Too small?
My guess is that the galaxy will be explored way, way faster than anyone is expecting. A lot of us (me included) are always underestimating the ingenuity (!) and persistence of dedicated players with unlimited time.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the first players meeting the Thargoids in 'days', having someone visit the core of our galaxy in 'weeks' (or going as far as possible) and lots, lots more explored systems than anyone would have thought possible.
I'm not sure what I want Frontier to do about this, but it might be nice to learn from diablo 3:
The Diablo 3noticed a lot of players lost the motivation to play after reaching the level 60 levelcap. As a solution they invented '
paragon' levels: after reaching level 60 you could earn another 100 'paragon levels': your character would stay level 60 but would earn some minor perks for each paragon level.
This paragon system was meant to be 'endgame' and the developers speculated that it would take months, maybe years for a player to reach level 100: "
The time to reach the upper Paragon levels approximates the long-term time investment required to get a level 99 character in Diablo II" writes Jay Wilson. (a looooong time!). The amount of XP needed for each next level was DOUBLE that of the previous level.
To give you an idea about the XP needed, here is a chart (click for larger image):
Though the total experience needed is considerable, it was
just two weeks before the first character reached Paragon level 100. The winner was a Barbarian named Alkaizer, who dinged to the top on September 6, 2012.
In an
interview he said:
"The first few days I played probably 17-19 hours in game. But eventually I dropped down to probably 12-15 hours. There were a few days where I wasn't even playing for 12-14 hours straight."
In other words: I hope the galaxy is big enough. Never underestimate your players.
**for the record: I'm talking about the old paragon system. The current
paragon 2.0 system is completely different. **