Features left to rot: PowerPlay, CQC... and now Multi Crew?

[lysan]

I think this is a chained reaction pattern we see here. I'm very pro FD and Elite Dangerous, it's the only space game I actually can play for a longer period of time.

FDEV made so many great things with the game, and we sometimes forget that. So before I start to list what I believe is wrong, let me list what that got right. (in no particular order)

1. The galaxy sim, it's just a masterpiece, not perfect but I enjoy it very much.
2. The Flight model, I just love it, spot on. Can be improved, but still very good and enjoyable.
3. The Sound, the sound in ED is out of this world, I can't praise the sound team enough.
4. Graphics, as the graphics are improving all the time, it gives me confidence that they will try to make the game as pretty as possible.
5. The Anaconda damage model, could we only have it on all our ships.
6. The SRV and SLF, I like those a lot, the driving model on the SRV is great and the SLF with it's NPC crew very enjoyable.
7. The NPC AI, yes here we now are on dangerous ground because many will probably say it socks, but remember that programming AI for dogfights is not an easy task, and I have yet to see the perfect NPC AI in the flight sim where you can dogfight. It's could be turned up a notch in my opinion.

8. The overall immersion factor when playing in the ED universe, it's good however also it's sword of damocles (I will return to that later)
9. Ship design, weapons loadout and possibilities to outfit your ship in general.
10. Commander creation tool, it's very good and a great foundation to build on.
11. The new camera suit.
12. Wings (buggy as it is, i'm still having fun with it.)

These are the main points to me why I play the game.


that out of the way, lets see what I'm not so fun of. I will try to be as specific as possible.

1. Basic game design decisions: with a huge 1:1 galaxy, the way we move around in 3303 is just lacking a lot of tools. Flight computers and or Crew members who can perform repetitive tasks.
FDEV could actually make a lot of fun gameplay around just that part.

2. Basic game design decisions: Power Play, a great idea, but clearly not working, When you can capture stations and outposts, this could easily be a lot of fun, however in it's current form, a few people like it, but it's not appealing to the masses.

3. Basic game design decisions: As mentioned by @OP all the systems are static, sure the numbers change but we can't really see it. Stations are the same as the were 2 years ago, nothing is changing. I was wondering for a long time, what would it take for my fraction to start building rings around my home station? I know now they will never do it, because it is not in the game.

4. Basic game design decisions: The Engineers was a great idea, I really love the bases, I like to go there and tinkle with my ship. The problem (TO ME) are the execution of the mechanics, I can't understand why we have all these great immersive assets and then RNG is just slammed in the player's face, FDEV did not even bother to hide it. I mean it's a casino with spinning wheels and fruit machine mechanics? Bad bad bad decision, just make an animation of a robot doing something and that would have been 1000 times better.

5. Basic game design decisions: CQC, why even spend DEV time on it? but when the decision was made, NPC opponents should have been in from day one, and it should have been incorporated into the main game.
There are so many things that could have been done with it, however it would take many pixels to describe it, so we leave that for another thread.

6. Basic game design decisions: Exploration, exploration in ED is as basic as it gets, in the DDF (now banned to the depth of dev hell) the game mechanics described was great, I don't know what happened but what we got was not exploration, it was a marathon of honk my planet.

7. Basic game design decisions: Trading, well I would not call it trading, more like move stuff around, ok ok ok it's trading but very basic form of trading. Why can't you open up a console in your ship and see the prices in other systems?
Why can't you buy and sell commodities via a trading hub connected to your ship? and why do you see black markets without even being a criminal? and in the galaxy map?? it must be because ....fun???

8. Basic game design decisions: Passengers, I really enjoy move imaginary meat cargo around, I actually do that for hours in PP3D(FSX) and also enjoy it in ED. Again something is missing and you need to add more to it yourself to make it more digestible. Adding more sounds related to actually carrying passenger would help, I'm doing it via VA, but it should have been in the game from day one. Also cabin crew, where are they? even in the 2001 movie they got cabin crew
Hiring a cabin crew, even if it's only one, would be fun, just look at the flight sims, they do it just fine, I really don't want another feature if it's just a barebone. Maybe FDEV should let 3rd party game developers make add ons to the game just like FSX are doing it?

9. Multi crew, well it just feel unfinished, and I will leave it at that.

10. Game design decisions: deviation too much from the lore, longtime players of any game mostly are those who read and know a lot about the lore of a game, they are also those who invest most money in the long run, it seems that FD are making the same mistake other studios did in the past, i hope i'm wrong on that one.

