For crafting professions like mining, refining, aftermarket tuning and salvaging, could Star Citizen have scales of imperfection on the items players sell, instead of an auction house where everyone just buys the lowest-priced item? For example, if the plasma torch slips while you're salvaging it could ruin the weapon's integrity, or an overclocked CPU might run too hot, so buyers can see exactly what imperfections they're getting and bid more accurately.

Earlier, there was a part of the panel where I was going to say there are some things that we have been asked a lot by fans and organizations and backers that we're just not ready to talk about, because it's not something we're doing in the next 12 months kind of thing. And crafting is one of those things, because there's a lot of edge cases that we need to figure out, and there's also a lot of base technology that we need to do before we do it. So basically his question was, for player crafting, are there ways we can deal with situations like a player makes an item that is not as good as it could be, or makes an item that is perhaps superior, and how we would deal with that in our crafting system? That was a great idea, and I'm glad we recorded it.

I mean, we already have the overclocking stuff where players can overclock items.

He's just wondering, when you actually modify them and then sell them at an auction house, if players that are bidding on them could actually see the custom modifications, which to me seems like something you would certainly be able to do.

Outside of whether you're customizing or crafting stuff, one of the big gameplay ideas is that you will go around the universe and basically collect. So the idea is you can't just go to some global Amazon site and buy any item you want. Typically, the best stuff will be distributed around the galaxy, and so it will be hard to get. So you may potentially have this one planet that's out in a very dangerous area of space, near Vanduul space or something, and it has some crazy mad hermit that makes absolutely the best ballistic repeater, and that ballistic repeater does 20% more damage than any of the other ballistic repeaters and produces less heat or whatever. And so the concept would be that players would trek there to buy that item. Or another player could make a business out of going and buying a bunch of items, loading them up in his Freelancer and flying them back and selling them to other players at a premium in Terra or somewhere. So that's all part of the game design, to encourage players to travel around the universe and come across things and experience things. You will not be able to just, with an infinite amount of money, sit and order everything online. Now, you could potentially, with a lot of money, offer to pay other players to go get you stuff, and I could definitely see there will be commerce in that. That's the kind of gameplay that we're focusing on. And so naturally from there onwards, there's the additional stuff of overclocking weapons or crafting, or finding an alien piece of technology and then taking it to another location where scientists can use it to make a special kind of weapon. That's kind of what I think people are thinking about on the crafting side, and that's what we're thinking about. And all that will happen down the road in the game.

One of the things that you mentioned was if your arc welder slips or whatever. There's a bunch of things that we're doing in our gameplay design that are very skill-based, like the way you do the mining and the way you do the wormhole jumping is all very skill-based. I don't want to say twitch-based, but you need to move this stuff correctly. That's definitely part of the things that we're considering as we're doing these kinds of designs.

Yeah, and that's actually a goal across the entire range of occupations: basically to eliminate as much as possible the concept of press a button, wait five minutes, and something happens. That's not fun, it's boring, it opens the game up to all sorts of farming exploits and various other things.