Dissentient said:
They could have made, for instance, 15 station types instead of 4 and have different station types prevalent in Federation/Alliance/Empire.
And it would still be boring. I started arguing this kind of thing recently, types of content they could add.
Football (soccer) has only one type of pitch and one size of team (ish), and FIFA alone made $4 billion revenue just by selling the marketing and TV rights to the 2014 World Cup.
Football is popular not because it has tons of varied content, heaps of mission types, stadiums with different paint, more minigames, varying ticket prices... it's popular and enduring because it fundamentally has a good gameplay mechanic.
Same with driving games where you drive round a few tracks, same with deathmatches where you have a handful of arenas and weapons, same with chess which has one typical chessboard.
More station types will still be you supercruising from star to station, drumming your fingers. More minigames will still leave you wondering why you're bothering doing them. Chained missions will frustrate you with taking a ton of timewaste from A to B to C instead of just A to B, more fighting will leave you more annoyed at the stupid NPCs.
People who like the game, like the mechanic of supercruising around in a huge galaxy. People who don't like the game, don't like - well, *loads and loads of different things, different for everyone*.
I've quickly undergone a swing of opinion about this; if they're not going to make very strong headroads into changing the fundamental gameplay and interactions to make them long-term enjoyable for more people, what difference does it make if they slap wet content onto a broken wall with a trowel and smear it around a bit?
If you could wing up with friends, go for a fight, and there were challenging fights that had you on the edge of your seat, pushing ship designs to rebalance your wing, to adapt to skilled enemies, then many people would be perfectly happy
in one star system. Instead you get an eagle interdicting your Python, and then it doesn't fight back. You go to a RES looking for pirates, and the game engine gives you ... a DBS with a mining laser which is only wanted because it got caught in some crossfire.
If you dislike the gameplay for "take a ton of MacGuffins from A to B" then it doesn't matter if they wrap those missions in fifty different mission descriptions, chain three of them together, make the reward 500,000Cr, make the missions influence "powers" instead of "factions"... you'll still not like doing it and it will grate very quickly. Counter to that, if you love the trade planning/route planning/system jumping/supercruising/docking experience, you could make it work for you with two mission descriptions and five types of commodity.
NB, this isn't to argue against content. More content can make a good game
better, but it can't
make a good game - if content made a good game, Wikipedia would be one of the most loved games out there.
This change in view is why I've gone from "CQC? Why don't they improve the base game?" to "CQC is the deciding factor in whether a whole heap of players are still logging in in six months or not".
