If everybody is working as hard as I know they are, and everybody is as dedicated and as talented as I know they are, why does something like this still happen? Why has it happened twice in the last two weeks?

I think there's a part of that which is that we're still transforming the game into an MMO. We're still in the process of taking a game that used to run on a single server and now obviously a server mesh, which is working, but the game systems need to expand as well. If you add the content pressure on top of that, of getting content into the game, releasing it at the same time, stabilizing it, hardening it, and features that come in and do the inverse. New features come in and they destabilize the systems. Without stronger guardrails that also need to evolve with this, that's where we ended up. And so, to be honest, I think right now we're outpacing our ability to verify everything that's being added to the game. And this is where we need to put a lot of our energy at the moment, to put in those guardrails, so that the check-in that would cause this crash issue, right? Those are identified at this point. And so it's all about adding these validation frameworks to prevent that from happening and keeping the data stable and fully validated. Now, that sounds... well, why didn't you do that before, right?

You're not saying that there were no guardrails in place.

No, no. There are guardrails in place, but they're not keeping up with the pace. We create more content and more features than we have time to add guardrails and to prevent these cases. An example I could give on something unrelated to persistence: we used to make a weapon, we make a ship, that's it. Now we have a team making weapons. They balance the weapons. They design the weapons. They work in that realm. They have guardrails in there. They know what to check for, outliers, data sets, how power is distributed, et cetera. You go to the next team. The next team is making ship components. They have their guardrails. They have their approaches. They balance it out. You have another team that's making recipes and dismantling. They have their own guardrails, their own systems. You have another team that's making economy. They add those things to shops. They add pricing. They make sure that that's balanced. And then it moves on to another team that's adding this content to loot boxes. Now, we didn't have that a while ago. And then mission rewards are added in there. All of these have validation, but there's no holistic validation across. We're at the point now where all these systems communicate with each other all the time. And crafting has changed the game quite a bit in that area. And so that translates into more weapons being created, more content being created, more missions giving more rewards, and all these things need to be validated together, not in silos.