Allow me to start with a little anecdote. During the development of World of Warcraft over 20 years ago, there was a system to encourage players to make breaks and not play the game for too many hours (yes, that was actually a thing). After a while, the player character got tiered and got less EXP. The player needed to log off for a couple of hours to rest and remove the tiered status. This was unpopular among the players, making them feel punished for playing the game, but the developer Blizzard didn't change the system, instead they only changed the way it was presented to the player. Now, instead of feeling normal and tiered, they renamed it to feeling rested and normal. The rest stayed the same. You're still getting rested while logged off and gain less EXP when returning to normal state, however players liked the system much more now, because it was presented as a reward for returning players instead of a punishment for active players. This shows how important rewards and punishments are for the feel of the game. These two things (reward and punishment) are fundamental for game design because a game designer can use these two things to steer the player in a certain direction, the intended path or engaging with a system in the intended way. As a basic rule for game design: Rewarding the correct behavior always feels better to the player than punishing the wrong behavior, but punishment is still needed to tell the player they did something wrong and can learn that this isn't what they are supposed to do. Many game mechanics in Star Citizen don't follow this basic principle. CIG seems to not understand that punishment is supposed to be a learning experience. Let me list some examples: Eating and Drinking We have to eat and drink to keep our characters alive. The icons on your HUD telling you that you have to eat and drink, appear on their own. You did nothing wrong, just playing the game, but you're now being punished for that and have to interrupt whatever you want to do, to eat and drink. Forgot to bring food with you? Now you're even more punished because you now have to go somewhere to buy food, interrupting your game even more, and if you don't do that either, you're getting the hardest punishment possible, you die, not interrupting your game loop but outright ending it. What are we supposed to learn from this? The fact that you die if you don't drink or eat is something a child could tell you. No, it's something different, what the game and CIG are telling you is, that you have to role-play as a citizen, who drinks and eats and if you don't do that or don't want to, you're getting punished. There is no reward in this, except that you are allowed to keep playing the game. Cargo This also falls in the "forced role-playing" category. We now have to load and unload our cargo manually, taking significant longer than before. If you don't want to do this and use the automated loading feature, you are being punished by having to pay for this and still have to wait. What are we supposed to learn here? That you're supposed to buy a $35 solution for this problem we made role-play as a cargo lifter because we define what is fun for you and not yourself. EDIT: I actually like the cargo gameplay, it can be relaxing, I just wish it would take less time or the reward should reflect the large time investment it takes. Death We are living in a dangerous galaxy, so death is inevitable. In other games, if you miss a jump, fall down and die, you respawn before the jump and can try again. You are supposed to learn, how to make this jump. In Star Citizen, if you miss a jump and die, you respawn at a distant hospital all your stuff you had with you gone. You have to claim your ship and rebuy your gear or go retrieve your old body. This takes a lot of time or UEC or both. By the time you can try the jump again, you already forgot what you did wrong the last time and even if you remember, there is no real way to learn something efficiently if you can only try once every half hour. This results in a steep learning curve, with many players giving up and just not trying that gameplay again because it is too frustrating. Again, the punishment isn't suitable to learn from it. Master Modes What Master Modes did, in the grand scheme of things is, to make our ships feel less like a spaceships flying through space and make them more feel like airplanes in space. The players who like Master Modes are the ones who like airplanes in space because it is easier to fly and is what they know from other games (Elite Dangerous; No Man’s Sky; Star Wars: Squadrons). The rest of us got used to how spaceships fly in space with 6 degrees of freedom over the last years, meaning you can move freely along and rotate around all 3 axis, even though it is at first harder to understand than airplanes with 3.5 degrees of freedom meaning they can rotate around all 3 axis but move only along one in only the forward direction. What did CIG do to make ships feel more like airplanes? They reduced the amount of movement and speed we have that is not in the direction our ship nose is pointing. If a spaceship wants to turn around, it just rotates without changing its direction of movement, but an airplane can only move forward, so it has to also changing its direction of movement during the turn. In Master Modes, when you want to fly like a spaceship and turn around, you're getting punished by getting your acceleration and max speed reduced because you are supposed to fly like an airplane. The big problem is, that no one is telling you that. Players, who know how spaceships behave in space, are trying to fly like that and then realizing, they are too slow and slow feels less exciting. They are getting no feedback from the ship or the game, what they are doing is wrong. A punishment is supposed to teach you something, but you can not learn the lesson if you don't even realize that you are being punished. This is why Master Modes feels so boring to older players because everything is slower and what they learned about combat with 6 degrees of freedom is thrown out and replaced with arcade style 3.5 degrees of freedom combat. If someone knows how a spaceship would realistically behave in space, Star Citizen allows them to do those maneuvers like a spaceship but also punishes them through reduced speeds. Because these maneuvers are still possible, gives the impression that you could still fly like a spaceship, but not knowing that it gives you a disadvantage in every fight. The best maneuvers you can do in a flight model where forword is the only direction you can be fast in, are jousting and hit-and-run. The reason why interceptors are so dominant in Master Modes is because of their high speed, interceptors can execute these two maneuvers better than other ship classes. Flying in space like a spaceship gives you an advantage over someone, who only flies like an airplane. Now CIG implemented a punishment for flying like a spaceship, and the one ship class that comes closest to still flying like a spaceship is now META. EDIT: To better clarify what the problem is with Master Modes, here is a copy of my explanation I left to someone in the comments. I know that we still have 6 degrees of freedom on paper, but you can not use strafing effectively. No one would attempt to strafe left or right in an airplane because they know an airplane can't do that, but they would try to do that in a spaceship, expecting that a spaceship can do it. In Master Modes however, if you strafe left or right you are being artificially slowed down. In combat, speed is most important, so everything that slows you down might as well not exist. You should never strafe left, right, up or down in a fight because of the slow effect. If these options for 6 degrees of freedom exist, but you never use them because they're bad, causes flight and combat to feel more like 3.5 degrees of freedom. If you don't strafe, the best options to get your guns on target while still moving forward are jousting and hit-and-run, but not an exiting dogfight. This is what I criticized of Master Modes from the beginning. Sorry for the long rant. I somehow needed to let some of the frustration out. O7