The whole point of Star Citizen, to me, has always been freedom of choice in how you approach a situation. Instancing itself doesn't bother me. Four player CURATED instances do. If instancing is necessary for performance, balance, or preventing random players from ruining an event, fine. But then why are we jumping all the way down to 4 player coop? Games likl Battlefield have been solving this problem for decades. Put 20, 30, 40 or more people into a bounded playspace, divide them into teams, give those teams tickets w/ objectives, establish rules for what players CAN and CANNOT do, and then let the players create the battle themselves. Hell, isn't that much closer to what Theatres of War was supposed to demonstrate? Imagine Siege of Orison as an actual SIEGE... Matchmake me into a friendly force. Give us pilots, infantry, vehicles and logistics. Give the enemy side actual players alongside Nine Tails AI. Give both sides objectives and reinforcement tickets. Let one squad attack an objective while another provides air cover and another moves equipment. This is what ORGs are BUILT FOR. :heart: (Let solo's que on the side they're aligned with.) Have competent AI pilots actually (actually fix the ai. Fix them, fix them. Fixem.) contest the skies. Have Crusader Security or the military fly in with reinforcements. Put those mechs on the enemy side so we can kill the crews and capture them. Or let us arrive in an Ironclad carrying our own mechs. Build the battlefield. Don't script the battle. And if PvP isn't appropriate for Siege, that's fine too. Make the opposing force AI. The important part is retaining the scale, unpredictability and freedom. Twenty players fighting a systemic PvE battle would still feel far more like Star Citizen to me than four players progressing through a carefully controlled sequence of encounters. The explanation that outside players need to be removed so they can't obstruct the intended experience is actually the part that worries me most. These are enormous, mountainous platforms floating in the skies of Crusader. Space itself can be part of the solution to griefing. Spread objectives out. Give players room to breathe. If someone repeatedly targets or harasses the same players, use the scale of the environment and the game's existing systems to separate them and escalate consequences. Hell, make it physical. If the game can clearly determine that a ship is an offending vessel, have Crusader Security respond. Send in AI security ships equipped with massive tractor beams that lock the offending ship in place, disable it, impound it, or drag them the hell out of the combat zone. Or ban them. Simpler tbh. That's the kind of solution I expect from Star Citizen: solve problems through the universe and its systems instead of solving them by removing the universe. Battlefield doesn't solve greifing by turning Conquest into a four-player co-op mission. It establishes teams, boundaries, objectives, spawn rules, friendly-fire rules and consequences, then lets dozens of strangers play together inside those constraints. That's game design. It shouldn't require designing everyone else out of the experience. Star Citizen should have more tools available to accomplish this, not fewer. Reputation, crime stats, factions, restricted areas, hostility states, mission eligibility and eventually more sophisticated Ai should all be systems that can establish these rules And this raises a question I genuinely have: What happened to Theatres of War? Because we're building enormous servers and talking about server meshing, dynamic populations and systemic gameplay, yet this new showcase is deliberately isolated to JUST FOUR players??? Was Theatres of War abandoned simply because priorities changed, or did larger structured battles expose technical problems that still haven't been solved? If it's the latter, I'd genuinely rather hear that. Because if the technology currently works best when an encounter is isolated onto a tiny four player instance, then that is the problem we should be discussing not treating four player isolation as the desirable endstate.. right? And if we're intentionally moving toward completely curated, linear four-player experiences with no outside influence, then the comparison changes. Now you're competing with games built specifically to do that ... Halo, Call of Duty, Destiny, etc. The bar for NPC/ai, encounter design, scripting, presentation and combat becomes astronomically higher. Watching the developers play this actually reminded me why I backed Star Citizen in the first place. I love seeing developers excitedly showing us what they've been cooking. I love the ambition behind this project. Please never stop that, this was a rare and raw experience that felt genuine, it had frustrations and was rough around the edges... I just don't want that ambition gradually compressed into something every other game already knows how to do. Don't script our adventure. Build the insane absurdly detailed universe that was promised, establish the rules, give us the tools, throw something SICK AND TWISTED AND COOL into it, and let us figure out what the hell happens with it All the best, Blink