What can you tell me about freight elevators and what still needs to happen?
TL;DRFreight elevators are complicated and still have known issues like item loss and stacking; of roughly 73 known issues 51 are resolved, with a goal that players never lose items.
The freight elevators are way more complicated than we can imagine, because they get affected by other systems like hangars, like planetary locations. There's also multiple flavors of them, top loading, side loading, and they all operate very differently. So this year, we've had issues at the beginning of the year clearly with the freight elevators, like losing items, and obstruction blocking them from functioning.
You said the beginning of the year, but that really came to a head in July.
Yeah, where we even had an event that would rely on them, which was, in retrospect...
Well, we knew there was a collection of issues, but all of our data said they were only localized. It wasn't until we went to scale that we realized this is actually even worse than we thought.
Right. It's also coupled to a couple of things for that event specifically, which was concentrated missions in key locations. That's one thing that has been in our discussions all year. The first thing we did was look at how we distribute missions. If we launch a new mission tomorrow morning and we send everybody to the same spot, that is problematic, not just because it's not fun, because it's a traffic jam, but also it causes other issues. We learned a lot from that on the design side, I think, overall. So we're pretty happy with some of the core mechanics, but there's still very egregious issues that we're tracking. So there's roughly 73 total issues that we know about. 51 of those have been resolved. So I've asked one of our team, Nathaniel Fisher, our resident expert in freight elevators, to track that. So the rest of these issues, some of them are really problematic. One of them we actually discussed, you and I, just before the show, was how if you're turning in Wikelo items, you need to put them one by one.
You have to be able to put things in a box and have it suck up that box.
Yes, I agree 100%. And so that's going to be one of the first ones I think we need to look at. The other one is a bit more problematic because we don't have a proper repro for it, but sometimes there are lost items if there's a back-end slowdown when things get stowed. So we have a couple of reports for this. Not many, but the ones that we have are critical. And so this is a kind of rule we've set on the CGP team. So Jens and I are pushing this to everybody: the golden rule for everything related to freight elevators or anything that touches inventory is a player should never lose an item interacting with these systems, right? We need trust in them 100%. And so that's why we're chasing those issues. So there's still a lot more work required on freight elevators for different edge cases. A new one that we started seeing in 4.6, which seems affected by another change, is sometimes putting stuff on the elevator not on the grid will cause it to disappear, which is kind of a physics cleanup conflict. So I know we're looking into this right now because that's a big one. And then everything that has to do with stacking. Having a stack in your inventory that you want to unstow onto the freight elevator, that mechanism from a backend perspective is actually a creation. I know that sounds weird, but you have a stack of 10, that's one item with a stack of 10. You bring one, it's a creation of nine. So that bit is not stable right now. We're trying to improve that mechanism.