PvP/PvE:

Very, very little of the game concept is about PVP.

No question; for all the grousing about PVP and how we’re going to solve it (ahhhh) I think we aren’t getting the message out that there’s going to be a LOT of PVE. An Empire falling in on itself, alien raiders on the frontiers… lots of chances for big battles with your friends against the AI.

And YES to PvE… I don’t know where the claim that this game is all about PvP is coming from. We’re building the universe as a setting for some serious PvE (and PvR) scenarios… the fact that we ‘allow’ PvP isn’t to say that it’s what we want the game to be about.

Our goal, which I think is tripping up a lot of people, is to ALLOW griefing… but to build a game that prevents you from wanting to engage in it. That is, putting the onus on us developers to create a system that punishes people for deciding to break the in-game law instead of a system that just stops you from shooting people. Can we do it? Chris thinks so…

Chris is very against forcing people not to be able to PVP artificially and thinks we can balance the game in such a way that it’s not an issue. Beyond that which we’ve already said, I’m not sure what else we could add to mollify folks… it’s going to be one of those “trust us and we’ll fix it if we screw up” things.

As for scammers and gold farming… our goal is to be as responsive as possible (it’s one of the big tennets of Chris’ plan for SC: constant updates, hands on dev team.) It’s one of those cases where you know it’s GOING to happen no matter how much we plan for it… so the real test is going to be how quickly we can respond.

There will be PVP, but the goal is to figure out how to punish players in an in-universe sense to keep them from killing one another indiscriminately.

Private Servers:

You can start a private server and play by yourself! You’ll lose some of the experience, but there will be a Privateer-style game there.

we absolutely will push updates to the single servers whenever possible. Some of the content is going to come from player actions (well, a lot) and it may not transition over. But when we’re adding stuff like new models of ships and new fixer missions and so on, everybody should get it.

Content updates will absolutely happen for the single player portion of the game, both the Privateer world and Squadron 42. We want to do addon campaigns for S42, just like the original Secret Missions. You can access your ship offline in the Star Citizen mode… I think the Earth Navy will assign you a different one for the S42 storyline.

I guess the goal is to keep adding short (or sometimes long?) campaigns to keep the single player adventure going for as long as people are willing to buy add ons!

Related Stuff:

Trading system isn’t designed yet, but we’re leaning towards a real career. One thing Chris wants to do in Star Citizen is model entire economic systems… so instead of just a “get something, get reward” model like WoW, he would model all ends of the spectrum… so you’ll also be paying taxes and landing fees and so on and money is both coming in and going out of the economy. And what he’s thinking there is that it will create a setting that people can start their “realistic” trading careers and so on on top of, since it will work just like real life (that’s the theory, anyway! Let’s see how it reacts to players…)

There will be a housing system. Not sure if the ‘walk around’ part will be first or third person yet (my experience is that while first person SOUNDS better, it actually is more distracting making the transition because you go from envisioning a fighter to having nothing… maybe it’ll be player choice.)

Absolutely, you can hire NPCs to run your stations on the larger ships. Hard to get friends together all the time for that sort of thing, anyway.

Chris wants to do a Wing Commander-style time-skipping autopilot (per my understanding.) I don’t necessarily understand how it’s going to work yet, but he believes in it and he’s the genius here. But we’re going to have lots of places to explore and hide, for sure.

everything about instances is TBD. I don’t want to get into that ball of wax before we actually have it working.

We want piracy/smuggling/etc. to be an equal part of the game. I know exactly what you mean, too… Privateer promised this, for instance, but it ends up short-sheeting you when it comes to the game world if you choose to be a pirate. So, we will build a much more vibrant base for people who choose not to be citizens.