What is comical about this entire situation is all of the immersion is what we are missing and requesting. This game in an open world environment with instances would be incredible with the core game. That would allow development of the story and give everyone the experience and re playability they are craving. The mechanics are there for complete dynamics in the open world with the ship drops and events that we currently have now. The Stories could easily be instanced off the main world. There could be any number of dynamics preplanned and implemented on a monthly basis to further reinforce immersion. The core game itself is completely finished and polished. The world ie worlds themselves are in a completely raw unfinished state. It's like someone took a novel and made very bland and poor cliff notes of the entire book chopping it up into a disjointed fragment of the original story and design. What is the real concern is this had to be obvious in the meetings discussing the game development and they continued on course anyway knowing the re playability and immersion was really non existent. Seriously why have patrols that are basically loops or circles and not have an open world. Even the most novice of developers would look at that and go that doesn't make sense. If you see the need for patrols then you see the need for open world development. Instead they turn patrols into mission maps. None of the current setup makes sense from a long term aspect since re-playability in stand alone map design is very short term. You add 5 new maps and stories but the content is exhausted in a few weeks time or maybe a month or 2. The only reason to keep replaying them is for itemization. So now you put considerable stress on your itemization team as well as a new requirement for inflated time sinks to slow the player base down and extend the content a few months to allow development of 5 more story maps and something else replayable due to itemization. Rinse repeat while trying to charge and generate revenue at each step. The only problem is this becomes obvious to the playerbase as whole very early and the profitability drops with every release. The entire design and business plan is very short term and backwards instead of a long term vision and growth ie progression. This is why MMO's only survive if the initial world and content release is massive. That then gives the developers time to add to the world and story which keeps players invested both emotionally and time investment. So each subsequent expansion is really an add on to the core world which actually gives so much more freedom to the designers since options for directions to go are already in front of them. How can they not see this entire project was developed and released going backwards short term in steps and profitability. It really is mind boggling.