We've been on Wave 1 for what seems to be a while now, four weeks. Is Wave 2 still [coming]? I understand that you have some hand in why we're not at Wave 2.

Well, so a couple of things, right? So just so you guys know, when we decide to go to another wave, there has to be a sort of a gain, because we want to keep your attention when we're testing on the Public Test Universe. When we add these big waves, that adds a lot more players to the system. We want to make sure that we have all the changes that we want on the infrastructure so that we get as much data as possible for these big pushes. And there's a series of tech changes that have been necessary that showed up during the Christmas break, which to be honest was very beneficial, because we let servers and shards run during the break and we discovered a lot of issues, like shards growing out of size, that breaks the loading process, prevents that shard from being loaded again. And that has a lot of impact on the infrastructure that Ahmed is running in the cloud. And so basically we've been looking at these issues and we've devised solutions for them, but we want to make sure they're in place before we hit Wave 2. So there's two of them. One is the method we use to reload a shard in the current mechanism was prone to break if we had hot zones. Hot zones are basically one area, one very specific area, with a large amount of entities. So we discovered an issue with the way we were loading. And so we have a new streaming system there that will basically fetch results from the persistence database and basically send them as we go instead of buffering them, which was causing an issue. And the second big issue is that in our original design for PES, we were shooting for one large data pipeline per game environment, right? So every game server would be submitting their messages to this very large queue and just process that for persistence. Now that we've seen what players do and we've seen how the game servers are submitting their updates, there's issues with, I'll say, noisy neighbor. So one shard, one server is creating a lot of updates for something, and then that will affect another shard. And so we've seen these ripple effects go on. And so we wanted to solve that before we went to Wave 2, which is a feature we called shard isolation, which is basically each server has its own data pipeline. And they all operate sort of independently to persist to their shard. And there's no crossover between them. And so that feature is pretty much done now. So we're about to run the test and stuff and then move it up to PTU so that we can see the effect. And that will open the gates for Wave 2, basically.

Okay, so just so that's not misconstrued, you're not saying that's today or anything, right?

No, I'm not saying that's today.

Not today, but I mean, we're getting close, right? We're getting there.

Yeah, we're getting close. It's a good thing. I mean, this will give us a lot more resilience, too, over the growth of the shards, which grow substantially larger than even the game designers had planned, which is good. That just means the feature is functional.

And those are the two specific bugs that are stopping us from moving to Wave 2?

There's also some other gameplay side effects that we've been looking at. One of them is related to the way insurance works. As far as the players are concerned, it works the same way. But the way the back end was implementing restoring a ship was sort of reliant on the previous technology's way of keeping ships that are destroyed, which we no longer do; when the ship is destroyed, we have to clean it up. And so there's a new insurance system, which is good news because that's also future-proof. But it's the same functionality; for you guys it works the same way.

And then on the game side, we're just going through and fixing stuff still and making sure that when we go Wave 2, Wave 3, it's as solid as possible. But that's what we're doing from our standpoint.

We do need Wave 2. The Wave 2 influx of people is very important for us to validate that those changes work. So yeah, Wave 2 is totally still a thing.