I've been playing this game for almost 2 years now.
Appeal to authority as an opening statement
I'm still finding ways to love this game!
Appeal to accomplishment by implying that the rest of us are less than the OP.
First, what's wrong with the game, they are fixing, or at least trying to. Remember that these guys are a "small" company. They aren't EA or Activision where they have thousands of staff slaving away to bring you your AAA+++ super polished over 9000 games. They are making a serious awesome game without that kind of backing.
Given that the company has published that they have a worth in excess of 300 MILLION and that they just had a new building made, the fact that they have a total of three active projects, and the fact that they just published 2.75 MILLION licenses sold for Elite: Dangerous (a larger number than the population of the state of Delaware or Maine by a factor of more than 2), I would be inclined to disagree that they are "small".
As for a comparison between EA and Frontier, this is rather a
False Equivelence. EA hires teams as needed, Frontier is a dedicated entity. That is why EA cannot maintain consistency, they do not retain the same team between product because the only permanent employees are administrative, not development. That means that Frontier is actually MORE engaged than EA.
Second, about whining for what we don't have. If I remember correctly, the devs of Frontier have a 10 year/season plan for this game. We can't get it all at once!
Referring to feedback as whining... While the company may, or may not, have a ten year plan, the lack of transparency in laying out parts of it that will not compromise the story line do not encourage an active and generally eager community to patience. Given the lack of communication in that regard, people are providing their own input on what they would like to see.
The fact that Frontier is not generally active in the forums to manage that input means that the community attempts to manage themselves, resulting in a feedback process without controls.
Third, for the ones saying that it's simple to code X and Y... you try coding an entire universe and then say that it is easy.
Another False Equivalence, implying that you have to rewrite the entire code base to make incremental changes. The fact that large parts of the game are procedural means that changing the procedure changes those parts of the game without requiring the developer to actively touch individual elements, aka the "beige plague".
Certainly, coding interactive landscape, even procedurally generated ones, takes time to create, but making changes to extant material is not nearly as involved, and, if the programming is properly modular, means you are working on small segments instead of one entire mass of code.
Honestly guys, I grew up in the day and age of the original Wing Commander, the X-Wing and Tie Fighter series, and compared to what we had back then, this is a dream!!!
An expansion of the same Appeal to Authority that opened the dialog, and even more problematic on several levels.
First, the hardware and the software of the day did not support this level of play. Hand in hand with that is the fact that a lot of the ability of this game is founded in the video hardware, which means that Frontier is not responsible for it.
Secondly, the game's interactivity is founded in internet networking capability, which Frontier had nothing to do with. Certainly, they created their own instancing, but IP is not their animal.
Lastly, throwing the fact that you are "old school" around in a community where many people have played the original game on old hardware, and more have played the games you mention, is not going to get much in the way of wow factor.
Just enjoy the dream guys! Enjoy the dream!
Dreams are not reality, and suppressing requests for improvement does not encourage participation.
Signed,
Someone that went to school with the AppleII