When people say 'this is meaningless, my actions don't matter', what do people expect their actions to result in, given they are a single individual amongst simulated trillions? In an open-ended game what are people ultimately expecting other than gaining more stuff, ranking up and occasionally getting a pat on the head from powers-that-be or the pilot's federation?
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1) The 'core' of Elite to me is the 'one man, one ship' thing, and the game should stick more rigidly to simulation of ship systems and personal interaction with NPC contacts involved in combat and trading, leaving the broad sweep of markets, events and politics as abstractions run in the background simulation, however...
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2) The range of scales over which the background simulation should (has to) work are pretty staggering. For a single commander to achieve local superiority (in trading, combat or whatever) in a backwater system should be feasible - destroying a handful of ships should have impact to local factions, or delivering 100 tonnes of goods should completely distort a market. But the system also has to scale to high pop worlds, with billions of inhabitants and production capabilities of thousands of ships or millions of tonnes of goods. Hence it's far easier to clamp local trade to fairly fixed min-max values, with constantly replenishing stocks, or spawn endless waves of AI ships to farm, so that everybody in the theme park gets a chance to ride.
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3) It would be nice for combat situations to generate a fixed number of assets, or key targets (defences, C3I intallations, depots and resource hubs, shipyards etc.) in a system and generate missions to counter or defend these assets. However, how do you balance this? You've got the instancing nightmare to contend with (aggregation of destroyed and active resources? How?), and if too few assets are generated and too many commanders show up, your war's over before its begun. See end of point 2 again. Best you can hope for is to somehow give AI ships generic missions and communicate what they are doing via comms to the player, I suppose.
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4) If Frontier can get some form of randomly generated story arcs of the ground, with enough archetypes to make them varied, and Tier 2 NPCs with decent comms for interaction, in, that would be a vast improvement on putting a personal face on the game. Again however, I'd be curious as to how you could make NPCs persist in the nightmare of p2p instancing, or across and amongst player 'histories' generally (e.g. can NPCs be shared between players? if you kill and NPC I need how is that handled? Is it easier to maintain a list of NPCs to interact with separately for each client account etc.?).
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5) At the end of the day, this is an update of Elite, Frontier and FFE. All of those games are regarded highly, and all were criticised for having huge, but sterile, empty and 'samey' universes. Levelling that criticism at E: D is therefore somewhat predictable. Personally, I can live with it, as it does make the game very easy to dip into for a couple of hours, or leave for a few months, then come back and carry on. It doesn't require much from the user once the base systems are learnt, which is both a blessing, and a curse if you are playing intensively, when you realise the man behind the curtain is an emperor with no clothes (sorry - having fun mixing metaphors these days...
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6) Anyone who says 'it would be better with guilds, player-owned stations, or player crewed cap-ships', just consider that you've earned a 'Paddington hard stare' from me, OK?
