Best Parts
- Coop tractor looting. But it needs some polish, less fiddly controls to remove the crates from storage, a tractor throw option to launch the crates through 0g into the bay.
- Idris battle. This was already in, but it's still fun. Pre-Xenothreat fighting the Idris was where I had the most fun in 3.12, although it still feels too much like a bullet sponge and too vulnerable. It's a helpless target with a big health bar.
Worst Parts
- Cargo ship vulnerability. Thankfully we had a fair number of fighters keeping the skies clear, but it sucks to spend 10 min loading the ship up only for it to get blown up and lose all the time you spent on it.
- QT cargo (Dilutherium). Not being able to QT just means 10 min of waiting. There's no gameplay involved.
- Length and repetition. I'm lucky my server lasted as long as it took (3 hr). I was on a relatively busy server which had a full Carrack crew, a Hammerhead, and a fair number of solos helping, and I still did 25% of the cargo myself. In the future CIG should look into tuning the event according to how many people are participating, whether by filling in for missing players with AI allies or scaling back the requirements.
- Bugs bugs bugs. The station wouldn't load, the javelin wouldn't load, enemy ships wouldn't load, ally ships wouldn't load, players wouldn't load leading to ghost crates, I had an entire Starfarer which would randomly decide whether or not it would load while I walked around it.
Gameplay flow
The real break ups to flow were death and restocking/repairing. Jericho should have offered repair/restock at least, if not respawn. Especially for bombers, which fire all their torpedoes in 30 seconds then have to fly all the way to MIC L1 while the mission giver (very professionally) whines that you're leaving the battle the UEE has refused to offer the infrastructure to support.
Also finding new wrecks. Just fly in a random direction and hope that you find a wreck. When you do hope it hasn't already been looted.
Besides that I'd say it felt like a pretty clean loop. Park your ship near the door, go do some FPS, power the generator, rapidly load up (thanks to good parking + tractor), and QT back to Jericho to sell before doing it again.
I was fortunate to be the first one to every wreck I looted so I always got to do the FPS part, but I'd have been pretty disappointed if I hadn't been able to. That's a really big part of what made it fun to me, the combination of FPS, cargo, and combat.
Final Showdown
Wait there was a final showdown? My mission completed at full resupply and just said that was that.
Or do you mean Phase 3 which isn't live yet?