So here's what I don't get. Why do the anti-money people think getting enough cash to buy whatever you want is "winning" the game? From my perspective, that's the exact point when you actually get to START playing. You can finally tinker with the incredibly deep ship customization to your hearts content. You can focus on the BGS without having to worry about what missions or systems or activities pay the most. You can engage in PvP and actually up your fighting skill without having to stress about rebuys.
Having cash unlocks the full potential of the game, and its dumb to lock that potential behind a series of torturously repetitive tasks.
I made my money back in the good old days of Quince passenger missions, so this while mining thing doesnt affect me personally, but I really feel for the folks hurt by it.
Not really sure how me owning 18 ships with assets of around 6.5 billion makes me 'anti-money'. However to answer your question, your post says it all really.
'Quince passenger missions' and
'torturously repetitive tasks'.
Your mindset is that of a grinder.
'I want X, I know Y pays a lot right now, so I will do Y over and over again until I have the money I want and because I find that really boring, I want a lot of money for it to compensate me for having to do it.' Or at least that's what the example you chose and your language suggests.
I've never spent
any time in the game performing
'torturously repetitive tasks' because I never spent time spamming the crap out of things like Quince passenger missions. If I get bored doing something in the game, I do something else. Or play something else. Or read a book. I already have a job, I play games to escape from that, not double down on it.
More to the point, I'm not really sure how being able to regularly bag around 15-20m for an hour's gameplay, as you can in the game today without even thinking about void opal or painite mining with daft prices, represents any sort of barrier to fully engaging with the game. I mean seriously, you can literally make more credits by just flying around the bubble with a discovery scanner these days than missions (other than now fixed exploits/unintended consequences/whatever) paid for the vast majority of the time I've played the game. Anybody who is 'hurt' by losing the ability to haul in around 200m credits an hour from mining needs to give their head a wobble in my opinion, it's absolutely absurd to suggest that's required to provide a sensible pace of progression.
That's without even getting into the fact that the only people who will be 'hurt' by this to begin with are those whose idea of gameplay is following step-by-step instructions in a youtube video. As someone (Jmanis I think) pointed out earlier in the thread, people who care to actually understand the game and gameplay will probably be too busy engineering their own private gold rushes in out-of-the-way systems to be too worried about it. It's hardly unfair to expect a player to take the trouble to understand basic concepts of a game in order to progress in it, if somebody can't be bothered doing that I don't really understand why they want to play the game to begin with.
In short, I have no idea why you think the game only starts when you have a boatload of credits. For me, the game started when I started playing it in a Sidewinder. If I hadn't enjoyed the experience of incrementally improving my ship, then trading up to a better one, I'd have quit after twenty hours tops.
I
don't think the pacing of the game back when it took players a year to get into an Anaconda was right; I know some players loved that and yearn for it again but for me, you can't pitch a mass market game with progression that slow. We're light years away from that today though. You can make the credits for a fully A-spec Asp or a stock Python (around 55m in both cases) in a few hours without needing any super-special knowledge, youtube videos or anything else which seems more than reasonable to me. That's been the case since the day they took the rank locks off missions, which was update 2.1 if I recall correctly. None of the grindy aspects that people complain about today (obtaining engineering materials, guardian components etc) have anything to do with credits and credits won't speed any of them up.
The full potential of the game is unlocked when you have ships capable of doing anything. As I pointed out above, you can do literally anything in a Cobra Mk3 other than launch an SLF. Having a bigger ship does
not create more gameplay. The concept of ship progression has already become largely redundant since you can get yourself into a high-end medium ship like a Krait, Python or Challenger in a week tops, even if you're completely new to the game and know next to nothing about it. Removing the rank lock from missions in update 2.1 did that. Just doing elite ranked surface scan missions where the only threat is usually a couple of skimmers and maybe a turret that you can just drive away from in your SRV pays over a million per mission plus high grade engineering materials in many cases; you can pick those up for fun and complete them in ten minutes. That's just one example.
I played for
a couple of months before I was able to consider ships like that and I found that entirely reasonable, not least because by the time I was able to afford one, I also knew how to use it. As soon as you have a ship like that, your ability to earn more credits increases significantly anyway and it's all good.
Note - I'm not trying to judge you or your opinions here. I think it's fair to say we probably disagree about this topic but I'm just telling you what I think. You can think what you like about it. I do think my own opinion is closer to that of the game's developers though and as I said earlier, it doesn't actually matter what
any of us think when you stack it up against that.
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