I get that it's a multiplayer game you're building, and that you want to make multicrew/multiplayer gameplay rewarding, but lately it seems like so many changes are straight up forcing multiplayer/multicrew to have any effectiveness whatsoever. While multiplayer gameplay can be fun and should be an important focus of this project, I think it should be equally important that solo/individual gameplay is not left out or made ineffective to the point of frustration - which it's already nearing, for me. I cant speak for every player or backer, of course, but for myself solo gameplay is 80-90% of my time in star citizen, and I think that it's very likely going to be that way for a fair portion of players. This is not a 'cheap' game, we're not talking 60$ for a console game, some of us are into this hundreds or thousands of dollars, and you dont get that kind of backing from teenagers with ten+ hours a day to throw at video games. You get it from working adults who have a very limited time slot to enjoy games in their lives. Obviously you can't balance the gameplay 100% for minimalist playtimes, or 100% for the no-lifers that will be spending ten hours or more a day grinding away at it, a middleground has to be found, but I think it needs to lean more towards less gametime availability than the alternative. You throw statements at us like "90% of entities in the game will be npcs" or "1 player for every 10 npcs", and have us stuck on 50 player servers where most of the time we cannot even get our friends into the same game iteration in order to even attempt multicrew gameplay, yet keep pushing ships that require 3, 4, 5 or more people, or gameplay loops that cannot be feasibly done solo. We haven't even gotten an intuitive system for grouping yet, 99% of the time you cannot see your party member's locations or names, voice chat is completely useless still which forces groups to use exterior applications like discord, ventrilo, teamspeak, etc. just to talk to one another. How can we continually be pushed towards multicrew gameplay with the game doesn't even properly support it? Now on to the more specific example that prompted this post: Mining. As a predominantly solo player, I like to mine. I like to log on, get in my prospector or mole, and go spend my time alone in the asteroid fields or skimming the surface of moons. Mining is a 'zen' kind of gameplay for me, that I find relaxing and enjoyable after a hard day at work in the real world. Yet, it seems like CIG doesn't want solo players to enjoy mining at all. The prospector was sold as a solo mining ship, yet 75% of its cargo capacity is hidden behind a multiplayer wall. Compared to a mole, which has 3x more capacity that a solo miner can utilize relatively easily. Now, looking at the latest updates to mining in 3.12: -The Helix head, which miners have heavily relied on for solo mining, receives a heavy handed nerf, almost to half the effectiveness it currently has. At that level of effectiveness, I already know that some of the nodes I mine in 3.11 will no longer be breakable in my prospector for 3.12. -With that nerf to the helix, there was also a massive buff to the Lancet - a support mining laser which cannot break rocks on its own - making it all but required for those tough nodes. What I'm seeing, with these patch notes, is that if I want to mine what would currently be a valuable node, and capable of being handled solo with a prospector and a helix mining head, I'll now need two prospectors (one with a lancet) or two people in a mole (one with a lancet) to accomplish the same thing I can do by myself now. Not only will I need an extra person to do my 'solo' gameplay, I'll make less than half the profit unless I use a refinery, which will tack on several hours of refining time to get me to the profit margins I'm used to in 3.11. But now I have to split that profit with another player, because it took two of us to mine the node, so I'm back to 25-50% as much profit as currently. To me, as a solo miner, this seems like a massive nerf to my ability to turn a profit. Everyone seems to think that every single time you take a prospector out you're coming back with 200,000 aUEC of profit after 10 minutes, and that simply isnt true. 90% of the time you're hauling in 50-75k, very often quite a bit less than that, after 30+ minutes of searching for a half-decent node. But it looks as if CIG is basing balance changes on the extremes rather than the average. These changes frustrate me. Similar crippling changes were made to package delivery - remember when we could take a courier mission, pick up one box and take it from point A to point B, and make 8-10k profit? Now you're picking up three boxes and going to four locations to make a measly 3,000 credits. Guess what: nobody runs courier missions anymore, wonder why? Used to be able to pick up 3-4 missions leading to the same wrecked ship (find X crewman, scan all the crewmen, recover cargo crate, and recover black box) - now you can hardly ever find those missions, and when you do it's one of the four instead of being able to stack them up. I used to love doing those because I could get that sense of exploration and salvage while making a moderate amount of money... now it's not profitable, I spend more on fuel than I make doing those missions. Over the past year or so, it feels like the focus of this project has changed from all-inclusive and supporting most or all gameplay preferences to being keenly focused on multicrew above all else, and players who want to enjoy the game at their own pace without dealing with the drama or hassle of finding crewmen are being left behind. Sure would be nice to hear from the horse's mouth whether or not that's the intent, because it's becoming frustrating enough to drive people away entirely, and I'm almost to that point myself.