rob Reininger · Assistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services

I think the bigger question is, how are you going to protect your ship and your cargo that's being loaded and unloaded on your ship? Who are you going to work with to make that a safe thing? To me, that's where multiplayer gameplay just shines, right? You want to hire some friends; eventually we want to have NPCs that you can hire. Maybe your reputation is high enough that turrets at the station will actually help protect you, right? So you're going to see reputation being tied into a lot more things as we move forward. And certainly we've talked about hiring NPCs and working with other players forever, right? So this, to me, is ripe for that opportunity.

Chad McKinney · Lead Gameplay Engineer, US PU Gameplay team

Yeah, and if I could add, I think a lot of people might hear that answer and be maybe a little bit upset. Keep in mind that you're not moving the cargo in and out on the landing pad, right? We're changing it to be in the hangar. And getting into somebody else's hangar is going to be much more difficult. ATC can be monitoring ships that are going in and out. If you just end up in somebody else's hangar, bad things could happen. If you want to physically walk in there, you're going to have to sneak in along with them. You can't just decide via some hangar elevator that you want to go to somebody else's. You would have to get into the physical hangar with them and then get all the way into their hangar. So it's just a lot less likely that this is going to happen. So for the first outing, yeah, it's probably going to be a bit more of a manual process in collaboration with ATC. And my guess is that when we go live, there is going to be a certain amount of it, but it's not going to be this rampant problem. Even if it does end up being like that, we can always do things like introduce maybe a security system. And maybe that's something you have to opt into. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. We'll see how the gameplay turns out. We'll see what the feedback is. But yeah, so it's a little bit safer than I think you'd probably expect.

Rob Reininger · Assistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services

And I think one thing that we've blurred the line on a little bit here is that the cargo refactor is physicalizing cargo. It's not going to change the shopping flow for that particular feature. Persistent hangars is the big thing that's going to change the cargo gameplay flow. When it comes to shops, shops are still populating while your ship's despawned behind the scenes there. It just means that as a player, once it gets spawned on a landing pad, you can walk into the ship and take it out if you can get in there. It's physicalized at that point. The persistent hangar work is what's really going to drive this entire gameplay flow of the manual loading and working with friends and collaborating on that level. And then you will be much safer behind the doors of your hangar. So making things harder to do, like I mentioned, stealing ships, that should be really hard. It should be really hard to get into somebody's hangar. Maybe you've got to sneak on their ship and then be a stowaway all the way back to get inside their hangar, and now you can wreak havoc. But it takes an effort, and I'm sure players are going to do it. I guarantee it. They're going to find a way. But I think just the physicalization of cargo is going to be a huge step.