Are timesinks part of the design principle for SC? I hopped back in for a look at 3.5 and went to Lorville for the first time. Initial impression "Wow, cool, there's a metro!" [and I'm immediately #Alpha'd and killed by a train] I wander around for a solid hour, riding trains and exploring, then grab a mission. Fast forward another hour, when [unrelated #Alpha leads to my untimely demise] I'm back in a bunk with ten minutes, two trains and multiple elevators away from getting back in a ship. [At the end of which, the second train kills me again...#Alpha] When I commented in Global that it seemed a bit silly to force you to ride two bloody trains to get back to the game, general internet responses of "Space is big! It's Alpha! Blah blah blah!" -- so that's covered. But from a game design angle, this raises a serious question with me -- are timesinks going to play a big role in the design of SC? I wouldn't stay at a hotel two train rides away from the airport, WTF would I bunk clear across the city from my ship? If that's just an Alpha design error, great...if it's sinking ten minutes of my time as some sort of punitive death penalty or just to eat up time to slow my content consumption by design, then very much not okay. I logged in last night and played for three hours -- thinking back on it, I had one nice space battle and about 3 minutes in an intense 8-vs-1 firefight (until the idiot AI bunched up and I threw a grenade...that stuck to my hand [#Alpha]). The entire rest of my time was spent waiting on elevators, waiting on trains, in QT across the solar system (I actually don't mind this other than if it takes me that long to cross one system, which is TINY on an interstellar scale, how long does it take to get to another star?) If that 10 minutes of gameplay in 3hrs of game played is just growing pains, fine. But looking at the mechanisms for why that ratio is so skewed makes me a little concerned. Yes - space is big. Yes - this is Alpha. But wasting time is a lazy game designer's trick of old, and SC is supposed to be following the Rule of Cool. My heavily armed and armored Space Badass waiting for yet another train to wait for yet another elevator just to get back to being a Space Badass ain't cool. -Jn- PS - Also, losing your equipped weapon when you die? Really? So my clone has everything else?