Now I will go a play some Elite, because even with all the warts and bugs it's the only space game I can play more than just 20 - 100 hours.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I see you are arguing for MC being bad due to lack of reward. But that's not the whole equation. Fun can be a partial replacement for reward. Unfortunately MC has some problems which stop it being fun for many, and IMHO this is wrongly leading to the conclusion that rewards are to blame. (Reward COULD keep people playing MC, but it would so unbalance the game that it would cause other problems. Do we really want novices being able to afford an Anaconda after playing with an Elite player for a while?!?)

I'm not even saying it's bad. You have a point about "gameplay is it's own reward" - eventually, those that still want to progress will realise it takes away their time to progress and won't care about it. Which makes it end up as a feature that gets toyed around by the "rich". And that "Anaconda argument" gets old - some posts above someone did some math about your stated "a while". And how does that even matter when the novice now can just "leech" credits from winging up just as well?

 

[Infidel Deity]

SkUnimatrix made this intelligently argued post on Reddit, which I felt deserved a wider audience:



It seems pretty insane that they stopped developing PowerPlay (I'm not talking about fixing bugs). Not only was it a MASSIVE undertaking (which is currently wasted), but with a change to a few of it's mechanics, it could have gone from a repetitive merit grind... to a somewhat exciting weekly battle between player groups (where merits were a reward for doing interesting/varied activities). The basic idea behind PowerPlay was definitely good, but the implementation made a few wrong turns that completely ruined it.

And rather than attempt to fix it, they've left it essentially unchanged, and moved on to the Next Shiny Thing That Will Fix Elite. At one point they obviously thought that CQC/Arena would be "it", but despite the huge amount of effort that went into it, that's now been left to rot too. While I don't play CQC myself, from what people have said the game itself is great, but the lobby & rewards are badly designed - and yet those are probably also pretty easy to fix (using designs copied from existing successful games).

The Engineers NEARLY falls into this category, but they have made a few essential tweaks that at least start to deal with some of the initial terrible design flaws. Too soon yet to see if FDev leaves the Engineers to rot...

And now we have Multi-Crew, another HUGE undertaking (so much so that even after big delays they still had to cut features... which ended up helping ruin it). Going by FDev's past pattern of behaviour, we can expect them to fix the biggest bugs quickly, but when players don't bother to use it (after the novelty has worn off & the annoying flaws become obvious), FDev will decide it's not worth trying to fix any of the design flaws, and instead move on to the Next Shiny Thing That Will Fix Elite. Again.


FDev's behaviour worries me. They clearly have NO confidence in their designs, once players reject the initial (v1.0) implementation, when they should be taking feedback to come up with Design v1.5, which makes a few significant changes but re-uses most of the existing effort (coding). What is perhaps most surprising is that they haven't gone bust yet despite all the money they've poured into features which almost no players use.


P.S. Credit where credit is due, they DO gradually improve some things (given enough time - say 12 months) :
* Networking is now good enough for Wings (most of the time), and has far less waiting when entering new instances.
* Planetary landings were initially empty of anything to do/see, but they've gradually added the ability for NPC ships to fight near planets, NPC ships guarding (and even landing) on planet bases, the defenses of planet bases against SRVs are now actually a decent threat & much scarier, planet bases have more variety, there's more variety of "stuff" on planet surfaces (and some of it's a bit interactive).
* Planetary missions are more interesting & varied (although more work still required).
* Plantetary surfaces are much more detailed than they originally were (while still performing much better), and we can even leave SRV tracks on the surface!
etc

But most of this stuff is small incremental improvements, rather than the bigger changes to design that are required to fix major stand-alone features.

Unfortunately I have to agree with this.

I have played this game A LOT, since I bought it, during the release of PowerPlay.
And I will certainly play it a lot more.

Some things are just hard to swallow.
Regardless of all my love.

 

[Andovar]

"What really I think took people back was the comment by Sandro in the live stream two weeks ago that they will only continue MC development if it is popular. Then Braben confirming that is how they develop things and why features like PowerPlay and CQC are left to wither and die."

Now I need to go dig up those streams and hear that in context. Because honestly, that sounds like the most idiotic design philosophy ever.
I don't like to bash FDev, and I do enjoy playing ED...sometimes.
But If they're actually going with that philosophy, then for the first time, I might be jumping on the "this game is doomed" bandwagon.

