Bounty Hunting: Well the bread n' butter for most players but essentially every RES is the same with slightly varying levels of difficulties and a different backdrop.
Combat zones: Endless waves or whatever cookie cutter factions are fighting each other, the off chance for a capital ship spawn.
Base Assaults: financially unrewarding
Minor Faction: they come in 5 flavors :The Criminals, the corporation, the nationalists/authoritarians, the democratic-agenda and the hippies.
Powerplay: The attempt to uphold a backer promise that a player or group of players could have an "impact" on the galaxy.
CQC: Died within months after release and without an substantial rewards that tie into the main game its probably going to stay that way.
A lot of work in progress methinks
That bolded bit always strikes me as...lazy I guess is the most safe word to use here. I've yet to go sit in a Rez to bounty hunt, I mean, I've literally never done that, and I've killed LOTS of pirates and wanted NPCs. Me, I load up an interdictor and go HUNTING, as that's actually part of the thing, bounty HUNTER, not bounty SIT IN A SPAWN LOCATION AND FARM MOBS, just saying... Funny thing is, I have a lot of fun when I'm bounty hunting due to that and I get to practice my interdiction skills, which are a thing when you are going for targets who are ranked higher than you in combat, which I tend to do, best way to get my combat rating up, kill things higher ranked, not lower ranked.
Combat Zone, I agree with that, not exactly what I thought they'd be, really does need some serious reworking there, damn straight!
Base Assaults,erm, yeah, no, I've made a lot doing those, they are so easy, couple of missiles or torps, bam, base defenders all gone, mission done in seconds.
Minor factions come in a lot more than those 5, there's a big list around here somewhere, you should get around the bubble more.
Powerplay, disagree with our view of what it is, but I find it...lacking and nothing but a grindfest personally. Definitely needs work, and David has stated the same and that more work is being done on it, I'll wait and see how that works out before commenting further.
CQC, ALWAYS had rewards that tie into the main game, what are you talking about? The system permit and discount on ships/modules, part of CQC all along, and for combat oriented players, it's a good deal. With the changes to the matchmaking, it's faster and more fun now. And the Arena thing is a brilliant move, bet your ass someone over at Blizzard saw that and was yelling at the team for NOT coming up with that years ago for WoW. My gods, can you imagine how well just a Battlegrounds game would have sold for Blizzard? Oh, right, they did come up with something similar...but it's a totally separate game based on the WoW world, still, you can bet people got yelled at when Arena was announced, and not just over at Blizzard. Cheap price means lots of people will grab it, it's fun, it's fast, it's easy to pick up the basics and damned hard to master, so that'll actually keep many of the PvPers playing for a while, that's something we actually love, easy basic, hard to master, means the top players are skilled, not just have better toys. And many of those PvPers are just like me, we love the thrill of fast paced combat games, but we ALSO love the slow methodical pace of Elite: Dangerous itself, it gives us time to relax and just have some fun doing non-violent things. I'm out in the Black, again, loving it, but CQC lets me get my fix when I get a little bored of the Black. And there's no risk to my Anaconda I've put so much money into!
) on the galaxy, doesn't seem reasonable to me. Certain other space games might be far better in this regard with a much smaller universe and properly persistent AIs (if they can pull that off).
