How much of a difference can one player or a large organization of players really have on the price or availability of a commodity or retail product? Can you corner the market, for example?

It's unlikely you're going to corner the market, but never say never. I mean, the reality is there are many other NPCs. As Chris mentioned earlier, the number of NPCs to players is probably going to be roughly 10 to 1 in terms of what we're actually simulating. What you're actually affecting, therefore, may be largely superseded by other things that are going on. So if you really want to have an outsized impact on a particular commodity or the availability of a particular item, and therefore its price, or a whole slew of these things, your best bet is to basically go to an area that has a smaller population. Your best bet is to basically team up with friends and work in concert. But in general, you can kind of picture it like a spring, where if you're clever and you pick the right spot and you get some friends to help you and you basically do a good job of preventing every freighter that you see from actually landing in a given landing zone, then you can actually start to bend the needle and basically start to have an effect on the price of that commodity, and therefore everything that's built utilizing that would eventually show some effect. But in general, it's going to be the larger, more macroscopic things that are going to significantly move the needle. And what I mean by that is if you've got a raging battle in a particular solar system between UEE security forces and pirates, then that's going to be consuming not just what one player or 50 players would; you're effectively going to have thousands of NPCs and hundreds and hundreds of players involved in this battle, all chewing through ammunition, chewing through ships, chewing through personal weapons. What that's going to do is it's going to create a tremendous demand for commodities that won't, at least immediately, be able to be satisfied, and therefore you're going to wind up having a choke point in the production of everything that depends upon those things. And so all of a sudden what you'll see is the price of ships, the price of ammunition, the price of personal weapons will all start to basically rise.

And so I could see a really cunning organization starting a war between two other organizations in the system, having stockpiled a whole bunch of missiles and weapons. And then there's a run on the stuff in the shops, and then they can go and sell the stuff at a premium.

Yeah. And that's actually another concept that we talked about relatively recently, which is your ability to store significant stocks of commodities and other sellable goods at various spaceports. And so depending upon what the situation is, you could very well think that because of how things are evolving within a given system, copper or a particular ship or you name it is going to increase in price, and therefore you basically start planning ahead of time. You basically stock up, and when what you've been predicting actually occurs, assuming it does, then you can actually reap a very significant reward. But the real point there is that you shouldn't expect one player to basically go in and assume that you're going to take out one freighter and that's somehow going to completely constrain the supply. It's a very large world that's being simulated. And while one player can have a very significant impact in regards to some very specific situations, where you're talking about a low population or a distant outpost or something like that, you're not going to move the needle very far by yourself or even with your group of friends in some of the more populated zones. That's really going to take one of these more macroscopic events to really move that needle.