Richard Towler · Vehicle Experience team

So it's probably no secret now, seeing as it was out on the forum the other week. So it was basically some early experimentation that we were doing internally to change the speed of combat. So basically we want combat to engage at a lower speed than it does now, because the higher the speed that combat engages at, the worse the general experience gets. So we don't want to fake it and just artificially force people to combat at a lower speed. We want to look at the way that systems perform at high speed and how that would happen in the real universe. So we're looking at shields: if you go faster, how does the shield react on the outside of the ship? We'd encourage players to engage in combat at lower speeds rather than high speeds, where perhaps there's more risk of being taken out by an opponent. So it's just to encourage that kind of closer engagement in combat, because we found that the experience in combat gets better if it's much closer and at a lower speed than high speed.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

What are your thoughts on that, Yogi?

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Experience team

We are not entirely set on what these things are going to be, but part of our process for the coming weeks is to do a lot of gameplay tests to figure out how these actually can work. So the DevOps team supported us greatly by allowing us to create an experimental gameplay system so that we can easily try out new gameplay builds between us and iterate on these kinds of small changes. And the high-speed combat changes that we have planned, we can then test and check if they work or not. So that's going to be a really exciting time soon.