I think ... I
hope they know how badly this has damaged their relationship with the players esp. the long term players, there have been so many commenting here in the forum it should be hard to miss.
It has seriously damaged my personal relationship with Elite. I took scrn shots last night of my current Cmdr's status in the Codex with a view to simply not returning again and re-awaking my focus with Visual Studio and my Raspberry Pi in my evenings and spare time.
And,
@Will Flanagan whilst I have you attention [ if I do
], I just want to mention that with over 4,500hours in the Elitian Universe I dislike how easy it has become to earn credits, how easy it has become to rank up etc. How a couple of hours of Void Opal mining can net 100's of millions of credits.
I
understand why, and I assume it is because there are many, many players out there who want to join the Elitian Universe play for a while, get the big ships and the high ranks and move on, but
I, as a long term [2nd life?] player don't like it. When I first started, gaining my next ship took many hours and days of play to work for my first Python and to work for my Anaconda and I felt like I had achieved it. It took a long time for me to achieve my Elite ranks and, again, it was an achievement.
That sense of achievement doesn't seem to be there anymore. I do not know whether I have simply burned out [note, I have been programming since the 1970's and still have not burned out on that] or if my in-game experience means I find everything easier anyway but the you tube videos like "get an Anaconda in 24 hours"
seem to indicate it is actually easier that it used to be.
There are some
wonderful game play ideas I have read, e.g. the recent one where instead of your SLF pilot dying they are captured by the attacking ship and you have to go, chase the pirate down and either pay a ransom or destroy said pirate and pick up your SLF pilot in an escape capsule. Yet depth of game play seems to be increasingly missing and grind [and I am specifically thinking of the click, click, click of engineering when traveling to an engineer and having an additional button along the lines of "use up all of my mats and engineer as far as you can" would remove some of the repeated clickety click grind 'game' play.
I thoroughly enjoy flying my spaceships and Elite seems unique and there are many other shoot-em-ups out there I just hope that Elite can return to being unique.
This long post is not a moan, I do not intend for it to be a grumble but it is written with a feeling of sadness for "my" elite that seems to have become lost.