correct. features will be added over time. i've always argued hard that they should have put basic co-op multiplayer features in: wings, shared bounties and missions, friends/wing members as selectable destinations, etc.
sadly they didn't add those yet. i think many of those features are also quite simple in their code. even if they just re-enabled the distress beacon feature... that would at least help us find our friends easily.
anyway what my friend and i do now is take turns putting in the last shot on npcs when bounty hunting at the same location. we have also turned off "reports crimes against me" in the options you have on the right menu inside your ship. this way we can shoot each other without becoming wanted. what's been annoying is when we go to a planet with multiple resource extraction sites. they aren't numbered so we have a hard time explaining which one we've gone to.
following low energy wakes is not terrible, but not easy enough either... if you need to go help a friend and you haven't actually seen their wake from interdiction (or there wasn't one because they weren't interdicted) or you can't figure out which wake was theirs because there can be many... they're just out of luck.
frontier truly needed to add maybe another week's worth of time coding these basic features. i'm not even saying they needed to be complete. they just had to hold us over for a little while. because the code is really really close to there, right? #1 we had distress beacons -- they were useful! AND we now know the game mechanics and code allow for something similar. #2 we have the sense of color-coding ships on radar (green are friendly ... why on earth not making a purple grouping for friends? to match the purple comms color). #3 we have the option to not report crimes against us...why on earth can't that flag in the code be set JUST for specific groups? ie. wings/friends/players in your private group even.
unless they are terrible programmers...adding more multiplayer functionality should be pretty easy because they've already coded some of those features elsewhere in their game. it is of course completely possible that they don't code in an abstract way and are left to repeat themselves in the code quite often (which makes maintaining the code more difficult, longer testing, and identifying/fixing bugs take longer). i'm hoping (and assume based on how nice the game runs) they are good programmers.
instead, they went for building a single player game that requires an online connection in the meantime. which also upset users. they aren't exactly the best at listening to the needs of their fan base unfortunately. they need someone who knows something about marketing and product design to hop on board over there. desperately.
