@sallymorganmoore Greetings first of all. I'm going to try to be straight to the point as possible and what I'm about to say is always with all due respect of your team, the hard working developers, and us the community that depends on your (Fdev) decisions to enjoy this game. I start by saying that I've been playing this game since Horizons, and spent over 4600+ hours enjoying every minute. Coming from Elite (1984) I got immersed in ED and replaced/upgraded my machine two times to be able to play it. What keeps me playing it? The Community. I play other games, once I get them done, I'm done with them. Elite Dangerous, I've done everything in it, why do I keep playing it? The Community. The list of new international friends I've got is endless, some of whom will meet in RL in the near future. So you can imagine the impact this game has given us.
I start by quoting you saying:
'I can confirm that no major changes or updates should have happened in the "Criminal Activity field" as part of Update 6, but it does concern me that some elements of Crime are sparking conversation and confusion, following update 6.' - this would absolutely be a great example of 'pulling everyone's legs' - always with all respect. Please don't take it as a negative feedback.
This game is all about grind, it's not me saying this, it's the community. Search in forums, discord, where ever, those who play ED will tell you that it's a whole grind from the top to the bottom. From the player's aspect, we grind to play the game better, be it engineering, ranks, you name it. From FDev's aspect, grind is a necessity to have players spending more and more time in the game to have better statistics (at least this is what some say in forums). The proper gameplay, that instance that makes you really enjoy the game, is when you play it with your friends, The Community. In order to play it in an enjoyable fashion, one will grind to be or at least reach the same level of your fellow friends. e.g. PvP, I have a FDL fully G5 engineered. Those of my friends that don't will spend the next couple of months grinding mats to get to my level to enjoy destroying me (as I'm a mess in PvP) Exploration, PvE, Xeno, you name it, in order to enjoy, you have to grind.
Now we've got two scenarios here, Those that started Odyssey in the first place, and dedicated a lot of time, managed to grind up everything and they're at the top level. Their friends who have just started, or those that do not spend long hours playing, simply because they have a family to take care, or any other reason, spend less time and take much longer to grind to level up like their friends.
In Update 6, you have made this so called grind even more impossible to accomplish, why? You have introduced / switched on / enabled something like notoriety, that wasn't enabled in Update 5. You have removed the Relog to the main menu exploit (which eased slightly our burden) to grind mats. You have fixed a lot of bugs, like you always do with every update and gave us great features like the planetary enhancements, but in turn, you have created bugs that weren't there in the previous updates, like incomplete missions to pick up an item from a crash site for e.g. You have introduced / enabled notoriety for On Foot, even in Anarchy systems, making it even harder for those that want to reach the level of their friends. This was not even in the Update 6 release notes. Please, please, please invest in a QA Testing department. It really makes a whole lot of a difference.
There's only one way, and it is
Balance. If you take something you gave someone, who was enjoying it, who was deliberately investing time and create content for others to enjoy, and who was looking forward to reach that level to ultimately be able to play with his friends, and enjoy the proper gameplay of this game, - you need to exchange it with something else. If you are making it harder for us to grind, by employing something that wasn't there or wasn't enabled, you need to give something in return. e.g. make rare materials more available. Make a Data and Items trader, I'm sure you can think of many others. Increasing the time taken to grind is ultimately giving its fruit by having players our friends in the Community getting silent and abandon the game. Who is suffering? Us, those who really like the game, but are having their friends departing from it. We are only speaking with PC users here. I don't want to imagine those Console players that are waiting for Odyssey to be available, their reaction and their let downs.
I hope that FDev - with all their respect - will realize that this game will succeed as it did in the past, only if it hears the Community's outcry. More and more grinding does not make a player enjoy the game, grinding simply obliges the player to reach a point where he can start enjoying the game with his friends in the Community!
o7
