Exactly this.
I 100% agree.
- "Is the BMM done? Is the 890 done? What about the simplest of game mechanics and professions?"
- "No, but here are some new features that will be ready in a few years. Pay us with cash".
I've told some of my friends about Star Citizen a year ago and told them we were expecting 3.0 and a whole lot of content. They recently asked me how the game was doing and what progress they've done in the last year.
It was really embarrassing.
While CR keeps announcing features that might see the light of day in the next few years, we still can't run more than 20fps or open a freaking ship door or finish a mission.
While i agree that the progress appears pretty awful and ships that were promised are being reworked 3 yrs later, I have a hunch that they are not massively far off introducing this mechanic into a large content patch once they introduce scanners and mining.
They must want to do a ton of testing on the people in the community with this feature because it will be quite important to test punish mechanics and how people work around defending their claims. Protected or not.
I'm just some clueless bum but this seems like a mechanic that is a lot more complicated than it sounds and some sort of implementation in the alpha is not going to be that far off.
I'd be willing to bet they will throw this into testing in 2018, which may be why they are announcing and selling this now.
I agree the PR is not great though.