If you have also recently returned to Discovery like a lapsed addict, please share your own experience below. Call it a public journal. I'm obviously too entrenched a veteran to give New Player Experience feedback (although I have some suggestions), but the population of inactive Discovery veterans would not be an insubstantial boon to the server's player count if they could be enticed to return.
Aside from some minor awkwardness to do with a ship in the Transit system that underwent an engine swap and a Hegemon I couldn't dig out of Tau-23 (I just deleted it; I'm not that hard up for cash), I haven't experienced anything game-breaking. Had some hiccups the other day with the mission boards, but the server has reset since and I've been able to do missions again.
PVE Encounters
I've done a fair amount of reading about the capital ship changes (some of which were in progress when last I was active), and I've tinkered a bit with my Scylla. As of yet I haven't had any serious PVP encounters; my time zone is not conducive to meeting many players. Considering the available rewards for PVE these days, I assume that PVE is considered a legitimate gameplay loop now. I probably look pathetic struggling to manage my powercore against a few flights of NPC BHG VHFs, but I won't claim to be a good (or even decent) cap player.
The difference I feel from a PVE perspective is that previously I was able to fend off a flight of badly-piloted NPC gunboats in my Scylla, whereas now I feel such a strain on my powercore and survivability that I've had to abort a few missions.
I hear you, yes—missions vs. gunboats and capital ships are intended to be a team effort—but as usual it's the assembly of a team that poses the challenge. I've had an easier time vs. VHFs with a Mule; I'm certainly not killing any gunboats with a freighter (or at least, not quickly), but the small size and high maneuverability of the humble freighter makes it altogether better for this kind of shenanigans. Even the relatively low-threat PVE zone off the trade lane in Pennsylvania is a real pain for me in a cruiser, but in a freighter, I can evade the gunboats and kill the fighters.
Do cruisers have a role in PVE? Am I just bad? I don't know what the answer is here. I imagine they work better in a PVP situation where enemies don't mindlessly rush you and dump infinite streams of plasma into your shields—i.e. a strategic environment where kiting actually makes sense—but for someone just trying to get a feel for the behavior of the different cruiser weapons, it's difficult to find a meaningful testing ground that won't eat me alive.
I also really don't like the removal of engine kill from cruisers (and I think other capital ships). I read the rationale as to its removal; I just don't like the way it feels. I'm accustomed to my Z key behaving a certain way, and trying to split my muscle memory between ships that can use it and ships that can't is hard after all this time.
Travel
I got to have a look around in Earhart and a couple of the systems it was connected to at the time. It's rare for me to have a new experience in Freelancer, but the spooky pylon and the engine effects were exciting and interesting.
I don't know whether this is technically feasible, but it'd be a nice quality of life feature if the "navmap not available" screen could at least auto-plot my entry point—just a waypoint would do fine. Getting lost in space is fun until you've been looking for the exit for so long that you give up and reveal the hidden systems on the forum navmap.
Copernicus's blackout field had me reaching for my brown pants, so that was cool. Overall I've been liking the attention to freighters. There are enough unstable jump holes and interesting backdoor routes to make trading in a freighter feel fun even with ordinary commodities, and the engine upgrade for freighters for that higher cruise speed is a nice touch.
Loadouts
This is a mixed bag. I'm sure there are loads of people jumping for joy that the vast swath of both faction-specific and civilian weaponry covers a much more complete possibility space of refire–damage type–projectile speed combinations, but I find the equipment selection to be overwhelming—and more practically, very irritating to scroll through without some ability to filter. It's helpful that I can mount basically any civilian weapon anywhere and mount faction-specific guns on bases of those factions, but I don't even want to imagine trying to work out what's optimal for a particular ship.
I think it would be helpful for ships to come bundled with weapons that are sane defaults, but I recognize that there may be some tech cell irritations when someone buys a ship that's 100% to their ID and its bundled guns are 75%. It's cognitively easier to think "oh, this loadout is mostly fine, but I'd like a Wardog instead of a Seeker" and just swap the one part, rather than every ship purchase becoming a game of loadout micromanagement. (I imagine this would be helpful for new players too.)
I feel like I never have any idea what to do with the heavy weapon slots, so I usually just cram more (V)HF guns into them.
MIssiles seem useful in that, for the first time in my Discovery experience, they actually seem to track their targets now, and the reduced volume of countermeasures and cruise disruptors makes it so that it's not a matter of if the missile will hit, but when.
I've been enjoying the selection of <=3.6K transports. It's a bit of a problem how many I've bought, but with the changes to the human cargo commodities, I couldn't help but buy myself a yacht to cart them around in.
Economy
Maybe it's just the /restart configurations of a lot of my ships, but I feel like half the commodities I pick up have their best sell price at Bornholm. Seems odd, but it's probably nothing.
Commodities having different volumes keeps things interesting, and the military salvage bonuses for small craft is a good bit of extra cash when I'm pewing stuff at a trade lane, but I feel a distinctly missed opportunity. NPC cargo piracy was a workable (if not optimal) means of profit in previous mod versions, but the most interesting thing I've been able to do in that regard is hunt VIPs with my Pilgrim Liner. Everything else is H-Fuel and Crew, which pay well, but an idea I find interesting is the possibility of supplying a POB (in whole or in part) with pillaged goods, but I haven't seen any NPC transports or freighters carrying anything other than what is essentially Discovery's version of vendor trash.
I mean to emphasize the PVE aspects of the game because, in a low-population time zone, it's nice to have something productive to do while on my way to (or while waiting for) other players, and just doing trade loops in a transport means I usually just pass by other players for a few seconds—often not even long enough to type out a message in local chat before they're off scanners again.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
