Before I start I just want to say that I really want to see the game succeed (I have paid for it after all). But there are some things about this project that really make me question if it will be as good as most people in here think it will be. I held myself back from being active the community a long time because of how overprotective it is about this project and how toxic it reacts to criticism of any kind (I don’t want to know many mothers have been insulted). I didn’t pledge much, so far I only bought a 300i Starter Pack back in 2013 but I deeply wanted this vision to become true, I wanted this game and I still do (so please no “If you don’t like it get a refund.”-arguments). I even considered pledging more at various points in time but the delays in development and really, really questionable decisions held me back from doing so, while others kept pouring thousands of dollars into it. The road Star Citizen took the last few years was a really bad one. Let’s first look at the current state of the technical foundation: Low framerate, hundreds of bugs, bad netcode and no gameplay besides some boring missions in Open “Universe” and arena based gameplay (Star Marine and Arena Commander) which are both below average. I’m serious, in your heart of hearts, do you really think Star Marine would be able to compete with any other modern FPS? It’s super clunky, hitboxes are bad, netcode is bad. Same goes for Arena Commander, though I have to admit it is not nearly as bad as Star Marine, despite the really bad framerate for what it is (a very limited space sim) but it also gets pretty bleak fast. The graphics are great though but I get to that later. At this point most of the community will say “Yes, but the game is still in development, you can’t judge by the state of an Alpha!”. And this is where we get to the core of the problem: Yes I can. The state of the development after 5 years is underwhelming. And I’m not talking about features and optics this is all ok. But the problem is people get blinded by all this bling-bling and lose the focus of what is important for a game to be fun. Is it a working toilet in your 500,000 polygon ship or is it good missions/quests, working, fluent gameplay and having fun with a minimal amount of gamebreaking bugs? Hell, my 300i is from 2013, I still fall through its floor when I try to enter it from EVA half of the time. CIG was not able to establish a solid technical foundation to this project. And I sincerely doubt that this has anything to do with the skill of the developers, it is mainly a problem of poor management decisions. Marketing stands well over performance which is partially understandable because as the progress is delayed, constant cashflow is needed. And so we see procedually generated planets, moons and city-planets and get blinded by how awesome it looks (and it does) and yet an Ursa gets smashed by a cargo ramp, nevermind it’s still an Alpha, you can’t judge by that. On the other hand people have to PAY to become Alpha testers (subscribers), after they have already pledged on average $90 to this project. A job people in the industry normally get paid for or at least do it for free with gratitude from the developer. The gratitude the SC-community receives: A “Thank you guys this wouldn’t be possible without you!” in a video with such a high production value that this alone must cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions over the course of the project (cameras, equipment, editing …), followed by a “Buy more ships please.”. And people do. Let’s come to some of the main points I think were absolutely unnecessary in terms of gameplay or should have at least been added or even considered WAY later: 1) Procedual cities I know people will flame me for this but the development time put into this would have been much better spent working on core functionality of the game. An argument I often receive is “Yes but that’s another team working on this.”. What kind of argument is this? They HIRED people for this. So instead of hiring designers to create textures and objects for the cities they should have hired developers whose focus is netcode and performance optimization. I know it looks super awesome, it really does but this also falls under the category “building the roof before you have the foundation”. 2) Face over IP Pure marketing. It’s a nice gimmick but does it give you so much more gameplay value than just basic voice chat with your squad/organization/friends? I’m serious, just try to be objective and asses the ratio of development time (including hardware, costs of implementing a third party technology and of course promotion) to actual impact it will have on your gameplay experience. I wouldn’t be mad about this feature if the game was in Beta and we had a really good build to play with or even as a DLC later, whatever, but at this point? Pure waste of time and resources. 3) Ship details I know ships are a huge selling point for SC, but don’t you think that a working Alpha wouldn’t be a better selling point? I mean CIG already sell unfinished ships we can’t play all the time, why does the ship have to be 100% perfect before the universe it flies in doesn’t break down? 4) Inner Thought What I’ve seen about this in the PTU on a friends PC was just incredibly bad. Not to mention absolutely unnecessary at this point. Facing a button and pressing F was so much more intuitive AND IT WAS ALREADY THERE. Yes, it was buggy some times but so is this now. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel in every regard. Simple press F to interact. If you want multiple options, press (not hold) F, press 1 for option 1, 2 for option 2, 0 or walk back to exit or scroll and click. Time invested in this was also time that could have been spent elsewhere. 5) Cargo handling It seems to be so crucial for immersion that cargo is an actual box you carry around instead of just numbers and placeholders. I don’t even want to know how many manhours went into this (including the huge amount of problems arising from carrying over physical objects between the different coordinate systems (ship interior, planet surface, universe). And you know what? It still doesn’t work, it looks bad and clunky and added little value to the game. Easy solution: just give the player a model with a box in his hand, so it’s not an actual object, just a “skin” and this box represents x amount of cargo. He goes back into his ship and the box is removed and a box is added to the cargo bay as visual representation of the added cargo. Or handle it like it was handled in Freelancer: just numbers. And cargo in space could be collected with a tractor beam. Boom problem solved. Gameplay value lost: next to nothing. Time gained: weeks if not months. KISS-principle. Ever heard of it? Or “worse is better” whatever you wanna call it. And even if you want this system so bad: Do it at a point where there can be more than 1000 players in a stable PU at once, because the goal is millions and I don’t see this happening anytime soon. I could go on but you get the point: The focus is constantly shifted to things that aren’t crucial and I can absolutely imagine that the developers who are absolutely doing an awesome job get frustrated over it: “A new presentation is coming, stop what you’re doing right now and help on this and that so that we look good and people pay more.”. This is what I read between the lines all the time when I read “reassigned to help with…”. Constant interruption of workflow is exactly what this project DOESN’T need. This doesn’t only shift the focus away form important things, it effectively eats up man hours because what most people in the community don’t get is that you can’t just take a developer out of his current project (e.g. flight mechanics) and reassign him to let’s say procedual planet creation and he will instantly know what to do, he needs to be instructed first, learn about the current state, get used to someone elses style of coding (even if they have a project-wide code convention) etc.. All this results in progress being delayed again and again so I beg you, stop it. Please, set the focus on stability, performance and ACTUAL gameplay and go through with it before you do ANYTHING else.