Dear Frontier,
After hundreds of hours to get (triple) "Elite" .. you find it nescessary to implement 5 more levels of "Elite" (on itself a weird idea .. you are or you are not, if you are a King, technically, no need to become King II or King III ) and by that decision, you are simply diminishing the meaning of the "end-achievement" (not the end of the game) of 'being Elite' (for as far as it had some meaning, except 'been trough the endless hours of grindy gameplay', which we accepted.) .. all the work that each player has done in the past and the 'psychological value' associated to having achieved this rank, while others have given up (comprehensively), is now lowered in the blink of an eye by this decision. What was the idea behind introducing new Elite ranks? Simply that it would make the people grind yet more again for each role? Do you sincerely believe you added some value to the game by choosing to do this ? You must be out of good idea's to take sush a gameplay decision, punishing the players that did the work to redo it again .. wel, it's it's not encouraging to me, on the contrary. I agree to go through the grind for the 2 new roles, but I will leave the rest as is, I won't chase the summum again (as it was not the summum apparently, who knew) .. I paid my due! ..
I'm not complaining (too much) about the bugs, the glitches, the disconnections, the states of the releases, the updates breaking other stuff, etc .. but with this one decision, I feel like you 'hollowed out' the essence of the game called Elite Dangerous (and not Elite V Dangerous), changing the rules mid-play is a pittyfull decision.
Now I'll go scan some plants, up to Elite 1 .. o7
PS: yes I love Elite, but this is my renewed opinion about it, and just a ventilation of one player ..