 

[Infidel Deity]

I think this is a chained reaction pattern we see here. I'm very pro FD and Elite Dangerous, it's the only space game I actually can play for a longer period of time.

FDEV made so many great things with the game, and we sometimes forget that. So before I start to list what I believe is wrong, let me list what that got right. (in no particular order)

1. The galaxy sim, it's just a masterpiece, not perfect but I enjoy it very much.
2. The Flight model, I just love it, spot on. Can be improved, but still very good and enjoyable.
3. The Sound, the sound in ED is out of this world, I can't praise the sound team enough.
4. Graphics, as the graphics are improving all the time, it gives me confidence that they will try to make the game as pretty as possible.
5. The Anaconda damage model, could we only have it on all our ships.
6. The SRV and SLF, I like those a lot, the driving model on the SRV is great and the SLF with it's NPC crew very enjoyable.
7. The NPC AI, yes here we now are on dangerous ground because many will probably say it socks, but remember that programming AI for dogfights is not an easy task, and I have yet to see the perfect NPC AI in the flight sim where you can dogfight. It's could be turned up a notch in my opinion.

8. The overall immersion factor when playing in the ED universe, it's good however also it's sword of damocles (I will return to that later)
9. Ship design, weapons loadout and possibilities to outfit your ship in general.
10. Commander creation tool, it's very good and a great foundation to build on.
11. The new camera suit.
12. Wings (buggy as it is, i'm still having fun with it.)

These are the main points to me why I play the game.


that out of the way, lets see what I'm not so fun of. I will try to be as specific as possible.

1. Basic game design decisions: with a huge 1:1 galaxy, the way we move around in 3303 is just lacking a lot of tools. Flight computers and or Crew members who can perform repetitive tasks.
FDEV could actually make a lot of fun gameplay around just that part.

2. Basic game design decisions: Power Play, a great idea, but clearly not working, When you can capture stations and outposts, this could easily be a lot of fun, however in it's current form, a few people like it, but it's not appealing to the masses.

3. Basic game design decisions: As mentioned by @OP all the systems are static, sure the numbers change but we can't really see it. Stations are the same as the were 2 years ago, nothing is changing. I was wondering for a long time, what would it take for my fraction to start building rings around my home station? I know now they will never do it, because it is not in the game.

4. Basic game design decisions: The Engineers was a great idea, I really love the bases, I like to go there and tinkle with my ship. The problem (TO ME) are the execution of the mechanics, I can't understand why we have all these great immersive assets and then RNG is just slammed in the player's face, FDEV did not even bother to hide it. I mean it's a casino with spinning wheels and fruit machine mechanics? Bad bad bad decision, just make an animation of a robot doing something and that would have been 1000 times better.

5. Basic game design decisions: CQC, why even spend DEV time on it? but when the decision was made, NPC opponents should have been in from day one, and it should have been incorporated into the main game.
There are so many things that could have been done with it, however it would take many pixels to describe it, so we leave that for another thread.

6. Basic game design decisions: Exploration, exploration in ED is as basic as it gets, in the DDF (now banned to the depth of dev hell) the game mechanics described was great, I don't know what happened but what we got was not exploration, it was a marathon of honk my planet.

7. Basic game design decisions: Trading, well I would not call it trading, more like more stuff around, ok ok ok it's trading but very basic form of trading. Why can't you open up a console in your ship and see the prices in other systems?
Why can't you buy and sell commodities via a trading hub connected to your ship? and why do you see black markets without even being a criminal? and in the galaxy map?? it must be because ....fun???

8. Basic game design decisions: Passengers, I really enjoy move imaginary meat cargo around, I actually do that for hours in PP3D(FSX) and also enjoy it in ED. Again something is missing and you need to add more to it yourself to make it more digestible. Adding more sounds related to actually carrying passenger would help, I'm doing it via VA, but it should have been in the game from day one. Also cabin crew, where are they? even in the 2001 movie they got cabin crew
Hiring a cabin crew, even if it's only one, would be fun, just look at the flight sims, they do it just fine, I really don't want another feature if it's just a barebone. Maybe FDEV should let 3rd party game developers make add ons to the game just like FSX are doing it?

9. Multi crew, well it just feel unfinished, and I will leave it at that.

10. Game design decisions: deviation too much from the lore, longtime players of any game mostly are those who ready and know a lot about the lore of a game, they are also those who invest most money in the long run, it seems that FD are making the same mistake other studios did in the past, i hope i'm wrong on that one.

