Is balance possible? With 140 ship records for Master Modes, is it a pipe dream? Is balance actually an attainable thing?

It's not a pipe dream at all. So yes, we had 140 records and we did a very quick weapon tuning pass and a little bit of a health pass for some components and ships. But we're also getting a huge amount of data from the players actually playing that stuff. Internally, when we develop stuff, it's sometimes hard to judge whether or not we reached the right balance, because we have a vast array of ships and items and all that. But when you watch players playing it, then you get an idea what's happening. That said, as I said, the current pass that we have on the balance should not be treated as a 'this is now the final product' thing. It's really just a stepping stone, because it just sets the stage for the vastly bigger changes that are coming in 4.0 and beyond, because there will be new gameplay loops and so on.

I think a huge step we took right now is actually that we set our intentions very straight. So we know exactly what we want to achieve. And now we actually look for the data sets in what players are actually experiencing right now. And we use these observations to improve the balance even more.

Yeah, on the overall question, is balance even possible? Do we want balance? As in, do we want everything to be balanced? Because the kind of nature of balance is the imbalance in balance, if that makes sense. Because we've got to capture all the unique characteristics of the ships, and that throws them off in all different kinds of directions. And we've got to capture that balance to make sure that within the game context, the ship fits within the game. But every ship needs to feel different and offer different things and have different character to them. So that's kind of the complex nature of balance. And then we have to balance the game with the other features that affect flight. So basically, as Yogi said, this is the starting point of the rebalance of the game. But then with 4.0, it's going to evolve massively. With the engineering gameplay, it's going to have a significant impact on how the ships are in the game. So we're going to reset again there. And then again, we're going to look at the data to see if we're delivering the gameplay we intend. So it's a juggernaut. And it doesn't really ever end with a game like Star Citizen, because the game is a live product. It's out there, it's evolving, we're adding features, we're changing things all the time. So from my side, balance is not something that will ever be finished. It's an evolving thing. It's a living, breathing thing that exists in the game currently and will carry on evolving.

Which is true for any MMO, any online game, right? The main guy in charge of Smash had an interview where he talked about their internal numbers, about how the most successful fighter in all of Smash Brothers had like a 51% win rate, and the least successful fighter had a 46% win rate. So it was really only about a 5% difference there. And Torsten, you mentioned that he had a YouTube channel where he talks about design.

Yeah, basically he talked about how if you have a fully balanced game, everything is average, and average is generally boring. So if you do balancing, there's always a peak up or a peak down, so it's more interesting for players. Worth watching, by the way.