Yeah, the thing Denis is - ease of play and straightforwardness if that's a word . Running a niche faction is hard enough, when I discussed the direction of Maquis Haste left and then came in and started looking at the 3+ years of outdated rep sheet info, and that's the lead dev for crying out loud. There are close to no indies, every little thing we rely on that gets deleted like propaganda, proper smuggling or the ore pirating + hauling mechanic has a big impact.
Every extra step you need to do turns people off, and so does every workaround, this is a game after all, a game meant to be fun. Before you went to mining spots, took ore, and then took your pick from the fences and foreign sell points on where you will drop it off. It was exciting pirating ore and going to Omicrons and back, just like that, at a decent profit even on a 3k frigate. Now I need to go to Corse to create a refinery and build a PoB near the field, or to run a lossmaking operation where I go to Provence and then they go all the way back to the selling point. It's the same with LH and Cardamine, we actually met them often in Tau-37, and they ran that route often - but it got butchered.
The easy options are not here, the game turns into a "job" that makes sense to devs with every obstruction, extra step and complexity they add, which turns off the players who have better entertainment options. Mind you this was the patch quarter, the exciting quarter with new content. We will really see what impact the patch has had on the game in the next two.
. Running a niche faction is hard enough, when I discussed the direction of Maquis Haste left and then came in and started looking at the 3+ years of outdated rep sheet info, and that's the lead dev for crying out loud. There are close to no indies, every little thing we rely on that gets deleted like propaganda, proper smuggling or the ore pirating + hauling mechanic has a big impact.