Now I will go a play some Elite, because even with all the warts and bugs it's the only space game I can play more than just 20 - 100 hours.

I find this to be superbly written, from where I now stand.

I am not allowed to rep you at the moment, but I really wanted to.
If I could, you would have gotten more than one. [yesnod]

 

[Scrat]

I still enjoy the game but most of the time I just use the base game features. It is really needed to add more depth and interesting gameplay to the existing features.

Powerplay: Not interested in grinding merrits. How about interesting auto generated missions with reward depending on powerplay rank which help your power. Deliver/steal secret documents, transport diplomats/weapons, protect troop transports to fortify systems...

CQC: I really like it but it died because of the poor matchmaking

Horizons: Still missing atmospheric landings which I'm sure will come some time. In my opinion horizon should have fleshed out the gameplay for explorers.

Engineers: I like it but it is too difficult to get the materials you need when you need special ones. Good opportunity to implement player to player trading in market places and let players decide on the price(like eve trading).

Commanders: I'm not interested in multicrew but I understand others are. Holo me is a good start and needed for 'spacelegs'.

The fundament is there but now it is time to build someting on top of it.

 

[{SAS}Stalker]

Without wanting to focus entirely on PP I said ages ago in one of the feedback threads that I thought the pace of it was completely off. As it stands its just several greedy pigs nomming at a trough. To expand I always thought several things should have happened and the first phase of preparation would do nothing other than decide where expansion would occur, eg;

Phase 1 - nomination. Players simply nominate a system within reach of expansion, it could last for a period of 48 hours with a breakdown of the pros and cons of each system.

Phase 2 - preparation. military intervention, propaganda, trading under the banner of a power, perhaps a mini CG in the preparation system etc etc to ready the system for assimilation.

phase 3 - recovery. The termoil of political change (and the system political alignment should change with it) should devastate the system and require a significant amount of repair and defending from remaining previously aligned factions (yes let us whipe them out). Again perhaps via a series of PP CG spanning several weeks, this can continue in parallel to subsequent phases but the system should be relatively static from a power income pov until its fully recovered.

There were other phases but you get the picture, there was basically something for everyone to do.

 

[lysan]

I still enjoy the game but most of the time I just use the base game features. It is really needed to add more depth and interesting gameplay to the existing features.

Powerplay: Not interested in grinding merrits. How about interesting auto generated missions with reward depending on powerplay rank which help your power. Deliver/steal secret documents, transport diplomats/weapons, protect troop transports to fortify systems...

CQC: I really like it but it died because of the poor matchmaking

Horizons: Still missing atmospheric landings which I'm sure will come some time. In my opinion horizon should have fleshed out the gameplay for explorers.

Engineers: I like it but it is too difficult to get the materials you need when you need special ones. Good opportunity to implement player to player trading in market places and let players decide on the price(like eve trading).

Commanders: I'm not interested in multicrew but I understand others are. Holo me is a good start and needed for 'spacelegs'.

The fundament is there but now it is time to build someting on top of it.

When mentioning EvE I get the Evil eye twist

However yes, player to player trading in some situations would be great, like Eng materials. I could easily imagine a player owning a larger mining facility and could sell the raw materials to a player who owns a process plant somewhere.

 

[timbero]

How I feel joining MC now:

Press this

button 40 times and you're in (maybe)!

How I would like it to be:

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[LKx]

At least with MC they had to rework the netcode, so, even if it's obvious that they just want to bury it and forget about it, at least it did something good.

 

[masCh]

I think this is a chained reaction pattern we see here. I'm very pro FD and Elite Dangerous, it's the only space game I actually can play for a longer period of time.

FDEV made so many great things with the game, and we sometimes forget that. So before I start to list what I believe is wrong, let me list what that got right. (in no particular order)

1. The galaxy sim, it's just a masterpiece, not perfect but I enjoy it very much.
2. The Flight model, I just love it, spot on. Can be improved, but still very good and enjoyable.
3. The Sound, the sound in ED is out of this world, I can't praise the sound team enough.
4. Graphics, as the graphics are improving all the time, it gives me confidence that they will try to make the game as pretty as possible.
5. The Anaconda damage model, could we only have it on all our ships.
6. The SRV and SLF, I like those a lot, the driving model on the SRV is great and the SLF with it's NPC crew very enjoyable.
7. The NPC AI, yes here we now are on dangerous ground because many will probably say it socks, but remember that programming AI for dogfights is not an easy task, and I have yet to see the perfect NPC AI in the flight sim where you can dogfight. It's could be turned up a notch in my opinion.

