It is not hard to look over the sea of fire on spectrum to see that we aren't doing so hot as a community. To understand the problem, we need to go back and reflect on how and why we got here. Not everyone knows the full story, or was there for all of the events. One must understand the past, to fix the future. There will be no TL;DR, everything here is critically important so sit back, grab some coffee, and get ready for some hard truths. 3.0 - THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSAL SPEED MODEL This all started back in 3.0, with the second iteration of the flight model after 2.0. In this flight model, there were very few complaints and PvP vs. PvE posts didn't dominate the forums. Why? What was different? In the universal speed model, PvP was optional for the most part. This was because the top speed of ships was high and shielded protected players during spooling. This meant that outside of using a mantis, it was near impossible to trap any player in combat and escape was always an option. In the PvP community, dueling was a gentlemen's agreement where both sides had to commit to a fight. Even with a mantis, once speeds went over 900+ the game started to break down and basic functions like targeting didn't work due to desynch. The non-pvp community was appeased in this era because PvP was for the most part, fully optional due to the near 100% certainty of being able to escape whenever they wanted. I'm not going to comment on if this was good or bad, but it was the reality of how things were and very few people complained. The only time you had intense forced PvP was during large events where players congregated (e.g. Xenothreat). During these events the lawful community herd was usually large enough to ward off attackers. MASTER MODES When master modes came out, everything changed. Due to the loss of shields with spooling and the low SCM limits, master modes turned every non-combat, non-fighter ship from haulers to Constellations into prey animals. Following master modes, any player with an apex meta fighter could engage and kill anyone they wanted. Any ambush on a non-combat ship by a combat ship became a completely lopsided engagement in favor of the attacker. Due to the way nav mode works and due to issues with spools resetting, players that are attacked are more likely to die or lose half their ship while trying to escape. The worst of it was that master modes didn't fix ANY problems with the previous flight model. Light fighters, racers, and now interceptors dominate the top skill meta. Aces simply migrated to performance racing ships that let them fly the exact same way they did in the old flight model. Master modes became the perfect breeding ground for murder hobos and abusive players. If they flew the meta fighter, they could prey on 90% of the other ships with no resistance. The majority of players are mixed content players that are flying multirole ships to experience a wide assortment of gameplay (Zeuses, Constellations, Cutlasses, Spirits). These ships are the perfect targets for murder hobos. Naturally, due to the fertile hunting grounds, murder hobo numbers started to grow and cases of abuse just multiplied. This lead to Star Citizen developing a "Dark Forest" culture that cultivated extreme player distrust among each other outside of orgs and a shoot first, ask questions later survival mentality. "Starkov" is a good label for what we have right now. Pyro, being a completely lawless place, just exacerbated this issue. The jump gate forcing players to sit unshielded while waiting for the wormhole combined with how easily campable it is just added more fuel to the fire. Complaints started to grow within the PvE crowd, who had things decent during the previous flight model. Those complaints only grew as more and more content released that favored the murder hobos (Align and Mine is a perfect example, which breeds player conflict in a lawful zone). Now the PvE side of the community has had enough and are just plain angry. WHY DID MASTER MODES HAPPEN? WHY IS IT SO BAD? I need to point out that the Evocati testers, especially the PvP testers, fought VERY HARD against master modes. They hated it, they told CiG it sucked, they said it would be a disaster. I was there, I was in the discords, I saw the chats. The reality of master modes is that it exists because of Squadron 42. It is a flight system designed for a single player game that has constrained arenas with plenty of obstacles. For that purpose, it might actually be good. For those of you that are directing anger and Yogi and the Vehicle Experience Team, I am telling you now that your anger is misplaced. Yogi and his team were essentially given a flight model designed for a single player game centered around constrained arenas and slow flying AI, and told to make it work on an open space MMO with over 90 ships. They were given an impossible mission that was doomed to failure before work even started. Trust me, they tried REALLY hard to make it work. All of the shortcomings that you see with master modes and the current state of affairs that you see in the PU is a DIRECT RESULT of a single player system being forced into an MMO. But now we are stuck with it and CiG has to find a way to make it work. The anger we are seeing in the community is a butterfly effect of this whole situation. Master modes inadvertently created the perfect breeding ground for abusive players because it essentially trapped the entire community of PvE generalists in a fishbowl with murder hobos and gave them no defensive options. THE POLARIS Fast forward to today, where something interesting happened. The Polaris released with over 13 million HP and automated PDC turret defenses that don't actually suck. I am going to call the Polaris what it really is: a sanctuary ship. The Polaris is the first option since master modes where players can actually OPT OUT of being prey animals to murder hobos because the murder hobos can't actually kill it without some level of coordination. The only time the Polaris is vulnerable to a single pilot is on a planetary surface against an A1. We are already seeing a rise A1 usage because players that have the option to migrate to a Polaris have done so (this is why you see them EVERYWHERE) and the A1 is the only way murder hobos can solo kill their favorite prey, the "space bobs," who now have refuge in their flying castles. You can already see the murder hobos seething and complaining about how broken and OP the Polaris is. This is the sound of starving hyenas. TODAY This is where we are today. A broken flight model, a broken community, and a sea of bullies with the only way to escape them being a 900$ life boat.