-->Grind Does Not Equal Interesting Game Play...

[Wraith_Magus]

I think people are focusing a bit too much on the trees and missing the forest when they talk about nerfing specific aspects of the game, like crystal mining or the amount of money it takes to buy a wharf.

That is, if this game was fun at all times, then why would anyone care how much grind it had? A fun game that's fun all the time could stretch a grind out forever and everyone would still have fun, right?

The problem, then, is that the game isn't consistently fun. I feel this most specifically at the start of the game, where that crystal nerf really hits the hardest. Early in the game, you can't afford the ship you want to fly yourself, you're stuck with your starter ship. You can't take on any combat mission or engage in combat with an Elite that has a Mk1 engine and shield and a pulse laser, even a N is likely to best you going head-to-head.

I mean, Fight, Trade, Build, Think, right? Well, until you get a ship capable of it, fighting is off the table. Trading? You technically can early on with a starter ship, but this is the thing that was designed for automation because it's just a bunch of referencing sale prices and cruising in travel mode, and is extremely boring... plus, a starter ship has garbage storage, so you don't even make money worth your time. Building? HAHA, no, you need a few million credits for that, first, and if you have that money, buy a miner to get you to the REAL game faster. That leaves the "enh, it doesn't fit into any other category" Think, and a lot of those can be off-limits to starting players, too.

Basically, the crystals nerf is such a terrible one because it's sitting on the gateway between being dumped in a sandbox you can't meaningfully play in and the point where you are capable of doing things players want to do, and having any kind of fun.

I can live with the wharf price hike a lot more, because that doesn't really do anything other than remove the main use you have for money or let you declare war on the universe with a truly self-sufficient economy. It's a cherry on top, but players should have experienced the full rest of the game by then.

The larger problem the complaints around the wharf price hike point to, rather, is more that players tend not to be playing the game to enjoy the journey, but more to get to the destinations.

I'll have to put a disclaimer up front when talking about this that I'm not suggesting the X series start developing mini-games, but for a time, I was hooked on the MMO Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. If you're not familiar, it's basically a bunch of puzzle games given a nautical theme and then wrapped in the context of being a pirate-based MMO. To sail a ship, someone has to navigate (a pieces-keep-falling puzzle game), someone has to work the sails (a Dr. Mario clone), and someone has to pump bilge (a Bejewelled/Candy Crush clone). People would log in just to play their favorite puzzle game, sitting on random ships belonging to guilds they don't know. Over time, as they got used to these people, they might join a guild and get involved in the guild battles for territory and owning their own stores (each of which have their own puzzle games involved in operating, such as alchemy being a pipe puzzle game). I in fact eventually burned out because I was spending so much time doing guild stuff that I didn't have time to play the mini-games I liked anymore (carpentry), I was doing the things valuable to the guild (mostly navigating).

The problem I see with X4 isn't that they're asking us to play too much, but that they haven't made that play very fun on its own.

When I was playing X3, I loved doing taxi missions. I had a dedicated taxi mission ship kitted out to boost like crazy. Now, I got my cheevo, then left it behind forever. What changed? Two things: Time limits and rewards. X3 taxi missions had a time limit that, as you increased in rank, became increasingly strict to the point of being effectively impossible in some situations. This kept my mind focused entirely on cutting all the fat and being the biggest speed demon I could possibly be. That was a fun game that worked within the context of the game without needing some arbitrary mini-game set up. X3 also made these taxi missions extremely rewarding, to the point you could get tens or even hundreds of millions of credits for doing extremely challenging missions. This made them feel worthwhile even when they're just repetitive time wasters. X4, meanwhile, has taxi missions with no time limit and piss poor rewards that aren't even worth the time to land. I still do them with teleporting (just being in person to get the passenger onboard before teleporting back out for the transit) for a war mission since those can, as a group, give interesting rewards, but basic taxi missions aren't worth my time anymore. The time limit completely changes the context for the mission, and it's not worth doing without a sense of urgency.

A lot of missions in X4 seem to revolve around forcing you to use aspects of the game they never developed enough to be worth using without having missions that force you to use them, whether you like them or not. Basically everything involving "platform mode" (I.E. walking outside your ship) is a complete waste of time because the environments are all copy-pasted, tiny, and have nothing to interact with besides random walkers that only give directions to three things you'll already have on your map or can be hired. There's no fun in having to dock on every stupid station to look for the apparently only two stations in the galaxy that have mixed friggin' fruit to make a meal at the same crafting station as I make my bombs.

Other missions, like ship delivery missions, aren't aggressive time wasters, but there's just nothing THERE. Oh, you want a Baldric, OK, let me order one on minimum preset. OK, wait 2 minutes for it to bake fresh, and when I remember it exists, I can just send it to the designated spot all on its own. I mean, I'm not complaining too hard about this one, because it's an easy near-million credits in profit for about 10 seconds of my attention, but it's also not really a meaty mission I can enjoy or feel like I was really involved.

