The early experiences in Elite Dangerous are great, but eventually boredom sets in for many people - enough that there are
many people complaining about this issue. I want to outline various reasons for this, and suggest some solutions...
1. While you are grappling with all the complexities of Elite Dangerous (flight, docking, combat, trading, etc), the game feels fairly challenging (but figuring out how to do something can be very rewarding). However, once you've gotten to grips with all of those complexities, Elite Dangerous suddenly becomes much easier. Too easy I would say. You can easily amass a fortune through grinding lucrative trade routes, or grinding certain kinds of missions in some systems, with little in the way of danger. This means you end-up repetitively doing stuff without having to think very much (or at all), leading to boredom for many people.
The solution to this boredom is to make the game harder (the sandbox game The Long Dark is extremely repetitive, but it's high level of challenge stops it from getting boring). Some suggestions:
(a) Add the already-planned Ironman Mode. This instantly makes the game much harder for those who find it too easy, but anyone else can ignore it.
(b) Make anarchy & low-security systems *actually* dangerous, by populating them with more pirates & pirates of greater skill. Beginners just need to avoid such systems, so might be a good idea to make the danger level more obvious on the Galaxy Map. But with increased risk, there should also be increased reward, so the highest bounties should be found there, and the highest paying missions should require you to go there.
2. Super Cruise is great for giving a feel for how ridiculously huge space is, and prevents star systems turning into a list of "fast travel" locations, but eventually it can get very boring - many people report browsing the internet (etc) while waiting to reach their destination in Super Cruise. i.e. Super Cruise is basically non-interactive. That's a serious problem given that you can spend maybe 50% of game time in Super Cruise. I am against speeding-up Super Cruise. Instead I think it should be made more *interesting*:
(a) There should be anomalies in supercruise you need to avoid (maybe justify it as dark matter affects supercruise more than normal space?), otherwise you risk damage and/or unwanted change of direction (but only in the worst case getting dragged out of supercruise). So you have to keep an eye out for things in your way, and plot a course around them.
(b) It should be possible for enemy ships to hide in wait for the player (in supercruise). Maybe they can hide behind (or near) those supercruise anomalies? So you need to be constantly alert, on the watch for possible threats that may come after you, and maybe take a wide berth (or countermeasures, or perhaps pre-emptive attack).
(c) USS were a good idea, but as they often contain boring/unwanted things it's tedious to drop-out of supercruise & then find you wasted your time. So some way to scan a USS to help guage whether it's a good idea or not (e.g. approx number of ships present at the USS, excluding stealthed ships) would really help. Maybe make this another mini-game, where you have to learn what the scan means, e.g. A strong signal could indicate many ships, while an intermittent one could indicate some kind of black box.
(d) *Maybe* there should be local distortions (blame low density dark matter if you want) which can cause you to gradually veer off course, unless you correct it. So you can't just point & forget. This would need testing, to see whether it was just annoying!
I will update this post when I think of more ideas, but please feel free to make your own suggestions, and/or discuss existing suggestions (mine or someone else's).
