Don't lower mission rewards and higher prices mean grind? Do we want grind?

We want an MMO. We want gameplay. We want opportunity. We want years of Star Citizen. We don't want 40 to 60 hours, I got an 890 Jump, I'm done, I'm going to go and play.

You feel more connected to things that you've had to put more time into getting. There's other MMOs where you do raids that take absolutely hours, and the rewards you get from them feel even better because of the effort you put into it. And it is effort versus reward, right? The grind is a part of the effort, and your reward is how an item makes you feel. There's a really popular community event we did a while ago, which was kill 50 players and you get a Vandal mask. That Vandal mask means something to those players because they put in that time, they put in that effort. The ones who actually did it, not the ones who just had all their mates on a server and just killed them. The people who put in the grind, it means more to them. And it's the same thing that we've been going forward with with some of our other events, where we've been giving you a set of armor that shows that you've done a bunch of stuff for it. It feels more rewarding to you as the player. And that's what a lot of MMOs do. You put in time, you put in effort, and you have something to show for it.

One of the weird challenges that are unique to Star Citizen is that we're running a live environment in the middle of our development. In the development of any game, many things will start easy and then become hard. Some things will start hard and become easy. It's this continuous sculpting and reverse sculpting. And most of this is done in secret, most of this is done in private in any other game. By the time they open it up to the players, they're well along, and a lot of those big sweeping changes have been done. We have this continuous thing where, because we've run a live game environment since late 2015, November, December 2015, to this day, these growing pains are experienced not just by us, which is normal, but by our players, which is not. So players who have played a long time, players who have played a tremendous amount, can get used to things being a certain way. And when we change, that almost never feels good. Whether it's a good change or it's not is a whole other discussion. It's just when you become used to something, when you've been accommodated to it, when you've decided you like it, and then it changes, that can cause consternation. We see that with everything from Master Modes to these economy changes and everything else between. That's not the same as saying that the feedback is not valid. I want to be real clear with that. Feedback's valid. Some of these changes are going to be too sweeping. Some of these cuts are going to be too much. Some of these bumps are going to be too much. Some of the things we did for Master Modes, like hover mode stuff, are going to be right where we want them, and some aren't. And we're going to keep tweaking. This is all of Star Citizen's game development. I see it from everybody, from good people, from the best people who struggle with this. And it's unfortunate, but it's normal. It's a part of our process here, and it comes part and parcel with running a live game environment in the middle of our development. So as always, we just encourage you to be patient with us, to help us, to keep testing, to keep giving us feedback. Like I said before, the doom and gloom stuff doesn't help so much. The 'hey, this could be more like this, and you would get this', that's the sweet stuff.

Something to add is, we're very much aware, obviously, as Jared says, with us being live service, and we talk about being an MMO and grind, the reactions we get, we understand why for most of them. We're making a grindy environment in something that we constantly reset and wipe as it is currently. And that obviously isn't fun, because you're not getting that long-term reward out of the effort you put in. But eventually, when we're closer to done, you will, because we'll have solidified a lot more of this, so therefore the grind and the wipes will go, so that you can put in the effort and get the effort out. I understand right now that it won't be as fun to put 80 hours into getting somewhere up there in the hauling things just to find out next patch that we need to wipe because of a bug or because we're balancing. It's part and parcel of just having to lay the tracks while we're still running the train down it.

Although I want to add to what Elliot says. I've had a dozen conversations with Rich Tyrer about this topic. We want to try to avoid as many wipes as possible. That's always the other thing. People don't want to invest time, people don't want to invest effort knowing this thing is going to wipe. It is our intention from this point forward to not wipe for anything. That's not the same as saying that we're not going to. I want to be real clear, because every time we say what we want to do, and then something changes, people are like, CIG promised. No, we told you what we wanted to do. What we want to do from this point forward is we want to try to avoid any wipe. If we have to wipe from this point forward, it'll be something severe. It'll be something that we've all come together and said there's just no other way forward. And so that is still a possibility. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and say it's not. But the intention from everyone at every single level is to do every single thing we can from this point forward to avoid any more wipes.

And of course, there are some other things which are very important, pieces of functionality which we haven't got to yet, which will, like Elliot was saying, let you enjoy your progress and your status that you've earned over all those hours. And it will become even more meaningful with Death of a Spaceman, where it'll bring a bit more consequence, more meaning to decisions you make. Server meshing, where we'll bring more players together interacting in the same place, which is going to bring a lot more life and collaboration to decisions you make. And StarSim in the background makes the universe dynamic around you. So at the moment it might feel like it's a grind and it's Groundhog Day, but we're building for the future.