Many players love the idea of building a second life in the complex, high-fidelity sci-fi universe you all have worked so hard to realize. Can you again confirm how you intend for players to enjoy industrial gameplay without there being a need for armed protection, PvP readiness at all times? Your messaging has been mixed and Spectrum continues to flare up on the issue.
TL;DRIndustrial play will never be risk-free, but systems will differ in security, with safer low-reward areas and riskier high-reward ones; they say the law system is not yet where they want it.
So Star Citizen is a living and breathing world. So the ultimate plan, the plan that we're aiming towards, is we'll have systems that have different security rankings, right? The idea that we talked about at CitizenCon was Stanton is a high-sec system and Pyro is low-sec. So because of the current implementation of law, and we don't have the law ships coming in and responding as we want in Stanton, right now players can pirate in Stanton with little to no consequence at all. It's the exact same as Pyro. There's little to no consequence at all. So what we want to go towards is, say you're going to, I don't know, craft something, right? And you need X amount of this really rare material, right? It's in abundance in Pyro, but it's not in abundance in Stanton. The idea is you can mine in Stanton, but it will take longer. And it's quite likely that you're gonna be safer because of the law system; when we evolve it, you'll be safer, but it's not impossible. You can still get pirated, you can still get attacked by players. You could even still get attacked by AI pirates, right? Whereas if you go to Pyro, the goods will be in such abundance that it's easier to find, but it's so much higher of a risk for you to get attacked by AI or players. So the answer is, ultimately, there's always going to be a risk of being attacked by another player or an AI. The difference will be per system, it will be either higher or lower, so you can make an informed decision. So in Stanton, you're meant to be pretty much safe, but it's not going to rule out the fact that you're going to get attacked.
You're meant to be more safe than you will in Pyro, perhaps not as safe as you would in Terra.
Exactly.
The short answer to this, and Elliot, you actually acquitted yourself very well there, thank you. The answer is the law system is not where we want it to be. That's essentially the slug line, the 10-cent version of that. There will always be conflict. There will always be some chance of having your day rained upon, just like there is in real life. But if we do our job right and we continue developing the game the way that we want to, the systems that we're still waiting on (remember how long we waited for server meshing), if the systems we're waiting on come online as they're supposed to, eventually this will grow into a place where those changes in security and everything are obvious to the players, and you will be allowed to make those decisions for yourself. Do I want the high risk, high reward of Pyro? Or do I want the safer, more secure experience of Stanton? It's never going to be as simple as PvP players or PvE players or Care Bears or griefers or whatever pejoratives you want to throw. It's never going to be that simple. It's not that simple in real life. We're not aspiring to build something that simple, in black and white, for Star Citizen. So it's just one of those things that's hard. It's hard to always picture where we're going based on where we are and where we've been. But I actually think we've been rather consistent in this messaging. The question says that we're not, and I think that's more about people hearing this part and not that part on any given stage, or people regurgitating this part and not that part, or maybe there have obviously been times over the years where we haven't been as clear as we should have been. It's a mixture of everything. But the goal has always been the same: a living, breathing, diegetic universe of risk versus reward. Where do you want to go and how do you want to play? We intend to cater to as many different groups as possible. I think Rich Tyrer said it two years ago: we're not a PvP or a PvE game. We're an everything game.
We just want to have areas where you feel very protected, where the security has very short response times and is able to arrive in time before you explode. So those people that are not that into PvP, they have the AI protectors helping them.