Impressions of 5.0 to date

[Lemon]

Battleships - horrible anti fun changes to movement, cores, fail.

PvE - big flop, encounters are a non functional concept due to being group oriented ( battlezones a single person could start, grind in one place, snowball more and more people, leading to much easier grinding off peak on low player counts) but breaking on higher server load that happens as low as 18 players now.
We are back to missions, but these are not designed well yet in terms of balance, there are also no clear systems like old delta where 4 factions had top tier missions with all overlapping mission zones that lead to PvP

GBs - big win, huge fun, annihilator is so epic brings the FUN to FUNboat

Systems - big win, surprisingly so, we were fearing huge deletions and lack of content, Earhart, hazards, turns out besides the disaster that PvE is aside, the systems are mostly well done, with great additions like Earhart concepts.

Story - underwhelming development levels really given the time skip and time IRL that passed for story to flesh out regions and update Infocards, but there has been a big change with Phil and Jammi only very recently who are actually capable of using the community and focus on quality control instead of pushing in their own pixels and ideas. Work in progress ™ that fills me with great optimism.


JDs
Good concept, but @Aingar , you make them less usable because of the restrictions on jumping back and 3 systems. That unstable JDs don't count sucks, that you can't jump to one place and then back does too. It makes sense on paper, is bad for gameplay and an annoyance that makes the cool concept actually worse off and less used than JDs before - this is fixable.


Cloaks
- fine with transport fix

Snubs
- all good, more fun overall

Econ
- feels very much still unfinished, very few circular viable routes, smuggling still sucks.


PoBs
- the refineries just confuse me and I still don't understand how to make the one I have work

Personal Impact
Overall, I play way less as someone who was a heavy BS player who focused on PvE and fleet fights , JD raids. This patch is basically destructive for players like me, many play less or have considered quitting, Slow BS movements that are unfun to handle outside of fights, cores that let you fire 2 secondaries when drained at a time, flopped main PvE concept (sorry Titan, that's just a fact), smuggling is weaker and not well done yet so less stuff to patrol for in e.g. Liberty when I do play snubs. I basically just use BC as missile launchers.

Only thing that does want to make me play are the new Novas - turns out they are a much bigger meme than before, hard to hit but when you do you get to watch the guy limp to base and dock, losing all guns just to avoid giving a blue

But yeah, overall the patch on me personally is definitely a big net negative on wanting to log and play after the new system stuff and ships additions stop being novel. It basically will make me focus on factions and running stuff, events, and enabling players who do enjoy the logging instead.