Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

No, and this is one that we're doing a bit of feedback on, and this is why I have to get the community hands-on with this. We need to get the metrics from it. We need to get some telemetry to know basically how long people are waiting. Right now, it's at a minimum of eight. And we play it a lot when we're doing play tests. With a four on four thing, it's not as hectic, definitely, as the 20 on 20, and we get a little less combat going on. But yeah, it can play just fine at eight players. So we do a minimum right now of eight, and then as soon as the eighth one joins, the round starts. The other thing, and we made massive changes to this, and that's definitely coming in 3.9, was the join in progress stuff. So this was, again, another fix that went in to fix a problem that's no longer a problem, and then it just stayed there. Which was this join in progress. So back in the days of just Star Marine, we had very time-dependent rounds. It was like a 15 minute round or a 20 minute round or something. And the issue is that when you play through Star Marine, it actually punts you back out to the front end when you're done. And one of the issues with that is that it takes a new load, and we didn't want people joining with only like two or three minutes left in the round. And what ended up happening was the logic got a little broken over time, because the way that we actually tracked the amount of time in a round changed. So we had a bug, basically, that once the round had started, and I think it was only a minute or two in, nobody would be able to join anymore. So what that created was this perception that nobody was playing. You would get into a server with maybe two or three people that joined in the same, let's say, five minutes or something. But anybody that went to go join after was actually spinning up a new server, which not only is a little bit expensive on our part, is pretty bad in terms of where the players are, because we're not putting the players together; they keep starting new servers. So again, in working on Theaters, this became so obvious right away, and because it's so important that we have as many players as possible within those rounds, we had to fix this, so now you can join in progress. Now, I think we left it so that the last two or three minutes or something you can't join, and this is just to avoid the fact that you've joined, you've just loaded, and the round ends. And that's not fun.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And just for clarity's sake, when you say that that feature is in 3.9, you mean that's applying to Star Marine in 3.9?

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Yeah, correct. The join-in-progress stuff is all, again, across Star Marine. And then when this game mode comes out, it'll use that too.