I don't post as often as I used to but the recent patch warrants some significant discussion on where we are in this game's long alpha lifespan: NETWORK, DESYNCH, QUEUING SYSTEMS: Years into the alpha, stability and performance is still SC's largest issue. People with NASA space computers are still getting sub 20 frames in Levski, desynch is still a major issue, and queue/physic systems just don't work when the servers are overloaded. Server meshing is a significant technological achievement, not just for Star Citizen but for online gaming in general. However, stability is still the primary problem. When there are too many people on, the game just breaks. Queuing systems break because they are overloaded with requests and miss timing windows or blow past failure gates. Physics systems become desynched causing invisible hangar doors to eat ships, people to fall through planets, or people to just fall out of their ship in quantum. General poor performance causes jittery enemies and absolutely atrocious frame rates -even on the best hardware. There are really no easy fixes to these issues but to refactor refactor refactor and write better net code, but every time you refactor you risk regressing old bugs or creating new ones. If anything will kill Star Citizen, it will be this. Honestly, the game may never be stable. We may need to settle for "stable enough." However, "stable enough" may not be good enough for everyone other than the most dedicated backers. I can only hope significant resources are being pooled in this area, because the risk of holistic project failure is real with these problems. You can make the most beautiful game ever, but if it cannot perform and is not playable, you still fail. UI/UX: We have had so many overhauls of the UI and it still sucks. Tiny unreadable text. 7-8 actions form legacy systems to new systems back to legacy systems to do simple things (like drinking a pip can). Animations are godawful and slow, leading to clunky UI interactions. There are all sorts of really silly things like running around to find the floating deploy ramp button for a Polaris, or not being able to bed log because your propped up heavy armor and backpack are hiding the button from the locked camera. The UI is the primary way people interact with the game and it needs to be GOOD and it needs to be FUNCTIONAL. This really needs some work and I can only hope someone really smart and experienced is fixing this giant tangled ball of spaghetti mess that was created out of UI ideas that sounded good on paper but failed in application. PARTY AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS: Yeah they don't exist outside of a simple grouping system that punishes players with shared reward penalties. Reputation and law/order systems are legacy deployments that are near forgotten and the developers probably have not even opened the files for Klescher or even remember that it exists. Also, grouping together takes insane amounts of time that no one has patience for. The average group takes more than an hour to setup, then they all die to bugs and get trapped in a perpetual cycle of endless preparation until the entire day has gone by and no one has progressed in anything. I am glad you are talking about teleportation systems and making it easier to group, because yes the game needs it. No sane player outside of the SC cult is going to tolerate over an hour of prep and travel just to play with their friends when they have so many instant action and instant grouping options in other games. POWER CREEP AND THEME PARK STAT-BASED MMO SYSTEMS: We are getting crafting for ships (yeah whole ships), ship weapons, and FPS gear that have significant stat boosts. Things like flight blades are being added. Are we just going to go down the engineering route from Elite? What happened to player skill? Will I need to grind for a +20 Omnisky 5 just to be competitive? Or craft +15 reactive armor to not die in one hit from a stat buffed Perseus Medusa cannon? The stat. based direction of the game is alarming. I thought SC was supposed to be unique and different, to be about skills, reputation, and careers? Yet here we are following the +9 Ogre Knife path that every MMO before this game did. Also the power creep in ship is getting nuts. You look at ships like the Vanguard which was the poster boy for Heavy Fighters with its 1s5, 4s2, and a manned 2s2 turret. The ship takes 2 people to fly but then a F7A medium fighter puts 4s2 and 4s3 right in the hands of a single pilot in a superior and more maneuverable airframe. Even the F8C has lost its purpose. For almost a decade it was hailed as the most coveted space superiority fighter and now it cannot penetrate anything and loses in every other ship in the game because its tiny guns. You could even give the F8C all the F8A guns and it would still get smoked by an M80 interceptor pilot. Are just all the new ships going to be straight upgrades from older ones? Is there any point on hanging on to legacy ships like the Carrack, 400i, MSR, Vanguard Series, etc... ships that are just completely overshadowed by new generations of faster, more powerful ships with better performance and better hardpoints. Even the cutlass was slain by the Shiv, which puts all the ship's firepower in the hands of the pilot, can hold 32 SCU boxes, and even has a bucket toilet to spite the older generation. The direction of the power creep is concerning. I felt like we had something special at the start of the project, now we are all just back to chasing the stat carrot and the next better ship while everything old gets forgotten about. I still log in everyday, I still play. I still generally have fun, but this direction we are going. This is not what I signed up for when I backed the project. We were supposed to be unique, to be different, but now we are just regressing back to the same treadmill every other game puts us on.