I pose this concern about gear loss and death penalties as a concern for the direction this game is going in with development and I just want to know what people think of it and if it is supported by the community and what other ideas people may have one the topic. First I would say I am not fully against loss of gear, but it comes with its own balancing issues that I feel must be addressed. To give context to this concern, this game is going to be a simulated universe of players and things on a mass scale that will transpire. In the current context of the game I think the vast majority of players tend to do combat as the mainstay of activity, and with it comes the obvious possibility of death and losing all of what you brought with you on that outing. For the current model of the game we have the following "penalties". - Ship Explodes: We have insurance and the idea of losing your ship is less of a problem, but you do have to wait for it to be available again, and currently anything onboard is lost. - Crime sends you to jail for a while and you have to "do your time" in one way or another. (lose your equipment worn). - Death: you lose everything. (until the bugs are fixed and you can actually go recover any of it). - and various Fines for committing crimes As for the focus of this concern is losing your gear I will point out that from the beginning of MMOs that introduced this model and kept it for some time in its PvP servers, all but Eve Online has abandoned due to a massively negative reaction to losing anything you have worked for. and for Eve they have never had a large population due to this. On the opposite spectrum we have FPS games that come with a respawn timer of a few seconds and potentially a short spout to reclaim weapons on the battlefield or arena where gear is essentially free. Gear and ships in Star Citizen are going in the direction of being extremely valuable and take quite a lot of time to build up, and in the long run this will include entire bases, which I will note Anarchy Online has and the loss of a base was equally possible. Not only does this include the base and all of its contents, but also the time dedicated to it from the players and the time they need to add to dedicate to it with protecting this investment at all hours of the day. Which I might note has been done in various games that were short lived in the past. With gear being fairly expensive, even one death on a mission can completely wipe out the value of doing it. This can be compensated for with some re-balancing of risk and reward, but for PvP you cannot predict pirate activity or just a person that wants to cause grief to the other players. With that even the simplest mission with almost zero risk and a low reward could dramatically be not worth doing if the chance of such catastrophic loss can occur. In the current state of the game, as it is with its testing and bugs included, I find the lack of any way to reclaim your body gear and all to be a lack of foresight into this issue. A simple process like ship reclaiming, such as body insurance and claiming, would vastly improve the experience for players even if it is not the intended end result for the game to have such a feature. Being punished for finding bugs is a large issue, and it does little to promote experimentation or discovery which may in turn vastly expand undiscovered bugs as players would rather not risk venturing into the unknown with that shiny new helmet they just found, or some nik nak from a cash purchase. Being in testing comes with the obvious expectation of things don't always work as you expect, but if those testers are forced to ignore doing certain activities because they can no longer afford to keep losing everything each time they attempt the activity in question it will hit into an obvious hurdle that prevents regular tests on the system. Extrapolating from that into a fully playable game, if I want to go down into a dust bar on some backwards planet crawling with the scum of the universe just to get a drink, I would rather not be shot and have my special hat looted from me just because I wanted to look like I was in an old western. To finish this long rant up, I want to ask some simple questions about risk and reward related to some of the gameplay styles that exist and where this game intends to go. Will there be gear worth exploring the cosmos for and waiting for that rare chance to claim it, or is gear just a thing you can buy at any corner store on the cheap for each outing? Is PvP and corpse looting something we want to be forever looming in the back of your mind every time you log into the game? Extreme survival games and gameplay elements that come too close to emulate reality tend to have a small audience for these very reasons, and those who intend to harm someone else's experience will never go away, but adding incentive for their activities can fuel a toxic gameplay experience that otherwise can be quite enjoyable for many. What are your thoughts, do you think we are going in a direction you want to see for this game?