I've seen some recent posts about an interview with Chris Roberts where he apparently mentioned that they are planning to launch Star Citizen with 5-10 systems instead of the 100 systems that were planned at launch during the kickstarter. I realize that there is some confusion with what exactly the interview was referring to by "launch", since it was translated from a German gaming magazine, but even if they are referring to the 4.0 beta test "launch" they will still need far more than 5-10 systems to do a proper beta test. Where should I begin? First, there's the issue that the explicitly stated kickstarter goal of launching with 100 systems won't be met and that will be a massive dispapointment for many players. We're not talking "feautures" here, we're talking the entire scope of the game being dramatically reduced. If there was an FPS game that featured 64 player matches as a specific development goal, and then after 5 years of development they were reduced to 6 player matches, that is changing the entire scope of the game dramatically. It is quite simply not the same game. Second, it completely removes an entire profession as there is no way you can have meaningful exploration within oly 5-10 systems. That's a massive area of interest for many players and without adequqate exploration opportunities the game will become "just another space combat game". Again, this goes to the scope and intent of the game. I'm sure someone will try to claim that "you can walk around on planets for hours" as if that's somehow going to count as "exploration" in an inhabited and populated system, but it doesn't. We already have Elite as a model of what players expect for the scope of exploration, and while you don't need the same number of procedurally-generated systems, you do need enough unexplored systems and distances to give the player a meaningful sense of being "out in the black" to make exploration meaningful. Third, having such a small number of systems will create massive player crowding in those 5-10 systems which will mean that the game will have to rely on even more instancing to handle the server workloads. In addition to the performance issues there will be the problem where such heavy instancing will make it very difficult to find specific individuals or particpiate meaningfully in common goals across the playerbase. Elite has this problem right now and it makes any large community effort basically meaningless if you're trying to interact across the entire playerbase as you only ever see a small group of players in any given instance. No amount of server or netcode optimization will be able to handle this if you're cramming 1.5 million players into 5-10 systems, it will require so much instancing that it will not really be implemented in a proper MMO-scale. Fourth, CIG has been selling several exploration ships and been acting as if there will be adqequate support for exploration as a profession. This will quite simply not be possible with only 5-10 systems. What are those players going to do with their exploration ships? Not only that, but CIG has been acting as if they're expecting players to be using the CCU system less the closer we get to launch, yet an entire profession is currently on the chopping block in terms of content. Does CIG expect players with exploration ships to keep them in their hangers until several years after launch? Or do they actually think that we somehow won't want to CCU them to something we can actually use at launch? Fifth, CIG has been focusing VERY heavily on ship sales and is now moving into selling ground vehicles, and the playerbase has been generally tolerant of this under the assumption that the development of the core game has been progressing adequately. If they haven't even developed the technology and done adequate work to ensure they will have several dozen systems available at launch then we have essentially been rewarding them for neglecting core game content. If the reality at this point is that it's simply become more lucrative for them to sell us more ships than it is to work on the core gameplay then the backers collectivley need to reithink whether the current funding model is ever going to produce the game that was described in the kickstarter, or if it is just going to encourage easily-marketable DLC content instead. I really have no idea how CIG is going to handle this, but they have to make some sort of clear statement on the state of the game in terms of what the number of systems will realistically be at launch and whether the kickstarter goal of 100 systems will be met at any point during forseeable game development. Either they have been laying the groundwork for a combination of procedurally-generating and fine-tuning those anticipated 100 systems (which is the impression they have been giving us the entire time), or they aren't. If they haven't been doing this then CIG absolutely needs to be clear with the playerbase about the state of the game and also needs to make specific allowances so players can adjust their ship fleets (most likely with the reutrn of $0 CCU options) if exploration is not going to be a meaningful career at launch.