8. The overall immersion factor when playing in the ED universe, it's good however also it's sword of damocles (I will return to that later)
9. Ship design, weapons loadout and possibilities to outfit your ship in general.
10. Commander creation tool, it's very good and a great foundation to build on.
11. The new camera suit.
12. Wings (buggy as it is, i'm still having fun with it.)

These are the main points to me why I play the game.


that out of the way, lets see what I'm not so fun of. I will try to be as specific as possible.

1. Basic game design decisions: with a huge 1:1 galaxy, the way we move around in 3303 is just lacking a lot of tools. Flight computers and or Crew members who can perform repetitive tasks.
FDEV could actually make a lot of fun gameplay around just that part.

2. Basic game design decisions: Power Play, a great idea, but clearly not working, When you can capture stations and outposts, this could easily be a lot of fun, however in it's current form, a few people like it, but it's not appealing to the masses.

3. Basic game design decisions: As mentioned by @OP all the systems are static, sure the numbers change but we can't really see it. Stations are the same as the were 2 years ago, nothing is changing. I was wondering for a long time, what would it take for my fraction to start building rings around my home station? I know now they will never do it, because it is not in the game.

4. Basic game design decisions: The Engineers was a great idea, I really love the bases, I like to go there and tinkle with my ship. The problem (TO ME) are the execution of the mechanics, I can't understand why we have all these great immersive assets and then RNG is just slammed in the player's face, FDEV did not even bother to hide it. I mean it's a casino with spinning wheels and fruit machine mechanics? Bad bad bad decision, just make an animation of a robot doing something and that would have been 1000 times better.

5. Basic game design decisions: CQC, why even spend DEV time on it? but when the decision was made, NPC opponents should have been in from day one, and it should have been incorporated into the main game.
There are so many things that could have been done with it, however it would take many pixels to describe it, so we leave that for another thread.

6. Basic game design decisions: Exploration, exploration in ED is as basic as it gets, in the DDF (now banned to the depth of dev hell) the game mechanics described was great, I don't know what happened but what we got was not exploration, it was a marathon of honk my planet.

7. Basic game design decisions: Trading, well I would not call it trading, more like move stuff around, ok ok ok it's trading but very basic form of trading. Why can't you open up a console in your ship and see the prices in other systems?
Why can't you buy and sell commodities via a trading hub connected to your ship? and why do you see black markets without even being a criminal? and in the galaxy map?? it must be because ....fun???

8. Basic game design decisions: Passengers, I really enjoy move imaginary meat cargo around, I actually do that for hours in PP3D(FSX) and also enjoy it in ED. Again something is missing and you need to add more to it yourself to make it more digestible. Adding more sounds related to actually carrying passenger would help, I'm doing it via VA, but it should have been in the game from day one. Also cabin crew, where are they? even in the 2001 movie they got cabin crew
Hiring a cabin crew, even if it's only one, would be fun, just look at the flight sims, they do it just fine, I really don't want another feature if it's just a barebone. Maybe FDEV should let 3rd party game developers make add ons to the game just like FSX are doing it?

9. Multi crew, well it just feel unfinished, and I will leave it at that.

10. Game design decisions: deviation too much from the lore, longtime players of any game mostly are those who read and know a lot about the lore of a game, they are also those who invest most money in the long run, it seems that FD are making the same mistake other studios did in the past, i hope i'm wrong on that one.

Now I will go a play some Elite, because even with all the warts and bugs it's the only space game I can play more than just 20 - 100 hours.

All of this, would make the game better.

Also the Engineer RNG, if I may suggest - a middle ground could be : just one roll based on the current engineering grade. For Grade 3 for example roll a dice to get a value between 70 and 90. From that roll, you adjust your min/max yourself but only up to that roll. You can save 5 points from the roll to random secondaries.

 

[Soon(TM)]

I personally suspect that there is a mole lurking at FD who doesn't want Elite to succeed, instead wants to push game damaging elements. It won't be pretty sight if no overhaul is done.

His name is: " if we can't put lazors on it it's not going in" Blandro No Romarko!

 

[SentineI]

that "Anaconda argument" gets old - some posts above someone did some math about your stated "a while". And how does that even matter when the novice now can just "leech" credits from winging up just as well?

I hadn't specifically see the "Anaconda argument" before, but I was picking an extreme/silly case - so doing maths to "disprove" it doesn't make much sense, as the point I was trying to make still stands: Excessively high rewards for a novice crew member (just because they happen to join a high-rank player in a big ship) is not desirable, because it just allows them to skip normal game progression (jumping to a disproportionately powerful ship).

Sure, credits are not everything in Elite Dangerous (real skill & in-game player ratings/rank also count for a lot), but newbie players will still end-up skipping part of the intended game, and thus run out of things to do in ED that much quicker.

 

[Ddtdmbow]

I mentioned it elsewhere but Elite: Dangerous' problem is really the lack of integration between gameplay "columns".

...

The game needs more interconnection these disparate systems. Have Power Play missions that are chained to surface missions (bring data for our faction to that station! now use it to do an assassination/skimmer massacre/etc!) resulting in naval rank progression. Have engineers ask me to multicrew-pilot the fighter for an NPC ship. Let's wing up for CQC and have a cool "sanctioned" PvP event. Have a NPC crew member give me a mission to hire him at a cheaper rate after he saw my CQC match.

There are so many fun bits in the game but instead of showing them off and inviting me to experiment with them, the game buries them. By inviting experimentation, you also get players to actually engage with these systems and see their true popularity. A game is not a collection of unit tests.

This, one thousand times. FDev needs to take a step back from new features and spend a good amount of time weaving the current features into a more cohesive package.

 

[mojonaut]

His name is: " if we can't put lazors on it it's not going in" Blandro No Romarko!

Or maybe " if we can't put lazors on it and sell it in the store it's not going in"

 

[CapuchinSeven]

Now I need to go dig up those streams and hear that in context. Because honestly, that sounds like the most idiotic design philosophy ever.
I don't like to bash FDev, and I do enjoy playing ED...sometimes.
But If they're actually going with that philosophy, then for the first time, I might be jumping on the "this game is doomed" bandwagon.

Sucks doesn't it, I'm the same. Reading that made me throw my arms up and think, damn.

- - - Updated - - -

This, one thousand times. FDev needs to take a step back from new features and spend a good amount of time weaving the current features into a more cohesive package.

Yup, big +1 from me on this as well.

 

[SentineI]

However yes, player to player trading in some situations would be great, like Eng materials. I could easily imagine a player owning a larger mining facility and could sell the raw materials to a player who owns a process plant somewhere.

I like this suggestion (as it gives players who enjoy collecting materials something extra to do with them), but I think the *idea* behind Engineer materials is to give all players an (additional) reason to land on planets & use the SRV. To prevent a player market from ruining this, I would suggest that the player market should only allow selling of UNcommon (or rare) materials, and possibly to set a minimum allowed price. Then all players still need to use SRV to get the basic materials, but for players who hate hunting for rare materials they can go to the player market instead.

 

[SentineI]

Now I need to go dig up those streams and hear that in context. Because honestly, that sounds like the most idiotic design philosophy ever.

Here's where (a rather frazzled) Sandro said it:
https://youtu.be/PhsH5U7tz4A?t=565
(maybe he says it clearer at another point?)

I don't know where David Braben is supposed to have confirmed this.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I hadn't specifically see the "Anaconda argument" before, but I was picking an extreme/silly case - so doing maths to "disprove" it doesn't make much sense, as the point I was trying to make still stands: Excessively high rewards for a novice crew member (just because they happen to join a high-rank player in a big ship) is not desirable, because it just allows them to skip normal game progression (jumping to a disproportionately powerful ship).

Sure, credits are not everything in Elite Dangerous (real skill & in-game player ratings/rank also count for a lot), but newbie players will still end-up skipping part of the intended game, and thus run out of things to do in ED that much quicker.

I don't understand the reason - I mean there are a load of other activities that earn more credits. And the cutoff doesn't just target novices, it targets anyone of lower rank than the helmsman.

 

[Cosmo]

Many people are concerned that Frontier abandons the old features that were added with previous updates and that they don't use the feedback to improve it. Frontier should put effort in making that better as well. Because it will improve the overall quality of the game.

Don't decide based on "it depends on how many people use the feature" because many people don't use it due to the lack of depth and such. Such as CQC would be used a lot more if it was integrated in the main-game so people can cue for a match while super-cruising. Adding bots to CQC would help to quickly fill up a match.