Was [4.8] really as bad as 3.18? What's your take on how 4.8 went?

Well, for me, if I take it from the machine room side of things, we've been firefighting since we launched 4.8 from a whole slew of different issues. Some of them are to be expected when we launch a patch that has this many core changes. We've touched on systems that are really central to the traversal again. So we're talking about the entitlement system, which has not changed in years at this point. And we've completely overhauled the entitlement system in 4.8 to power in part the item imprint system, but more importantly, to pull the entitlements out of the patch cycle and persist them across patches. What we call the LTP layer is not just what you have in your inventory, it's also what you own. Your ships and all of the items that you purchase in-game now have an entitlement record that holds the insurance loadouts for it, all of the customizations that you make on it. And that's hosted outside the game. Not outside the game, but outside the game patch. Which means that when we come back from a patch, there's no risk of, oh, I'm not getting my ship back. What you see in ASOP in the first patch will be exactly the same data source in the second patch. And so that risk of losing ships across patches is completely gone. So we're very happy. In fact, that bit actually went very well in 4.8, even though up to the launch, it was always last-minute things to look at. But we have been firefighting across a multitude of different issues that were tangential to that. Some of them we can touch on a little bit, because I've made some notes to talk about gameplay systems here and why they were affected by some minor infrastructure issues that turned out to be massively contributing to the perception of the patch. So I'll talk a bit about that in a bit, but basically we've been firefighting since 4.8.0. I want to touch on one thing because we just had an off-the-cuff moment about the Idris last night. But two weeks prior to that, we had another downtime patch that needed a lot of rectification. So the teams that run the online group were hard at work on this maintenance. And unfortunately, another one of those unwanted check-ins came in during that 4.8.1 cycle, where, in an attempt to fix the VGL flight suit that was missing hands and feet, another check-in came in that removed sub-components of this flight suit, but not just removed them from the flight suit, deleted them from existence from the game. And that's not something that you can do in a minor patch. And so clearly, that's two instances in this patch where transition check-ins should have been validated and prevented and went in, and then after that became an infrastructure problem. Because same issue here: if somebody was wearing the VGL flight suit and referred to these entity classes that were actually representing, I think, the nozzle and the front pack of the suit, then the game server would crash. And so we had, again, to do percussive maintenance to remove those items and fix that. And so that highlights to me a massive issue with how we validate check-ins and how we get changes in the game across persistence, until we have full forward porting compatibility on the persistence layer, which we don't have at the moment.

What's your perspective, Jens?

Live servers, you're always running, right? We're talking about forward patching. If we'd been behind closed doors, you would have done that, right? No one would have ever seen the game until you'd done that piece of technology, but that's not who we are. We're always running, and that's what makes it really, really exciting to work here as well, right? Because we're putting ourselves out there all the time. But if I look at this specific case, you're saying, right, we have checks and we have contracts on what you can and can't do in these sub-streams that we've already released, where the data management is super, super strict. And obviously now we invalidated them twice in a row. So it's time to look at how we really add that extra layer of protection.