13 years, hundreds of dollars spent, a cancer diagnosis IRL, and I'm still having to gaslight myself into enjoying the game.

Maybe you guys at CIG shouldn't have released a trailer for this if it's a f***ing preview. Just be honest and say you messed up.. again.

Well hey. Perhaps I'll have fun with it next year.

And perhaps I won't die before then.
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==Okay, edit time.==

I don't mean to sound entitled here, but I seriously do not have the time to respond to each individual comment that I feel needs a response. Additionally thank you for your well-wishes, I actually had my cancer diagnosis about 6 years ago and I'm fighting it well (thank f**k), but I'm still certainly not over it - still Holding the Line, if you will.

I went to sleep for a while after posting this and wasn't expecting this much attention on the post as I figured it'd be another shot/shout in the dark from just another disgruntled customer, whom feels fairly swindled after having yet more hours just totally bloody wasted in front of the countless friends I've recommended this game to.

No TL;DR - if you have time to wait for the game, you have time to read this through.

So, please, turn off your ship's power, take the woollen helmet visor off from over your eyes, and put on your reading glasses for just a few minutes:

Firstly, to the people who are saying 'just wait a bit longer', it is apparent that you did not understand the impetus or gravitas of the original post from my position in the first place and are talking through basically what most people would call 'Denial' or 'The Gamblers' Fallacy' , and futhermore, I sense that you take your own time for granted. It's like saying "just get another dog" to someone who's dog has just died - it isn't the right thing to say by a longshot - makes you look like you're just piling the wool onto your own face with a total disregard to how other people truly feel.

For those of you who immediately felt where I was coming from, thank you so much for existing, this world need more people honest with themselves like you.

I was 15/16 when I heard about this game - when I was 24, this game had been developed for one third of my entire life. I'm now 28 and it's difficult for me to know how much time I have left - which is weird to say because I figured I'd be like 60-something before I'd need to say something like that.

Sure, I'm no game developer, I don't know how to code, but I'd built a career in IT basically off of the back of my passion for this project - this game was a large reason I helped many of my friends build their gaming PCs over the last decade, (most of which are now outdated). We have less time & reason to go and build a whole new cutting-edge pc (more on cutting-edge soon) than ever before because of our own lives and all the messed up stuff happening in the real world right now.

For those who have backed this for more than, say, 6 years (let's use prior to the Covid-19 pandemic as a solid metric): we've all loved & lost a lot along the way - I'm sure - but one thing that has legitimately been a positive constant in the back of at least my mind, that entire time, was this game and the success of the grandeur achieved so far. It's still pretty impressive, but that is not enough now. 4.0 was suppose to be the turning point, but with how things look, in terms of Google developing the new mass-produced Willow Quantum Processor, it seems we may legitimately need to wait for cutting-edge quantum computing to become more mainstream and possibly even household technology before the multiplayer side of things stops being utterly painful to experience.

Speaking of which:

Reflecting on my experience of the game from within this community over the last decade and a half:

How many times have we all sat there and said "ah this patch is a little broken, but a hotfix will be out in a couple of weeks and we'll have a better, smoother experience then"? Because, I'd wager my RSI Account that EVERYONE in this community has said that at one point or another; whether you started playing at the time where you just had a cool looking, stationary model of a Hornet or Freelancer in custom hangars (hangars which were taken away from us and we've not seen since) - or whether you started playing in the summer 6mo ago.

How many of us have heard that 4.0 & Server Meshing would be 'the day things get better'?? I don't even need to wager on that, because that's the promise CIG & Chris Roberts [The Chairman] have literally been selling this game on for at least the past 6/7 years. I'm no mathematician, but roughly quantifying things, I think about half of the $800 million they've raised will have been based off of that promise alone.

How many of us have spent hours and hours, not in-game, but in real life playing the game to make some kind of pseudo-progress to make ourselves feel better about the amount of time & money (which are the same thing to those of you not wise enough to know it) that we've spent on this game, just for it to be 'wiped' from existence? Kind of feels like a "f**k you, think of the greater good" reasoning from CIG.

A 100% bonafide example of ☝️this would be that when you scrape RMC (Recycled Material Composite) salvage from a ship, the physicalised crates that the salvage gets turned into (for you to then sell in-game to make money in order to have any hope in making progress - i.e. buying bigger ships with aUEC), are counted in-game as a commodity. It takes, roughly, about an hour/hour-half to fill a Vulture up and print the RMC into 1scu crates, just to make, what 150-200k aUEC? (Assuming the server doesn't crash or your ship doesn't just randomly explode or literally just fall out of the sky when you're coming into land at a place to sell it).

Commodity items get wiped every patch, not just in overall wipes, as far as I'm aware. So, if you were to store a bunch of RMC up in the hopes of selling it in bulk later on, with the hope of actually getting anywhere, you best also hope there isn't a patch coming out before you sell that RMC - because all that time you put in to make fake-money will be for absolutely nothing when it comes to your experience as a standard player - let alone an official backer of 10+ years - who has spent time (which, again in real life, is also a tenderable currency) trying to enjoy a dream that was literally sold to us all.

In shorter, more explicit language - your time has been a fucking commodity to this company for years, for better or for worse, and it's about time we all had the humility to bloody realise it. Even then, it absolutely shouldn't take someone who doesn't have that same wealth in time to have to articulate that to some of the greatest minds in the game development industry and the community they've built.

At this point, I don't even care about the multiplayer, and I don't mean that in apathy. With all the other crap going on in the world (it's literally on fire btw in case you didn't notice), I just want to see some of my favourite movie stars in a space game where ships go pew-pew and the bad guys lose. I understand there's been a recent "Letter From the Chairman" addressing this kind of stuff, and how "things will get better", but to boil this down to a cliché, there's only so many so many sheep you can chew through before the wolf becomes realised.

So let this be my personal Letter To the Chairman, from just another Citizen that feels less & less in touch with what now appears to be more & more of a marketed dream. Give us official backers the first bloody hour of the Squadron 42, just as a tiny piece of carrot for the decade-long stick you've given us, and not even for our own good, but for the good of CIG and your own reputation.

As far as this goes as a Reddit Post, I won't be commenting below this any further than I already have, because I don't feel like there's much more to say than what I've highlighted above. I appreciate your inputs, regardless of whether you agree with me or not because it's nice to see that there's still some kind of solidarity out there. I will upvote what I agree with and downvote what I disagree with.

Either way.. I really do hope I get to See You in the F**king 'Verse.

o7