FDev sincerely has made a great game here, but they are repeatedly tone deaf to how the players are actually playing the game.
1 - Player made factions became a thing that brought people together to expand their name-imprint in the bubble and it's more popular and fun than the mindless boring slog of carrying whatsits from port a to port b for Powerplay. Powerplay is not fun.
2 - CQC actually IS fun, but not being able to get matches is a self destroying loop. This should be done "in-game" as an e-Sport, with the ability to log in remotely to fighters at ports, and add computer controlled enemies at least for the lower levels so it's always possible to get matches. Extend this to races and on foot CQC, with the idea being that you're projecting into a SLF or cloning or whatever and you have "sports" that people could even watch or bet on.
3 - The Thargoid war is exciting and fun... but like everything else in the game, anything FDev adds must be done with a slap in the face to players... i.e. to make progress, you have to do it so many times that you hate doing it. You can do it, have fun, and NOT make progress. But if you want to MAKE PROGRESS you must do the game loop 10,000 times.
There's someone who works at FDev who insists on punishing the players... and while I agree that things being too easy in a game kill the enjoyment... things being too grindy, or forcing players to re-log or fly up into orbit and re-land 453,345,234 times to get a tiny level up is the game design philosophy here.
The Thargoid war finally is balanced to the point where humans are winning some systems back and losing ground at a slower rate... but that's AFTER players killed how many millions and millions of Thargoid ships? Some of us have restarted and would still like to level up and kill Thargoids, so it's good that it's still available... all the options should stay available to players.
Anyway, if you take away things that players enjoy doing, and replace them with more non-rewarding grindy things, more players will leave. People have been talking about the grind being "good to a point" but way overdone in Elite for years, but every time FDev puts out a new feature, it's with as much or more grind than ever. There's a game designer at FDev who is incapable of hearing this constructive criticism and adapting just a bit to it... so every time, 100% of the time, it goes like this where a new thing is put out into the game, and then they have to scale back the grind from hellish eternity to simply extreme purgatory.
