I'm tired of hearing about how we can't have features because of some gripe about rank, and how somebody achieved it.
I started playing this series on console years ago.
I DGAF about your stupid rank. I want to be able to save my game and get up and live my life.
We need an actual single player version of the game, not just this version with rank and crap the sweatlords care about.

You earn XP as it happens and challenges are updated and added to your game profile as they occur, you don't need to manually save at any time to save your progress, it's automatic.

As for the story missions, all of story missions can be saved at any time.

The other modes like contracts and escalations are short, just a few minutes each and your progress and XP earned in them is saved as you go. If you fail you just restart but still earned the XP you made while attempting it.

Mostly I'd like to be able to save in freelancer after I hit a milestone in a mission or get a kill I needed. That way when I experience a glitch, a crash, or have to get up and do something. I can come back to it. I don't care if they give me restrictions on how many saves I can have or how often. I don't even care if they put a restriction on the number of times you can load in on the save mid mission, as I can't imagine needing to use it more than once, and twice at most. As long as everything that happens in the game doesn't = failure, losing all your crap, losing half your money.
There's got to be some kind of happy medium.
I couldn't care less about leaderboards, any of that stuff. I'm not playing this game in order to be validated by the community.

If your issue was freelancer, why did you even bring up leaderboards? There's no leaderboards in freelancer.

Freelancer missions don't last more than a few minutes each and it saves automatically between missions. It's meant to be a rogue-lite mode so they don't let you save scum.

If you want a mode that doesn't have penalties, play contracts mode, there's thousands of random contracts to play.

Freelancer missions don't last more than a few minutes each and it saves automatically between missions. It's meant to be a rogue-lite mode so they don't let you save scum.

TBH, there are better ways to inhibit save scumming than the most primitive solutions imaginable. Ways such as self-destructing exit-save stored server side (considering the game is fully online either way). Regular freelancer missions are time-wise whatever (usually), but showdowns can take a while.

...WTF is a "NON-leaderboard" for a start.

Secondly online games leaderboards always have and always will be filled up with names of those that cheated so i'm not opposed to them at all, just gives me a heads up when i join an online multiplayer game on the names of scummy people i may want to avoid joining the games of.