I have a question for the developers, and for the community. All of the threads to the recent claim time debacle have at least one answer that reads along the lines of "you are supposed to care about your character, and care about your ship, and make decisions based on that". Because 'caring' for your character is supposed to make losing your ship / life happen less often. (Yes, I am using a provocative word for the claim timer situation, as my opinion is highly biased.) So I ask, just exactly what am I supposed to care about? When I grew up, computer games had a sense of accomplishment. You "worked hard", and you got the purple text armor, the shiny apartment in the city, the super powerful spells, or whatever. It doesn't really matter what it was, it mattered that once you got it, it was yours. You could die in the game, but you still had the <X>. I don't see that anymore in Star Citizen. I am newish to the game. When I started, you could still keep your armor, weapons, ship components, customizations, etc. It was a royal pain in the tush to collect all the things (cross universe shopping trips are stupid, but that's beside the point), but once you did it for a patch cycle, you didn't have to do it again. Then we started removing what was kept on death. First, it was the armor / weapons. Away went seeing unique combinations of armor in game, everyone now plays in tighty whiteys or whatever they raided from the bunker that morning. Now we removed ship components. No one but the most die hard (masochistic) players are going to go on a universe spanning shopping trip each and every time they die to retrofit their ship. And why would I purchase ship components from players, that I will just lose to the next ship crash, bug, whatever? As a result, I doubt we will see very many if any at all customized ships. (The only thing I predict we will see is maybe an upgrade to the quantum drives, because the Bolon / Kama are just that bad.) I will only speak for myself, but as a player, I am only going to emotionally invest in something if I know I am not going to lose it. (If I am going to lose it, particularly if I am going to lose it frequently, I don't grow attached it to it at all. At that point, its just a thing.) I will care about my character when I can make meaningful customizations. I will care about my ship when my customizations can persist through multiple adventures, to include MFD settings, component swaps, ship settings. Because we are backing away from those concepts, the character, and the ship are now "meh" items. I am not going to invest time and effort into making them "mine", because that is folly. At this point, all I can cling to customizing are my personal hab and my hangars. (Until the pirates claim "we have no fun, because we can't rob people when they are offline!") I expect that some things will NOT persist between ship claims: E.g., if I place Finley the Plushie in the passenger seat, and the ship is destroyed, I accept that Finley is lost. But by that same logic, if you expect me to find and then keep a Hedeshian artifact on my ship's trophy shelf, you are wildly mistaken. Along the same lines, if we get engineering gameplay in, but those knob tweakings and setting changes are not persisted across claimed chassis, then engineering will die on the grapevine as well, as why would we do that each and every time we lose a ship? So I ask, is losing all your stuff every death "in vogue" now? Did we all sign up for Rust / Tarkov in space, despite the game being advertised for all types of players? (All the Rust / Tarkov players, you may issue your Picards now.) Is there any reason at all I (the player) should care about my character, my ship, or anything else? Thanks!