I'm not one to usually do rant posts, but god damn, I'll join my backer brothers-in-arms, come here, and try to do some constructive ranting. I'm OK with the whole "play while it's being built" mantra—it's one of the things I really like about SC and it's quite unique in the game industry. I also don't fall for the whole "oh, it's a $1B game and it should work" nonsense; I know that amount is the project's total over its 15-year history and that CIG runs like a real lean org (I've read the financial disclosures). I know that $1B USD to open 4 studios and make 2 complete games is peanuts compared to some of the other AAA game studios out there. I get it... but c'mon, even people like me are REALLY PISSED right now. Where to begin... I don't think your bi-monthly updates are gonna work. I don't think you guys can manage it. I'm a fairly new backer—I started playing just before 4.0—but this patch was the first time I saw a PTU go straight to LIVE without any Release Candidate build, just to achieve the DefenseCon launch date, and it clearly shows. There's more broken stuff than stuff that's working. I understand that new stuff brings new unforeseen problems, but A LOT of old problems are back, A LOT of old broken systems are still broken, and obviously, a whole bunch of NEW problems are here too. I get the need for a wipe—the economy was a mess and you needed a clean slate to straighten things out—but then you wiped our REP, which is a real kick in the nuts for dad gamers like me who have limited time to play. All the new and good content (TSG, QV Logistics, Xeno, etc.) is behind REP walls that are just boring to achieve. You have to do the same stupid-ass mission 20, 30, 40 times just to rep up enough to get it, and when you do get it, THEY JUST DON'T WORK. And if that wasn't enough, the contract system gets borked because everyone is doing contracts to REP up cause all REP was wiped, and the system can't manage that volume. And when the contracts do work, you get a big ol' FU in the end. Case in point: the QV Logistics Stations warehouse in the Vanduul Tech Smugglers contract. It takes around an hour to do the contract and get all 5 data packs in 5 different locations. If everything goes well, you get the passcode disk with the warehouse code and... the warehouses are COMPLETELY EMPTY. No components, no loot boxes, no Vanduul popsicles, NOTHING. And because you can get multiple disks, a lot of people just hoard them and go straight to raid the warehouse, camping and cycling between stations leaving a bunch of base-ass bricked ships on the landing pads. I'm tired of going to a QV Log Station and finding an abandoned Polaris, Perseus, Idris, TAC, or any other ship clogging the landing pad like litter in the street. Losing or abandoning a ship was supposed to mean something, but in actuality, it means nothing. All that happened is that instead of finding good ships with top A-components that you could loot and salvage, now we find garbage, useless, bricked base ships cause people just reclaim the standard loadout and discard the ship wherever they go—just like before, but worse, since now the bricking system effectively turns them useless. In one go, you guys made ship player salvaging useless and I'm not even bitching about the paint and flair boondoggle that was already said to be addressed in the next hotfix patch. Old-time favorites are still around! - The laserpoint on the Killshot is BROKEN AGAIN. Instead of pointing towards where the gun is aiming, the beam gets stuck in some random direction and it's just useless. - The inventory is STILL desyncing, worse than before! I always have to run around with the r_displayinfo 3 gimmick just to see if the pending moves are going through or if it's stuck. And guess what? A lot of times it gets stuck on pending, making looting impossible. - QT destinations are STILL bugged. You can never get a lock on a destination on the first try; you always have to turn the QT drive on and off to make it lock onto something, or QT to some place just to cancel it and redo the calculations. - We STILL are throwing our main guns around while switching weapons or medpens! And when the gun gets thrown onto the ground, it becomes unpickable, so you just stay there trying to get it like a retarded Excalibur pinned to the ground. - A lot of times when we get killed, we get STUCK in the limbo afterlife, unable to backspace, start a medical beacon, or anything, just staring at that annoying, stupid fade-out, fade-in animation. So you just have to log out and wait, or do a character repair to try to get unstuck from the shard you died in. - The Faro Data Centers and the storm breaker stations in Pyro are STILL a mess, with open doors, missing loot boxes, and an army of angry, P8-wielding sniper clones who only know 5 lines of speech and come at you relentlessly. You can't even look at a box without getting shot or killed since it takes forever to load the content of the boxes. - ASD bases STILL throw you to your regen point instead of making you regen at the medbay like it used to be—just another time-sink waste cause we need to go all the way back to the ASD site. I'm not even gonna bother mentioning all the other elevator killings, freight elevator ship-chewers, and all the other crap that goes around the PU. ALL of these have Issue Council tickets, and ALL were marked as RESOLVED at some point, but NONE are actually resolved because they keep coming back like a nuclear-resistant cockroach. You guys have a unique player base that actually works for free (or even pays monthly and sporadically) as QA testers, and you have your own paid QA test crew, so how come NONE of these things are being flagged and resolved, and how does new, shiny content like the Ironclad get thrown into the verse completely broken???!! W.T.H. CIG, where's Jared with a funny video explaining why everything sucks but will get better? Sorry for the long, annoying post, but I've reached my limit. I love SC, but it's been a lot more challenging to play this thing by the day. I understand that releasing an incomplete patch is better than holding content for 9 months trying to get everything right, but as it is, releasing the patch in this state doesn't help either since we just can't play.