Why is there a disconnect between the ship specs listed on the RSI website and the actual ship itself? Even after the updates, the website is more wrong than right for the majority of ships, even flight-ready ones.

I think what I'll do here is I'll defer to the ship pipeline director.

So there's a few things. Both CIG and Turbulent want that to be better. It's a very manual process at the moment. Obviously, where it's a manual process, there's room for error. A big problem we have with it at the moment is those stats pages show stats for in-game attributes that just don't exist at the moment. So in an ideal world, we'd have a nice automated system that would look at the game files and then pull that and put it on the website. What do you do for stats that don't exist in-game, like jump drives? Do we just fill our in-game data with fake data? That's going to be as prone to errors as manually putting something on the website. So yeah, that's the big fundamental thing that stops it from all being automated and forever correct. Again, when we spot things, we tend to save them up for batches and just push them out in a bunch, because if every time someone spotted something that was wrong on the stats page we'd go call someone at Turbulent and say, drop what you're doing, this value is wrong, they would never get anything done either, because they have their own sprints and work to do. And so we just factor it into update chunks.

It's challenging, because there are designers that work on ships in three studios around the world. And I've witnessed the process of balancing, tinkering with these things. It's flying around for two minutes, and then going and tabbing and changing a number value and then going and applying. And I've seen a designer make 30, 40, 50 changes to just one single number in the span of 10 minutes. Tracking all that and documenting all that and having every single successive update would be a disaster. Because if that updated automatically on the fly to the website, you could go to the website and in any 10-minute period you'd watch the stats on the ship go and change and be like, what the hell's going on? So it definitely has to be in batches. Even if we have this automated system, it would definitely have to be in a batch, like a script that's run every two weeks or something, and go, okay, grab the current set of data. Plus there's the very real consideration, and this is something I can speak to, that while we are constantly saying all stats are subject to change, and this is game development, not game construction, all things are being developed and subject to change, we have a responsibility to minimize the number of those changes whenever possible. It doesn't do anybody any good to see the numbers on the Hornet change 15 times in a week, or two weeks or three weeks. While that tinkering, that balance, is a normal part of game development, having that be forward-facing and seeing those numbers change... There are folks who don't follow every broadcast, who don't read every article, who don't follow Spectrum, who won't know what's happening. They'll just see that these numbers constantly and dramatically change over and over again. So there's a responsibility on our part, to the feelings and considerations of the backers, to make sure that while we have to change these things as many times as we need to to figure out what the balance is, when we update them, we do it in as responsible and as timely and as limited a manner as possible. The term that keeps coming to my head is: you're playing with my emotions every time you tweak something. So there's definitely a middle ground there. The answer is us getting better with our documentation and keeping that together and making sure Turbulent gets updated, and not swinging the pendulum so far the other direction that we introduce instability in the stats. It's definitely a challenge. It's one that we've been working on for some time.

When we did the big stats page update, I forget when, but it was when all the shipyard articles came out, we had every single system designer that worked on ships look over their ship's stats. They looked over each other's stats. We had all the marketing and community teams look over those stats. So it must have had 30, 40 people look at them, multiple versions, and they still missed things that the community spotted within seconds. And it's the same story for brochures.

Oh, the number of review passes is ridiculous. We have so many eyes: player relations, community, customer service, legal gets in there, design gets in there, the lore team gets in there, I'm in there. We're all looking and we all spot things. And even with all those eyes, sometimes...

Yeah, when you look at the same brochure, 30, 40 versions of it, it gets tough to keep track of what's happened. And then someone will change the phrasing on something, and when you're looking at it, you go, yeah, that was what it was before, but it's completely changed the context of it. But because you've read 20 versions of it before, your brain just doesn't process it.

Which is why we bring so many people in, because we need fresh eyes to catch the things that you're not capable of catching the 30th or 40th time that you've looked at something. And of course, it's definitely something that we still strive to improve on. Definitely room for improvement.