Persistence.
Not having it, damages the game experience in so many ways IMHO. Such as....
* A player pulls you into combat. You nail them, take 3 of their cargo pods and jump out. Their remaining pods should be available for others to plunder. But, the players ship, and its pods will be shortly pruned from the game.
* You defeat a ship in combat. Its hull floats in space, ready to be picked up and repaired or scavenged for resources. Except you cant do this, as the ship will disappear as soon as you jump out from the combat location. POOF, Anaconda hull gone.
* You discover a base / mine /crashed ship on a planet. It should then be available for all others to find. Post the coords, and others can find that same location.
* You arrange with a friend to drop 40 tons of gold, in a canyon on planet x as payment for their services. So you do. They go there, and the pods are gone.
Anyway, you get the gist.
To this end, a work colleague pointed out this new game sub-engine. Its called spacialOS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7RCFoY2d-k
Its goal is to allow for such persistence in shared environment games. So I guess lack of persistence is a thing, to the extent these guys have tackled it...
To expand on this. One of the things I really liked in Civilization is the phase of the game, where the whole map is black, and as you move around you discover hills and rivers, and resources, such as diamonds, gold, silver etc. Now ED features SPACE exploration, you can find solar systems, planets, moons, and these all persist. And on airless planets you can also explore, but.. everything you discover right now, apart from bases, and barnacles, are ALL ephemeral. Just think how much more fund exploration would be, if you could discover items, on planet surfaces, and those items persisted, and could even be rewarded for discovery!! Im thinking about, again, super large gold/copper/silver etc veins, nuggets. Large outcrops of diamond. Crashed ship hulls, ancient alien structures.
Lets have planets be blank, before we discover them, with procedural, and PERSISTENT locations to be discovered.