I had tried to completely avoid Spectrum since the old forums were shut down (since the Spectrum design is still terrible) but the recent $5 CCU fee nonsense has motivated me to actually start a thread. Just when I was thinking CIG was getting things back on track with their communication with the community, they do something like this. Thinking that the community is going to tolerate a ridiculous cash grab that removes a key strength of the pledge system is pushing things too far. Making up nonsensical excuses for the cash grab is even worse. The reason that players stockpile CCUs is quite simply because CIG isn't reliable when it comes to ship designs. They are direclty causing the problems that require players to use the CCU system by frequently changing ship roles and details, giving ridiculously outdated and inaccurate ship stats, taking years to develop some ships beyond the concept art stage and having many core gameplay features that still do not exist in an alpha state despite selling ships that require those features. CIG expects the community to have patience with the nature of early game devleopment, but then they turn around and try to sell us parts of that game as if it's a "finished product" where the customers should somehow be able to reliably decide between incomplete and vague ship options? Sorry, but CIG quite simply can't have it both ways. Their "reasons" for implementing the cash grab are ridiculous and make the sitiuation even worse. When there are 1.8 million players then the 1.1 million CCUs they're claiming are some sort of "problem" are actually less than than one CCU per player. That just cannot possibly be an issue for their database in any possible way. It's almost like whoever came up with that excuse thought that the community collectively can't do basic math. As if that wasn't bad enough, trying to suggest that somehow restricting or limiting CCUs will help them "balance" the game is absurd and it makes even less sense. How can they use the current numbers of ships in any useful way when most of the ships are designed for roles that don't even exist in the game yet? Does CIG think the community is going to take whatever excuse they provide without even thinking about if it makes any sense at all? You can't balance ships that don't exist in the game with game mechanics that don't exist and expect the numbers of those ships to mean anything at this point. The worst part about this mess is that the $5 CCU fee is going to have the biggest negative impact on new players. When I pledged last year I was reassured about how the pledge, melt and CCU features worked and I could buy a ship knowing that I wouldn't lose money if I wanted to change to another ship. That's simply not true anymore. Not only have ship prices gone up for several ships over the past year, the new trend of using warbond sales mean that you can't rely on credit to retain its full value for future ships. Now that they're going to be charging $5 to CCU a ship that will effectively destroy any confidence that new players have when they consider giving money to CIG. Not only that, but this will disproprtionately affect new players with starter ships because adding $5 to a $5-10 CCU cost is actually a very significant issue for a player with an Aurora or Mustang. Essentailly it means that it's not worthwhile using a CCU for smaller ships as you lose up to a third or half of the CCU value. CIG has created a terrible situation here where there is no real confidence that a new player will have in the pledge system any longer. For this to happen so soon after their massive referral push makes the sitaution even worse. If I were a new player looking at joining Star Citizen now I wouldn't buy into the game at this point because I wouldn't have confidence that CIG would properly support a CCU system that maintains the value of the money we give them. CIG quite simply needs to fix this. First, they need to straight-up scrap thier plans to add the $5 CCU fee. Second, they need to apologize to the community for trying to get away with a blatant, shameless cashgrab and trying to feed us nonsensical reasons as a flimsy justification. Third, they need to acknowledge that their own development decisions (i.e., frequent ship rework/redesign, inaccurate ship stats and missing core gameplay mechanics) are what makes players so dependent on the CCU system in the first place rather than trying to pretend that the community is somehow not "using" CCUs properly. Fourth, they need to reassure the community that they value our confidence in giving them money at such an early stage of game development and that they aren't trying to "lock" us into decisions on ships that we can't possibly make with any degree of accuracy given the game's alpha state with so many missing core gameplay features. If they can't do these things properly right now then CIG is going to have serious problems going forward in reassuring new players about buying into the game.