Lo I am a prophet. By studying the mistakes of history I can see the future. Like I'm sure most of you did, I played Red Dead Redemption 2 when it came out. It was an amazing single player game. Truly a work of art. At the end of the story I remember just sitting there as the credits rolled and wanting more of that experience, so I thought Hey, why not try the multiplayer? Maybe it will be a great story driven multi player experience where I can play through stories in a world full of other people. We can build a town! Make farms! Have adventures! Ten minutes after logging in I was captured by player bandits, hog tied, dragged along the ground, teabagged, shot, and left for dead. And this happened multiple times over a short period. It was the exact opposite experience of the single player game, it delivered none of the enjoyment I was looking for, and so...I quit. And never went back. Also the game economy was marred with pay to win real money "gold bars" or grind for weeks for guns where it was so obvious the developers intent was to make that experience so painful you would pay to skip it. Is this starting to sound familiar to anyone else? Honestly I think that's the exact experience squadron 42 players are going to have. I think it's likely the single player game will be a great single player experience, crafted by artists who have put passion and emotion into it, and then those players are going to come to the verse and get abso-fooking-lutely murder hoboed by...well frankly me and my friends and the hundreds of other bored murder hobos with ten years experience and every ship in the game. Then they are going to run into the ridiculous grind for rep and ships and be like... Stuff this, I'm out. CIG you have to protect them. Reduce the grindy feeling. Make it pretty easy to get mid tier ships and half decent equipment. Make Stanton safer if you can't get an actual high security system in the game in time, but for the love of Chris don't make this exact same mistake. If you want to grow the player base for this incredibly niche game then more than anything it has to be fun. Long grinds or expensive micro transactions aren't fun. Getting killed over and over by more experienced players with nothing to lose isn't fun. If you don't make changes it's going to happen. You won't retain new players. You only get one chance at this. You can't say you weren't warned.