Know what the easy solution is that should have been there since day 1? Wing missions. Something that's actually scaled to 4 players in their own ships tackling an objective. 2...fucking...years and the closest we get to an incentive is "Your bounties are worth the full amount now!" No excuse.
You know, I agree with all your people's complaints against Elite Dangerous. Except for one thing:
just should've done X, would be
easy etc..
I doubt it ever is easy. For instance: I'm all for Wing missions. But easy? The poor excuse that goes for "missions" in Elite Dangerous today would hardly make for a good Wing mission, because it's usually 90% supercruising around looking for something and 10% normal flight gameplay, where actial Wing interaction and cooperation is required. Sound like a receipe to lull your wing players into a sleep.
Also the jealous guarding of the status quo, as with the multicrew payouts and earlier the rubbish zero sum inventory management waiting game, aka ship transfer delays, is
pathetic. If the game designers are so concerned that players might skip the early game experience, they should make that experience worthwhile, wo players won't want to skip it. Players have the option todaywith all the credit exploits and will always have it, the way Elite generates missions half randomly where tight dev supervision and balance is impossible. At some point, the devs and also the players should realize something: Agency belongs into each individual player's hands. If players want to skip the ridiculous loading screen grind that is ship relocation, they bloody ought to be able to do so, without having an hourclock shoved into their face. If players want to skip early game progression, they ought to be able to do so, without asinine restrictions like "only 3" limits for mission types.
Edit: Anybody else here playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild? Frontier could take a very close look at that game and try to apply some of the designs that make exploration so bloody engaging there to Elite. Maybe a game that models a whole galaxy would not look like an amateur job because exploration revolves around watching spinning doughnuts, next to a game that sports as little as a ~6km*9km map and provides 50-100h of actually feeling like you're exploring a world.
I have been hoping for wing missions forever but i don't know if they are ever coming. Fdev seems to be really scared of introducing features that alienate people who play in solo, it's probably why we have such a weak implementation of multicrew.
They're also mortally afraid of competency in game design or are simply incapable of it. When you literally place a minute counter in front of a player for inventory management, you ought to reconsider your choice of game design for a career path.
