Will updates to the Persistent Universe be rolled out to private servers on a modular basis? Can we cherry-pick the updates we want and ignore those we don't?asked by Trapjaw

So the Persistent Universe is a slightly different beast than what you'll be able to do on your private servers, just because the Persistent Universe is actually many, many, many servers all linked together. It's just what you need to do to handle the large amount of players we already have, let alone the amount of players that we intend to have, and so to a certain level the ability for us to keep the private servers in sync with what we're doing on the persistent world is not like we just hit a button and it's on everywhere. So probably the way I would think of it is that with all new stuff, we roll out a new ship or whatever, we make it available in the Persistent Universe. Later on it potentially can be available for offline; people would get an asset pack or something they could probably pick and choose from. But it's not necessarily going to be at the same frequency or level that it's going to happen in the Persistent Universe. Because the Persistent Universe is the live universe, and that's where you hook into and you plug into, and we're built to push out data on that frequently. And as soon as you've got people modding their own server, first of all, they're on a much smaller server. That's something that an individual can run and have a bunch of their friends in their group or clan or whatever run on, more like a Freelancer server than what we have in the universe, because we have universe servers, system servers, instance servers, and it's literally hundreds of servers. It's very unlikely that any individual is going to have that at home. In that case, it's different, because how you manage the data, how you deliver it is a whole different thing. We can take some of the assets and say, hey, you can put these assets into the universe yourself, but we can't really push it out to everyone because, first of all, we don't even know what people have done on their server. Essentially, when you have a private server, you start at the base level, and then you build it from there. We'll occasionally put out updates of things that we've changed, and they can take that if they want, or they can do their own thing. That's kind of the way it will be.