So, we’re a few weeks into this season and I would like to post my feedback based upon my experiences. These are my opinions and noone else’s, but anyone should feel free to weigh in with your experiences as they will definitley differ from mine. I won’t touch on every little thing but will hit the high points, as I know RexXxuS is busy trying to get the commodity/mission stuff ironed out.
Patreon QoL Features:
So, I’m still trying out some of the new toys. I haven’t bothered yet with the OAM to OCD yet, but the features continue to improve and are staying QoL only, great job there. It was very nice unpacking my OCD this season without any cooldown on the command, I’ll say that for sure.
The ‘sandwich’ planets:
I’ll probably be the minority in saying this, but I love this idea and it must’ve taken a ton of work to do it. I like that it requires a little more thinking to assault a base than just the idea of digging next to it and causing a bunch of lag in the process. A rather big problem is the mesh blocking deposits on just about every sandwich planet (Armageddon, Titan, and especially Eton come to mind), perhaps the intent there is that those planets become autominer planets, being that Eton gives a lot of them out, that’s probably the intent. The first ever deposit I mined on a sandwich planet had a little hole in the mesh above/near the deposit, and I was quite disappointed when I didn’t find the same on the other deposits and had to dig for a long time out of the way for a stack and a half of resources.
I don’t use autominers and mined for many hours last season, so the autominer planets aren’t my thing and probably never will be. Adding in the mineable crust to planets with the mesh blocking deposits is a nice touch and a way to offset the inability to mine deposits, but also takes away from the experience of people who just like to jump in the cockpit and go out and mine. I’m not sure how much it helps with performance on the server side, but on the client side I see really no difference.
I guess in short I think the sandwich idea is great but there may be a few planets in which it’s implementation could be reconsidered, Eton especially. Some folks love setting out autominers and picking them up before a terrain wipe (sometimes even within the same 24 hour period), but I just don’t. I was excited to mine that planet dry of resources, but that didn’t happen. A great idea that looks clean, but may need re-consideration on where it is implemented.
Missions and overall loot:
I have noticed a HUGE decline in loot reward this season from alien containers with RNG based loot. It used to be that I would run through things and hope the RNG Gods bless me with an epic heavy armor. Loot and Survive was my favorite for that, but I have been very disappointed that the RNG Gods seem to have left behind a lesser diety in charge of the loot tables before giving notes to him on how it used to be.
Running through and getting some epic weapons and stuff I didn’t really need out of a few containers and then finding that awesome loot drop from a container after looting a bunch of houses in loot and survive is what made it so much fun for me. Now, I really only go there for some shooting and not so much looting, unless I need some auto-miner cores.
The static loot container missions I’ve encountered are just as rewarding as they were before, though, so at least there is that.
I think the RNG is an Eleon thing, but it sure is a step backward whatever happened there this season.
The Factories:
The factories have a great design and the way in which the land claim is unlocked is fun and makes the game seem more interactive. The trader within is lacking from my perspective in it’s content. I understand that the idea behind it is probably putting a base credit value on an item based on it’s components, multiplying that by it’s craft time, and then giving it a final price tag. It is a great idea in theory, but in-game, if I am already in a PvP hotzone in a factory with the proper reputation, I did not visit the trader to purchase things I can just craft for myself.
Reputation:
I dislike everything that is tied to reputation, literally everything, but that is probably just me. 
Having something behind the ‘reputation wall’ means that I have to grind a certain reputation in order to move on to whatever my next goal is afterward, that is fine and I like that part… Pretty standard MMO stuff there, right? The thing that makes me hate it is that my reputation is tied to my entire faction’s actions. So, if I get Zirax reputation up to go visit a trader and someone accidentally shoots Zirax in the wild or decides they want to take a mining trip, I’m now dead and my entire reputation grind has to be started from scratch.
That isn’t the worst part of it in my opinion. If I want to experience something tied to reputation, I have to take away from another players experience to do so, ex: if I want to visit a Zirax trader, I have to tell the guy who loves running Zirax that he can’t do so until I’ve gotten what I want, and go back and forth with that every day. Multiply that experience by 50 players in a faction, and it’s downright tedious. This is Eleon’s doing overall and may be intentionally how they want the reputation system to work, but that doesn’t make me like it any more than I already do.
I don’t know of a solution here but that’s my feedback on that subject.
Eton:
I’ve done this one a few times, it’s great, but really only available for a few of the larger groups to fully experience. It is a very challenging task to take Eton in itself for the first time, especially under the threat of PvP, and a rewarding feeling to put in the work to take the planet, get the treasure trove of loot in the POI (SO MUCH LOOT!), and take the planet for myself for the next 18 hours. However, unless I were to carry a small faction, they don’t stand much of a chance of ever experiencing those rewards, and by carrying them I have taken away the feeling of victory, that they have put in effort and gotten equal reward.
Don’t get me wrong, taking a whole planet in a PvP space and holding it is fun and rewarding, but Eton is PvE with a threat of PvP action, not really 100% PvP, and it’s such a great experience. Sort’ve like the Loot and Survive mission, if I am there by myself it’s just some PvE action, but if someone comes behind me I may be dealing with a player sniper and some drones.
I don’t know if this is possible, but it may be beneficial to include alliances in the action here. Alliances CAN do the initial battle against the POIs, but can’t share the planet afterward. If alliances could be included in ownership of the planet rather than just the faction, they may be encouraged to do it… it may even give smaller (even PvE) factions a reason to form an alliance and go collectively take something down together.
Toxicity:
Last season we had a group of people being extremely toxic in chat beyond PvP trash talk. By extremely toxic things I mean things like personal attacks, sexism/rasicm, lots of cursing (it still happens that folks avoid the filters on the last one). It was really no different in the previous season, in the first few weeks of my being on HWS there was an extremely toxic player who was banned for being such (mostly personal attacks), so something needed to be done.
What has been done is basically making PvP banter 100% against the rules. Yes I know it’s not 100% against the rules to talk about PvP, but if you do, you’ll be accused of being toxic. If the enemy talks some trash related to a fight, that may be considered toxic, and if I fire back, that may also be considered toxic. That leads to really only one solution, no PvP chat at all to be safe. The idea of implementing the toxicity rule is a great move, but the actual implementation of the rule has caused the toxic players to get exactly what they wanted, to always be correct in the trash they talk because noone is allowed to talk back, the rule is basically undefined. So, as a result, I need to stay out of #pvp-chat and mute all players who I might see in PvP every time I log in to the game, and if there is an instance of someone pointing out a percieved weakness, I can’t rebut them for fear of being banned. That’s boring and an extra step every time I log in (since Eleon can’t properly implement client side perma-mute), but I tire of hearing folks say to stop being toxic each and every time there is a little PvP trash talk, so I guess that’s the routine for now, very sadly.
Supergates:
I don’t really know what to do here. Sometimes the mechanic of the supergate to block a player from leaving if they are not alone works, and sometime it doesn’t. Since this is so RNG and lag/ping based I’d just remove the mechanic and re-enable k-warp so that you can at least look in which direction they warped and give chase if you’d like, rather than staying as close as possible to them as they run to the supergate to prevent them from running, only to see that they manage to escape anyway. Again, probably a minority in this but I’d like to be certain I can’t let that player reach a supergate or else, rather than staying close to them to find out that’s the way it works in practice anyway. Giving chase through the universe seems much more fun to me overall, anyway.
Kill boards:
I personally don’t care too much for the kill boards, you simply need to join the FPS event with a few friends, rack up some kills, and you’re on the board. PvP kills in the wild are much more rare and take more difficulty to obtain, so where you say ‘Kill Board’, I see ‘FPS Leaderboard’.
I guess that’s enough for now, more to come later on, especially after things are completely implemented for the season.
