I'm just going to pipe up here is that the issue, as I see it, is that Frontier has managed to massively break the game with the last three updates. 3.3 took over a month for the newly introduced gameplay to work, and even longer than that for the game to be stable again. A month! And that's back when we had actual game updates, and a beta period before that!
April and September updates, being smaller, still managed to have week (or weeks) of game instability, with mind-boggling features being broken. These aren't even updates to big features, just a new currency system (hey everyone, buy ARX!!!), or some new modules.
Remember the FSD booster? I took two updates before they reintroduced it after it being released in a completely unworkable state.
My point is that we haven't had an update in over a year that hasn't been exceptionally frustrating from a user experience.
The issues tracker, which gets virtually no response or action from Frontier, has over 3700 listed issues, and just 75 have been listed as "fixed". That's .02%!!! They've only acknowledged 132 of those, with no action, so the issues tracker is basically a black hole, where we submit information but get nothing back in return. Some bugs have been fixed, but many just languish, despite being listed as important by the community, including simple typos.
Are we placing odds that fleet carries will work as advertised? I'm not a betting man, but I'm pretty sure they're going to be glitchy and game-breaking, as well as anything else that gets haphazardly thrown into the game.
And then there's the topic of the 2020 paid DLC update. Something that massive - something that's been in development for years - is sure to have thousands of issues, which will simply compound upon the existing ones. I mean, personally, I don't give two whits about space legs; I just want to keep enjoying the game that I have and would love for them to expand on and integrate existing gameplay. CQC? PowerPlay? The Asp Scout? All these are in the game and completely languish.
There doesn't seem to be a plan for releasing content in a playable state for the future, nor any lessons learned from the mistakes of the past.
This doesn't fall on the development team, per se, but it falls on the company management, as they appear to have fostered a culture that leads to these sorts of releases. A friend of my opined just the other night: "It's almost unimaginable that the same company that could make the game that's unarguably as fantastic as Elite Dangerous is can also release updates that are so terrible and broken as this one."
And it's happening EVERY. DAMN. TIME.
