What's happened to ship naming? Why aren't we seeing more?
TL;DRPublic ship naming rollout was stopped because of unresolved visual problems like tiny, unlit or paint-obscured names, but newer ships already have the tech, shown by serial numbers, ready for when those issues are solved.
I'll go first. So we rolled it out on limited ships at the time, and we learned a lot from it, not just on the content side but also on the platform side, of how to deal with the waves of naming. But primarily on the content side, there was a lot of issues we thought would happen that did happen and we don't have a good solution to them. Like, hey, I've named my ship a four-letter word, it's teeny tiny on screen, whereas someone who's named it 32 characters looks fine. Or it's in an area where there's no light shining on it, or I put a paint on it and now I can't see it. So we decided with the platform team to stop the public-facing rollout of that until we figured out what's going on with it. But every ship that's been released since that time has the tech there to enable it. You'll know if your ship supports it because you'll see serial numbers popping up on the ship in various places, because that uses the same system behind the scenes, but we have a lot more control over it because we know it's always going to be this amount of characters. So yeah, if you see a serial number on your ship, you're pretty safe in the knowledge that that ship is ready for ship naming when we solve the visual issues alongside it.
Yeah, because I think naming your ship is quite a big deal, and the kind of attachment that brings, feeling like that is part of the whole experience. And then like you say, when you get it and it's Space Bob and it's this big and you can't even see it unless you get the light just right so it's catching on the glass. So I think we definitely want to make better use of the feature and improve the quality and the experience that the player gets to see.