I guess there was some sort of backlash against the X3-style missions that give out large payments for things the player would have to do themselves, like speed-run taxi missions or Xenon invasions that happen specifically because you took a mission to fight a Xenon invasion for not being realistic enough, but I'm sure a LOT of players would love having a "push button, spawn in a bunch of Xenon to blow up and actually get credits for doing it" button, since there's a lot of players that complain there isn't enough combat for their giant doom fleets, and X3's system of reading your local fleet size and creating an enemy force to match may be arcadey, but it's fun and not just having to skip over Patrol missions because sitting in place reading a book for 20 minutes while your wingmates eat up the couple of Kha'ak that spawn every minute or so on their own isn't.

Beyond that, the "platform mode" desperately needs some actual gameplay to justify its existence if you're going to keep saddling us with it. I mean, you don't need me suggesting FPS gameplay and letting us participate in boarding, that's something everyone has thought about already. However, "walk there talk to that guy. Now walk there, talk to that guy. Now use that computer with the same button as the talk button" doesn't cut it. I don't mind a drastic dip in the quality of the interiors if we just had more of them. There's something perverse about how hull parts factories have moving assembly lines and I can spy the individual cows in beef farms, but I can't have more of my ship in my space ship game than a cockpit and airlock, even if it has a crew of 300 people. And while having an interior to just look at and walk through would be enough for a few hours of fun exploration for me, and more for the hardcore immersion folks, again, it really needs your ability to do something there. Hey, those bars have a pool hall, how about a pool game you can gamble in? It's a totally in-universe excuse for a new game mechanic!

... Man, I'm really talking myself into booting X3 back up. I guess it's a good thing Farnham's Legacy is coming out, hunh...

[Bozz11]

I remember grinding in x3, trading chips in my space suit so I can buy a ship, that was some hardcore start.

In x3 the only grinding is in terraforming and in the plots, all of them are optional and long term projects that you don't need to do right away.
The rest of the game is almost devoid of any grinding, early game I would not call that grind for money, they are tons of ways to make your first million of credits very fast...

[Wraith_Magus]

I remember grinding in x3, trading chips in my space suit so I can buy a ship, that was some hardcore start.

In x3 the only grinding is in terraforming and in the plots, all of them are optional and long term projects that you don't need to do right away.
The rest of the game is almost devoid of any grinding, early game I would not call that grind for money, they are tons of ways to make your first million of credits very fast...

Presuming you meant X4 in the second paragraph...

Honestly, X3: AP was pretty good about grinding. The stock market in particular made it absurdly fast to make your first few millions risk-free betting on stocks at minimum price guaranteed not to go any further down, but sure had the capacity to go up.

Even TC, with its notorious grindfest plots (microchips for the hub, anyone?) weren't serious drags on gameplay, however, because they were more background noise than something that I begrudged being made to do.

Actually, I kind of take that back, the parts I had to do in person in linear plots could be a real drag (like that awful "follow this really slow ship for several sectors" one), and it was a real pain that I couldn't do whatever I wanted and had to follow the plot to get a much faster start because the plot missions were absolute Monty Haul giveaways of overpowered game features.

X4 does do a good job of mostly not locking vital gameplay features behind plots... besides the PHQ plot, which locks a prohibitive amount of basic game features behind a plot you are absolutely forced to finish as soon as possible against your will, no matter what you want to be doing in this supposed sandbox. A whole section of the menu is dedicated to research that isn't unlocked until getting the PHQ. Stealing blueprints (which in turn means basically any real ability to build stations), teleportation, and (in-game) modding are all gated behind that. It's enough to make you feel like all the time you foolishly wasted trying to play and explore the game before finishing the PHQ plot was a complete and utter waste and you were stupid for even trying to enjoy yourself in the sandbox game instead of doing the plot Egosoft is forcing upon you against your will.

Still, with that said, it's a serious improvement that Egosoft is restraining itself to one mandatory plot in my sandbox that can be done and buried fairly soon compared to the plague of linear plots spoiling what should be a sandbox in some of the games, and are actively trying to create more dynamic, non-linear plotlines that better suit sandbox gameplay. (Although I hope we can one day see actual emergent storytelling take the reigns...)

Beyond that, though, I think the problem is more what I said previously, and what the title of the thread implies - Grind does not equal interesting game play... but it's not it's opposite, either. Interesting gameplay can have a grind and still be fun. I didn't mind satisfying an absolutely stupid need for an arbitrarily huge number of microchips that take literal days to fulfill so much when it's only in the background and not actively wasting my time, and even moreso, I'll happily go in a grind doing the things I want and enjoy. The problem is, X4 has fewer missions I actually enjoy, and more missions that are wastes of my time than X3, so even if X4 is much less of a grind, it's still not more fun for it.

