>>14088301
The game was better in the beta, honestly. They could have taken it many directions but the direction they did take it ended up being horribly not fun and gets worse every patch.
Nowadays there's a lot of tedium, especially in travelling, but I think the biggest problem with the game is that they made the game a linear grind progression for stronger ships which lead to amplified rewards and some truly massive amounts of cash (and costs for very expensive ships) and then give you nothing to do with your huge stacks of money.
I hope I'm making sense here because I want to compare their progression to another MMO that did it in a very smart way keeping the game fresh while still having incentives to grind, that game being Guild Wars. Now in Guild Wars you could get to a max level character (20) in a relatively short period of time. You had further progression by acquiring new skills, but this was mostly horizontal progression and just gave you more variety of playstyles. (A large reason they were able to keep the game pretty balanced was that they used virtual servers so they could push out updates rapidly without taking the servers down, unlike Frontier who can only update ED a few times a year and so ED is an unbalanced mess). The other progression was in elite armour, but this was purely cosmetic and didn't provide a gameplay advantage. Some elite armour was extremely expensive and existed largely for prestige. You could also sink cash on expensive dyes. But these didn't raise your earning ability. If you grinded or traded a ton you could get something rare and fancy like Obsidian Armour which looked cool and made you stand out in a crowd and got people envious, but it didn't let you gain money any faster and accordingly it didn't reduce the value of any other reward you were aiming for, whereas in ED once you get the fancy expensive ship you can now get all the other shit pretty easily because that ship lets you grind faster and accordingly all the stuff you can get in the game becomes too easily attainable and worth so much less.
So to recap the ED progression:
>start out in a cheap small ship
>grind to a more expensive small ship that can grind faster
>grind to a medium ship that can grind even faster
>grind to a large ship that can grind even faster
>grind out engineering upgrades to grind faster
>you now have nothing to do, can't grind for skins because they're cash shop bullshit
If ED had progression the way GW does:
>start out in a cheap shitty small ship
>grind out to a "standard" small, medium, or large ship that'll serve as a baseline for the rest of the game
>from here on the amount you can grind doesn't change much beyond improvements in player skill because all the ships are relatively balanced in capabilities
>you can grind to outfit your ship with a variety of gear adding different playstyles, but not necessarily making it more powerful, so if you focus on say a shield tank then you have less power for weapons, or for engines; if you focus on a heavy hitter then you're going to have to miss out on something else, like defenses, instead of ED-style just becoming godly at everything
>you can grind for cosmetic upgrades as well, such as different paint designs and hull textures, some fancy/cool ones being very expensive but only earnable via ingame credits
>because your standard ship is as powerful as it gets, you can't be grinding millions at a time, the progression you'd get in old ED in a Viper or whatever is about where it tops out
body too long, contd