What's the path forward for distortion damage? Many players feel it's not really worth equipping distortion damage weapons over traditional weapon types. Do you agree with that?

That's a tricky thing, because there are certain ships and certain combinations you can use where distortion damage is actually quite effective at disabling a ship. But the question is whether we're communicating that well enough at the moment. That's probably the question for us on that side. But there are certain combinations of ships that are quite effective at using distortion to disable a ship. And then you can choose what you do with that ship once it's disabled.

When I watch streams, sometimes distortion damage doesn't get through the shields. I'm not sure it always works the way it's supposed to with shields and stuff like that.

That's something for us on the balance side: it might work fine with some components, but it might not work fine with others. It might not have the intended effect, which is where the analysis of the combat side comes in for us, where we're triggering certain events when this happens so we can understand what's actually happening to these systems when distortion is used. And is it having the effect that we want it to? And is it having the right strength to actually bring a shield down? So that's more data analysis for us to do on our side when we're looking at combat: the type of combat that players use and how effective it is.

As I'm looking at chat, chat's not agreeing with you at the moment. So maybe that's something worth taking a greater look at.

I mean, it's a work in progress, right? If it doesn't work, we'll fix it up eventually.