The reality is it can take months (or even years) for developers to write code for what a dedicated player can chew through in an hour or 2. The only way the can stop this is to either time gate it (which i personally hate) or make it so you need 100 mats (or 5mil credits) to aquire, hence grind if you want everything quickly. The other option is of course to allow players to purchase credits/mats (p2w imo) like some games do.
There's a bit of a third option here that I would more expect from a game like ED: Sandboxed gameplay.
In the ooooold MMO days there was a genre that contrasted the theme park genre of Everquest and it's descendents: proper Sandbox games. Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, etc. These games didn't have nearly as much grind as many modern games, but players would stay engrossed for years and years (some still playing Ultima to this day). I personally played Shadowbane for 6 years, logging thousands of hours, and you could max level a character in 2 days and get competitive gear from vendors using gold you picked up leveling. If I made a character on Monday, I'd be competitive PvPing with it by Wednesday.
Ultimately, those games came down to "make your own fun", and set the system up that players could alter the world in different ways. The goal of this was that if each player was doing their own thing, they'd each play a game of "tug of war" with the game system and constantly be pulling stuff back forth, creating a never-ending battle that kept everyone entertained and engaged.
ED doesn't really do that. Nothing you do over course of your gameplay really matters in the context of the universe. This is a space "sandbox" in terms of the game not being on rails, but by way of you having many toys with which to modify the sandbox? You don't have a lot to work with. Powerplay doesn't affect much at all; BGs affects some prices and that's about it; Thargoid incursion is more like "Thargoid event happening in x solar system, come play if you want but otherwise don't worry about it!"; The "war" between factions is just for GalNet story and conflict zone farming purposes. Etc etc.
For ED, I had kind of expected entering the game that this would have more sandbox elements to it than it does. I don't dislike ED, but I feel like it has so much lost potential in the fact that players are constantly online, but not for any real purpose. It would be really cool to see that purpose expanded, so that players can start to entertain themselves beyond just farming for cash and mats.
Last edited: