<snip>I don't know if people are fatigued from playing Beta, or if E|D is attracting a lot of *ahem* older gamers who've been away from things so long that they don't have a realistic comparison, but this is a GOOD game, Folks.
One of those older gamers is me, and as most of the contributors here, I am neither too old nor too inexperienced to not be able to appreciate what ED really is. I am certain there is tremendous potential for a space-sim, making a truely immersive MMO, but it hasn't arrived yet. I played E1 (on the Atari) and E2 (PC) to elite rank and I can compare ED with for instance World of Warcraft, which I also played for many years already. When I watched the streams of ED on twitch before I entered it, I already noticed that the game is actually not very different from the earlier versions. Oddly, in some 30 years, not much has really changed. Elite Dangerous is a pleasantly playing simulator, obviously more pleasing to the eye then its predecessors, but gamewise there is very little added to it, as yet. The economy is as crooked as it was in the 1980s and 1990s; things as doing quests or trying to make a militairy career are still as void as they were then. I knew it beforehand, so I do not complain about it, but I can understand the disappointment and frustration of other players about the lack of content. ED is still not much more than what the game originally was: a fine simulator.
What puzzles me is that many features of ED were not redesigned. The defects of the game still adhere closely to the earlier versions, that were far from being perfect. For instance the non-supply and demand-based economy and the purposelessness of mining and of acquiring military ranks, resemble how things already were in E1, E2 and E3. Perhaps then it was as much as could be expected. But I have been spoiled since, for instance by playing WOW, where there are viable professions and a working economy. In my dreams Blizzard reconsiders its decision to bury its own space-MMO and instead adopts Frontiers fine simulator as the engine of its game. That might make a powerful combination indeed, but that's just a dream of course. So instead, what I do is simply to hope there will be enough time, money, dedication and patience present among the developers and the playerbase, in order for ED to mature into a "real" game. Time will tell, probably rather sooner than later.
