It's interesting that a bunch of people say that the players should open their minds and let the creativity flow and create their own fun and shouldn't care about nerfing that which was previously declared okay. The irony is that these very same people sure as hell are in a rush to tell other people to play it their way or the highway. We've already had countless versions of "If you don't like it, leave!" which is the most dumb and toxic thing you can hope for in a game as that is what kills a game faster than anything else. The devs not only have the goal to maintain their player base as much as possible, but for viability sake, must ensure that a constant stream of new players comes in to beat out the turnover rate and hopefully even exceed the turnover rate for a higher net gain in company profits.
One of the most surefire ways to murder a game quicker than anything is to listen solely to the top 1% elitist population who've been around for a while and are already well established. Many companies in the past who have done such have ultimately failed as they've nerfed their game into the ground trying to keep and maintain a status quo and not developing the game to meet the standards and expectations of newer generations of gamers (each year or two could be considered a relatively new generation.) Markets and games as a whole tend to evolve and adapt to the times to maintain financial viability. One of those very trends is the tendency to stray away from ridiculous grinds as a very high hurdle or gate to content. It leaves the player feeling that they have to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for eventually playing the game as they want to. This leads to the game not really being a game anymore but a job that the sucke... errr.. player pays to take part in. When this happens, the game population takes a nosedive and the game loses its ability to draw in young blood which is needed to sustain a game and maintain a healthy enough population to keep servers running, developers developing more content, and ultimately, the game running and updated.
What I find interesting is that it's these money making adventures of tedium that actually draw a lot of players into the game. One of the biggest detractors of ED from talking with a lot of my heavy gaming friends is that ED has a money grind worse than most Chinese/Korean/Japanese MMOs. Especially as a game like ED actually relies financially not on individual software sales for the entry into the game but ED store sales for cosmetic add-ons. I know a few people who bought ED over the holidays because there was finally official word that some sanctioned route beyond the endless and insurmountable money grind had been found which made the game much more accessible. The developers need to realize that their customer's time is very important and a limited resource and that forcing their customer base to give up huge amounts of it will alienate more players than draw in.
Requiring ridiculous amounts of time isn't difficult or challenging. It's monotonous time consumption meant to cover for a rather lackluster rate of improvement and updates on the content side of things. Many players aren't stupid enough to equate time burned for difficulty anymore and demand more of a balance between time spent, and in-game currency. This whole thing wouldn't have even been an issue if the other professionis of the game with missions paid more accordingly with some sense of increase as the player's ranks increased.
The mission system itself is completely borked to begin with as there's literally no reason to take any of the big ships out without board hopping many times. A large ship like a conda or cutter or type-9 should be able to easily get missions that can completely fill its hold with little difficulty. Nothing makes as little sense to me in this game as the mission system for trading/passenger missions. IRL we have buses and planes going to other cities based on a service area of only several million able to completely fill up to mostly fill up fairly easily, yet a space station that services a population of several hundred million to even billions of people can only find 2-21 people for transport? Of hundreds of millions to billions of people you can only scrape together at most 180 tons of cargo of a specific item? Really?
The way at least hauling/PAX missions should work is that the player picks set destinations from the mission board with set cargo that pays X/ton and the player uses a slider to load up that tonnage as a mission from a daily supply of commodities/PAX like the commodities in the BGS supposedly already do. You should have hundreds of thousands of people in a high pop system looking to go to places and you just use a slider to take as many as you want from a daily supply of goods/PAX. This is much more realistic and closer to what would logically be happening in real life. This is also why economy passenger loading should make more money as it does IRL. It's a proven business model that the logistics and transportation industries have adopted for a very long time. Hell, there are real life airlines that completely got rid of first class and business class and basically turned their planes into flying human cattle cars and people flock to it in droves.
We need less busy bodies poking their noses into what others are doing with their own personal time and more players actively playing the game. It's a very noticeable thing that ED's active population and sales seem to increase when these "exploits" are found that makes the game for many players feel a bit more accessible and open and the opposite whenever FDEV shoots the nerf RPG-7 at the complained about "exploiting" housefly. What's the most disturbing is that they had to put the QA team on this to hunt down that specific line of code and get the network guys to push the change instead of using the few hours it took to actually fix many of the other bugs. I'm still pretty that I lose 20-40 minutes off of each mission I take just for hitting the accept button. Also, you probably should try to screw with a system until you actually finish the fix instead of disabling it and completely breaking the item in question entirely. They took a perceived problem and their response was to actually break it mechanically further instead of actually fixing it.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I've been lurking on the boards for a while and felt that I had to get that off my chest. Thanks if you read it, whether you agree or not. [smile]