[dtpsprt]

Beyond that, though, I think the problem is more what I said previously, and what the title of the thread implies - Grind does not equal interesting game play... but it's not it's opposite, either. Interesting gameplay can have a grind and still be fun. I didn't mind satisfying an absolutely stupid need for an arbitrarily huge number of microchips that take literal days to fulfill so much when it's only in the background and not actively wasting my time, and even moreso, I'll happily go in a grind doing the things I want and enjoy. The problem is, X4 has fewer missions I actually enjoy, and more missions that are wastes of my time than X3, so even if X4 is much less of a grind, it's still not more fun for it.

You've put it quite right (even though I never chased crystals for starting cash - not my style). In the end of the day X4 feels more like a job than a game. and you know the (anarchist) saying about work: "If it was fun we would be paying the boss to do it, he wouldn't be paying us"!!!!

[naisha]

I cant speak much to the grind as i have, what, 40? hours in this game? (only bought the game when coh released)
Ive had loads of fun so far but I do want to point out that one of the first mod i installed was a mod that un-nerfs the crystals. As a new player (not new to the series, ive played em all so far) i was at a loss at one point wondering how to make money. Its definitely harder than in X3 and crystal "farming" in vanilla is not worth it after the nerfs


Anyway, with that out of the way, i HAVE to talk about walking in stations ..

I've said it back when they first introduced this in Rebirth, its tedious, pointless and adds nothing to the game!
Idk if you all remember that the first mods that were made for that game was to remove the need to walk in stations. That should say something about this.

Ok sure, that was their first attempt at an FPS portion of the game, thats fair, dont think anyone expected too much out of it but I was sure that with X4 they would have improved it, changed it enough to warrant having it in the game.

Sadly they didnt. All stations interiors are almost identical with very little variation and with no real reason to have them ... Sure it might be nice the first few times when you walk around your ship but that feeling dissapears quite fast.
I might be in the minority here but for me its baffling they spend dev time on this part of the game, why ?! It adds nothing to the game other than tediousness and wasted time.

I have a feeling this whole "walking in stations" is the reason we still have no boron in the game (except for the dude in your phq)

IMO they should either do something meaningful with it or just stop spending time developing this and focus on other more important things like AI and such.

[Virtualaughing]

Grind?
You have so much thing to care about after a certain time.

[Gregorovitch]

IMHO the definition of "grinding" is repetitive stuff you have to physically do yourself in order to progress. If you can automate something that's not about "grinding" in my book, that's about "thinking".

"Waiting" is different to "grinding". For me "waiting" is not really an issue 'cos X4 has got so much you can do in it you can always pick something to occupy yourself whilst you wait for something else to complete.

Whatever Repeat Order and parallel decentralised building usually answer both "waiting" and "grinding" problems one way or another.

And as for grinding a grub stake early game, crystal mining or whatever, I would say have you tried X3?

[Raptor34]

IMHO the definition of "grinding" is repetitive stuff you have to physically do yourself in order to progress. If you can automate something that's not about "grinding" in my book, that's about "thinking".

"Waiting" is different to "grinding". For me "waiting" is not really an issue 'cos X4 has got so much you can do in it you can always pick something to occupy yourself whilst you wait for something else to complete.

Whatever Repeat Order and parallel decentralised building usually answer both "waiting" and "grinding" problems one way or another.

And as for grinding a grub stake early game, crystal mining or whatever, I would say have you tried X3?

I would argue one of the problems with a fully simulated economy is that I can't exactly occupy myself with killing Xenon because they are ultimately a limited resource.

[Slashman]

I never grind crystals. In my latest start. I did missions, started the Hatikva plot. And bought a heavy fighter. I got the Callisto for free from the plot...Started trading with that. Then got enough to buy my first frigate.

I mean the thing about missions is that here are some very lucrative ones that don't take much effort...like laser tower clearing. Worth close to half a million. You can have a subordinate complete satellite missions without doing it yourself. All this while mapping out the universe. Once I got my frigate I started taking escort missions for mining ships versus the Kh'aak. Bought my first mining ship and then a medium trader. I'm not sure where all this "woe is me...I can't do anything except mine crystals" is coming from? There are things you can do to make money...take all the missions to eliminate Xenon...the ones that don't' specify a ship type. And then just pick off the stragglers when you see them.

It sounds like its more about "I want to rush to the part of the game that I enjoy and skip the parts that I don't", which is fair...but Egosoft doesn't have to accommodate you to do it. Saying that there is nothing you can do to make money is just false.There are multiple things and ways to make cash.

[jlehtone]

It sounds like its more about "I want to rush to the part of the game that I enjoy and skip the parts that I don't", which is fair...but Egosoft doesn't have to accommodate you to do it.

... yet they do (somewhat); they make modding possible, which can give you all the goodies that the rush would give.

