As refreshing as it is to see MoM's new minions roaming about the galaxy with an undying hatred for all life, I voted Too Hard - the reason being one of the encounters I had yesterday, which got me thinking about the distribution of extremely hard NPC's.
I was couriering a handful of Survival Systems from BD+28 413 to Purut to test out the new mission system - and bear in mind that since my last restart (ho hum) I'm ranked Penniless in trade. 55k credits, a nice starting sum for a new player to be sure. As I was dropping in on station I was interdicted by a Dangerous Viper III who gave me about six seconds to drop cargo before opening fire.
Now just prior to 2.1 dropping I had tasted the hate of MoM's new generation right in my valuable, vulnerable face, so I was lucky enough to A-rate a Viper IV with which to start the New Era, and I know how to escape an interdiction. The railgun-equipped Viper still blew off a ring of my shields with a volley as I winked back into supercruise and onto the station.
As I accepted the reward and the mild abuse of the mission giver (only 135.5 million to go, woo!) I reflected on this encounter and my other experiences in other games. Thanks to my ship I was fine - but what if I'd have been a brand new player in a Sidey? It was a Penniless mission in populated space. A railgun equipped Dangerous Viper III would in all likelyhood have been a death sentence. Now other games, like Dark Souls, have a similar level of difficulty and expectation of death - but even that famous series has a couple of caveats that make the danger fun rather than a chore:-
* Enemies are grouped into rough geographical areas by difficulty. An end-game creature cannot randomly spawn in a low-level area.
* Although you lose your progression to next level, you have a chance to recover your dropped souls at the point of your death AND there is no risk of losing what you've already attained - you won't lose levels by dying.
Elite has a random spawn system, meaning you can potentially get interdicted by "end game" grade enemies without warning, and the insurance system means that if you can't stay ahead of a minimum income level then eventually you will lose everything - you're back in a Sidewinder. Combined and unmitigated, that could potentially turn the game into an exercise in frustration and annoyance rather than a pleasure, especially for new players who aren't as emotionally invested in Elite as a lot of us forum old-hands are.
There are aspects of game design evolution that have occurred over the last decade or so that have done very well for games as a source of entertainment and satisfaction. I know Frontier are invested in making the game they want, but unless the goal is Dark Souls in space with random chance of uber-NPC/death/loss of assets despite player input and care, it'd probably be worth considering the whole picture when accounting for how all these new and old systems interact with each other.
As for the "git gud" approach, yes the new combat can be exciting, but it remains to be seen how much fun every dogfight being a fraught life and death struggle would be after a month or two - especially for players without without access to large ships and generous bank accounts and thus having the bulk of a need to find an income stream behind them. Also, bugs - there appears to be a few at the moment, but fighters taking out multi-million top end ships without breaking a sweat is probably worth a thread on its own (I think I can hear ship economics screaming from here
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