or in a more honest and less troll way, some players actually want a sensible and semi plausible economy in the game and think FD caving to the I want it now kind of players (in a way they specifically said they would not do) is a terrible misstep in the game.
it's also self defeating anyway. IF FD had kept a lid on the credit economy maybe they would not have felt the need to create multiple unicorn currencies and everything could have been purchasable with credits.
Nope, that would/will never happen without a major change in design approach.
It is what it is because they decided to make it like this in the first place, not because those pesky "want it now" kids complained too much.
Blaming it on the players is what is intellectually dishonest, disingenuous, and a cop out.
A proper credit based economy is antithetical to the core ED game design ethos, which is to lock everything behind a skinner box grind wall.
The schizoid approach to credit reward dumping is just another sympton of this, as they don't have any other levers to pull when it comes to ringing pavlovs bell.
They could still implement a proper credit sink marketplace where anything could be purchased, for a price, but that goes against their skinner box philosophy, and I suspect they think it might make their carefully crafted material grind mission/SignalSource/ShootRocks system redundant. I don't think so, they could differentiate it so it offers something unqiue from direct market purchase. They just haven't bothered to think it through. Not sure it could be worse than the mental gymanstics you have to do with the current system anyway.
All the technical elements exist to do it though (market system, brokers etc). They just don't want to do it.
Which is all the more hilarious, that people defend the core grind design as "you just have to play, there is no grind" (when it's the core game mechanic) and also at the same time "ED is a simulation, it's called dangerous for a reason", yet the single biggest element of human society doesn't exist - a proper market based economy where you can buy anything - not just a limited subset for a trading system as another way to make credits (you can't spend) or fulfill clockwork grind CG goals.
Instead, that was off the table to begin with, and so you're left with this beautiful looking gimped skinner box instead. Such wasted potential.
And then they have to implement workarounds to the mission reward system in lieu of that such as Dav's Hope/Hot Jupiter or players have to do silly things like HGE looping because you can't just go and buy what you need with the credits you've earned.
Just think how the game could have progressed within and without the bubble with a proper full market based economy combined with real exploration and player base building instead of this gimped system on rails that it currently is. FC's are "kind of" player bases, but they're really just stations in disguise and constrained by the same design limitations of the current market system. Surface, orbital, or system base construction, even limited for technical design reasons (storage, db, ++), is really needed along with full market capability to craft & trade everything that's available in the game.
The scripted thargoid war is just more of the same. What would happen if players let the bubble burn?
You can't really run anywhere, as players don't have all the tools needed to restart society even at a small scale.
But to their credit, nobody has nailed this yet either. Not NMS, no SC (perpetual alpha), and probably not Starfield either.
Still, they made the best Space Dirt Rally simulator, so there's that! (NMS is ok vehicle wise, but not on the same level as the SRV).
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
