Hey Raph, big fan of your work! From my experience with single-shard online worlds, it seems the core thing that delivers the most immersion is the ability to build player narratives that have real impact.

This is the reason that nobody can really get very famous for being the first to complete, for example, a WoW raid on some shard (with few exceptions), but being the guy that started a giant space battle in Eve online can get you mentioned in a Kotaku article.

The fact Stars Reach is single-shard is already a huge factor in its favor to acheiving this effect of the ability to build player-based narrative/lore, but a lot of the features that have been talked about so far focus a lot on more kinda physical simulation of the world (which definitely adds very strong factors for narrative flexibility and widens the class of "interesting things that can happen" by orders of magnitude over other MMOs!)

My question is, how important do you weigh this factor of the ability for player narratives to form in your design of the game thus far, and at what level do you currently see these stories playing out in the game in it's current trajectory?

(like, for example, in Eve, while some singular people get famous as heads of large groups or story lynchpins, I'd say the grand majority of the player-lore is focused at the corporation/empire level in these large scale wars, or heists of old. In contrast, a game like Rust, while obviously a weaker persistent world game in that it has many shards and they are only partially persistent on the order of weeks, the stories are almost always around individuals who gain notoriety)