Patch 4.9 was released today, and once again, progress that players invested countless hours into has simply been deleted. All collected ores, refined materials, and therefore a large part of the entire mining progression were wiped. We are not talking about a few items that can be replaced within minutes. Mining is an extremely time-consuming gameplay loop. You have to find suitable deposits, extract the materials, transport them, start refinery jobs, sometimes wait for hours for them to finish, and then spend even more time collecting and storing the results. All of that time is now simply gone. This becomes even more absurd in the context of the crafting system. Players are deliberately being pushed into mining and gathering large amounts of high-quality resources because those materials are required for crafting and further progression. The community is effectively forced into a lengthy and often frustrating gameplay loop, only for the people who actually invested their time into that system to be punished afterward. This is not a normal loss caused by gameplay. This is lost lifetime, because the progress was not lost due to a player’s decision or mistake. It was lost because of a reset that players had no control over. Of course, Star Citizen is still in alpha. But that cannot continue to be used as a universal excuse for showing absolutely no respect for the time players invest. Especially as systems such as mining, refining, and crafting become increasingly interconnected, CIG needs to find ways to preserve progress more reliably. The most common reaction within the community is no longer even genuine surprise. It is simply: “Of course.” Or: “What did you expect from CIG?” And that should seriously concern CIG. Players now expect disappointment. They expect progress to disappear. They expect systems not to work and their time not to be respected. That is not a healthy state for a project that depends entirely on the long-term support, patience, and funding of its community. It is absolutely unacceptable to treat players’ lifetime with this level of disregard. Without these players, without their money, and without their years of patience, this project would not exist. CIG needs to understand that time is also an investment. And with Patch 4.9, that investment has once again been trampled on. Edit: Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Some people consider these resets acceptable, while others do not. You do not have to agree with my criticism, but you do have to accept that it is a legitimate opinion and legitimate feedback. Labeling a patch as “LTP Preserved” becomes misleading when major areas of progression can still be excluded or deleted without any clear warning or explanation. If repeatedly wiping progress is supposedly so valuable for testing, then it is fair to ask why the PTU often struggles to attract enough players, why so many players share this frustration over the amount of time required to test these systems, and why many long-term backers openly say they have reduced their engagement and no longer invest serious time in progression. Of course, everyone can lower their expectations, stop caring and simply accept whatever happens. But then you should also lower the expectation that everyone has to share that attitude. You are free to accept these decisions. I am equally free to criticise them.