Can you clarify the PvP slider? I see a lot of threads where people believe this affects the whole game, whereas I believe it to only affect the random encounters during the autopilot.asked by Ice

Okay, so the PvP slider is an input to the game's matchmaking system to give it a hint of who it should be matching you with. So what happens is when you fly around in space, you're in your world view, your universe view, and the server up there is basically looking at where you are and is looking at everyone else and all their different machines, and basically seeing where everyone else in the galaxy is. And if it feels like, oh, there's someone close to you or there's an AI that's close to you, it basically would tell your local client, okay, this person's close to you, and that person would be streamed into your instance, or that AI would be streamed into your instance. And so the PvP slider is essentially an extra variable for the matchmaking criteria. So the matchmaking criteria is on a whole bunch of things. So it's on things like ping, which is, obviously we don't want to be putting people together where there's a huge latency. It's on who's your friends, who's your enemies, who's your people of interest. Also, it would have some level of skill rating in there. So we'll kind of track, are you a new player or are you a super experienced one? And based on that, in most of the areas, because some areas there won't be any, it'll be whoever's there versus whether it's PvP or not. But if you basically said, hey, you know what, I would prefer to have more PvE than PvP, it would give a preference to the AI flying around rather than a real player. So if there's an AI pirate and there's a real player pirate, it would drop the AI pirate into your instance to fight if you were more towards PvE than PvP. You definitely would get other players streaming into your space that wouldn't be hostile, say maybe a friend of yours or something, so you could definitely get a co-op kind of feeling. That's going to be an ongoing process, but the whole idea with it is you should be able to fly around the game, and if you wanted that more sort of Privateer, Freelancer experience, that's kind of what will happen to you. Mostly you'll see AI, and then if there's other players, they'll be probably friendly players. Or if you're in certain areas of space where it's no holds barred, then it definitely could be an unfriendly player. But you'll sort of know that those are the dangerous areas. So if you're a new player and you don't really want to be dealing with... I would like to say one other thing: you definitely can have NPCs that are tougher than any player could ever be, since it's a computer that runs it. It knows exactly where you are and it could calculate the correct firing solution much better than a player could ever do. So I think it is a bit of a misnomer to think that NPCs aren't necessarily as tough as real players. In some cases NPCs could be tougher than real players. But essentially the slider just allows you to affect the kind of people that stream into your space as you're traveling across the galaxy. And hopefully that'll mean that if you want to play the more Privateer-style game and just by yourself, you can have that experience. If you want to play with your friends and sort of co-op against other AI, that can happen. But also, if you want to mix it up with other players, that will also happen too. And we'll have some other stuff. I mean, I know that there's always a question where people are always worried, well, is that an exploit, and can you change it dynamically? And we're not going to let you change that dynamically while you're flying around. So it's kind of a setting that you have as you fly around. And like I said, there are some areas that are no holds barred, and those areas will also have some really cool stuff in them. I'm hoping at some point, like, you get brave enough and you get good enough, you would go to these areas to, I don't know, get this one particular kind of weapon that you can't get elsewhere, or salvage an alien wreck. But you have to take some risk to get there. So it's a sort of risk-reward basis. So I hope I answered the question on the PvP slider.