A little over ten years ago, Chris Roberts polled the community to find out what we were all looking forward to the most. It was exploration. Now fast forward to today, and there's barely any talk about real exploration mechanics or gameplay loops. No, base-building is not exploration, that's homesteading/infrastructure development. What happened? That's the question. What happened to developing deep-space scanning to find randomly-generated POIs in the middle of nowhere? What happened to having multispectral kinds of emissions/scanning ranges that could influence the kind of results you obtained for the various signatures that could be generated? What happened? Why did this singular, biggest building block of deep space gameplay, get pushed aside in favor of short gameplay loops (mining, salvage, combat) that do not appear to serve as a foundation to further expanded gameplay loops? Let me explain. The basic concept of space exploration starts with scanning. Getting signal returns with varying strengths. You tune your scanner's spread, focus, and sensitivity to various signature types to better resolve a given signal. Those signals could give way to rogue asteroids (or clusters), gas nebulae, shipwrecks, hidden bases, even mobile fleets. Anything that has a signature can be out there. These POIs could have value for selling to the TDD, or for high-value contracts such as finding a bounty hiding out in deep space. Some people say Stanton and Pyro aren't big enough for 'exploration'. I said it before: 3AU is a lot of space. There's plenty of room for these randomly-generated POIs to exist. With this basic building block in place, it can feed content into salvage, mining, mercenary and bounty hunting, among others. It can also serve as a foundation for major events, too, when it comes to finding enemy bases to raid (such as searching for a forward base operated by the Xenothreat - starting with a search for deep-space comm arrays serving as a breadcrumb trail to the base itself). Basically what I'm saying is that having proper exploration mechanics in space would significantly help with content generation. So I'll ask again. What happened to cause Exploration to land on the backburner to such an extent that it isn't even mentioned in the most recent CitizenCon presentation? The clear shift towards heavy emphasis on PvP content is very discouraging, especially for solo players who are not accustomed to PvP, when most of us backed for exploration as a primary gameplay loop. In addition to this, further exploration mechanics could also include scanning on planetside to locate mineral deposits, rather than randomly-placed rocks. Think Star Wars Galaxies, which would play well into the long-term plan for player-crafting.