[paraskous]

Procress can be really slow. Especially when you spend the money on ship alternatives instead of productive assets. I'm tame player and find it sometimes too long. I tend to make several playthroughs and often reset. Last PT I went terran and had the first ever ship building. Never got there before. X games are more ffor the marathon playthrough. There is time when I will consider a new PT and gp 'Nah, just takes too long."
I'm candidate for the custom scenario.

[Slashman]

Procress can be really slow. Especially when you spend the money on ship alternatives instead of productive assets. I'm tame player and find it sometimes too long. I tend to make several playthroughs and often reset. Last PT I went terran and had the first ever ship building. Never got there before. X games are more ffor the marathon playthrough. There is time when I will consider a new PT and gp 'Nah, just takes too long."
I'm candidate for the custom scenario.

I'm actually anxious for that to get released as well. If only for the avatar customization aspect.

[Matthew94]

I mean, Fight, Trade, Build, Think, right? Well, until you get a ship capable of it, fighting is off the table.

To elaborate on this, you're rarely in a situation where fights are balanced given the random nature of the universe. You're either too weak to do much or you blow away every S/M ship you see without breaking a sweat. With L ships, you're only going to fight 1-2 at most which won't be an issue for most players once they get their hands on an L ship.

I one solution would be to have "tour of duty" missions where you're given a specific ship for a mission and engage in a predefined battle that is balanced for your loadout.

[Raptor34]

I mean, Fight, Trade, Build, Think, right? Well, until you get a ship capable of it, fighting is off the table.

To elaborate on this, you're rarely in a situation where fights are balanced given the random nature of the universe. You're either too weak to do much or you blow away every S/M ship you see without breaking a sweat. With L ships, you're only going to fight 1-2 at most which won't be an issue for most players once they get their hands on an L ship.

I one solution would be to have "tour of duty" missions where you're given a specific ship for a mission and engage in a predefined battle that is balanced for your loadout.

They should bring back those X2 combat simulators.
Even better if we can change maps and enemies.

[Wraith_Magus]

I mean, Fight, Trade, Build, Think, right? Well, until you get a ship capable of it, fighting is off the table.

To elaborate on this, you're rarely in a situation where fights are balanced given the random nature of the universe. You're either too weak to do much or you blow away every S/M ship you see without breaking a sweat. With L ships, you're only going to fight 1-2 at most which won't be an issue for most players once they get their hands on an L ship.

I one solution would be to have "tour of duty" missions where you're given a specific ship for a mission and engage in a predefined battle that is balanced for your loadout.

That's what they did in X3, though.

The game looked at what units you had in the sector, and when you take a patrol mission or a "protect this station" mission, it would spawn in enemies based upon your available power, basically "rubber banding" the enemy to your available assets. Your flight rank further boosted this, so someone close to X-Treme fight rank would be getting an M7 and an escort of M3s even if you were in a lone M3, yourself.

I suspect there were some complaints from the hardcore immersive sim crowd that there should be no spawn-ins and that it's somewhat "gamey" that the missions are catered to your power level, but I always thought of it this way: If someone shows up in a banged-up M4 (basically, a starter Elite for those unfamiliar with Pre-X:R designations) and barely any fight rank/reputation, nobody is trusting them with a combat mission more complex than going after a couple pirates in M5s (scouts) bothering the local drone traffic. If someone is an admiral legendary for clearing a whole Xenon sector solo who shows up in their own personal carrier stuffed with 100 M3s and M6s (smalls and mediums) with an escort of destroyers, nobody is going to bother wasting their time with a couple pirates or for that matter, anything less than throwing them at the front of the latest full-blown Xenon incursion, especially since said legendary admiral doesn't even consider a job paying less than 30 million credits. (You know, unless they're really bored.)

X4 has a bad habit of not caring what your actual capabilites are when they give out missions, just blindly posting out missions to do things like board capital ships with a payout of 2 million credits... when you're in a starter Elite with no subordinates, or handing you satellite repair missions for 20k credits when you have a factory and fleet that could just carpet the whole friggin' galaxy in satellites, they mean nothing to you.

Taking up the presumption that there are a lot more jobs out there that just aren't even being offered to someone of your current capabilities would make X4 missions be a lot less of a waste of the player's time. Maybe they could also get the idea that MAAAAYBE a mission where I'm building a defense platform in Xenon space, while also building several capital ships to give away to the Argon, destroying 20 Ps, and THEN destroying a Xenon defense platform could be worth more than just one single paint mod or a single 2-star piloting seminar, and offer me those petty entry-level rewards by the dozen, instead. (For that matter, give us a chance at making some paint mods be infinite and applied to ships at construction so we don't have to take every ship we want to mod into a dock and adjust them in person at a wharf. The default color palettes are way too limited. You can still have some special paint mods that are rare and only for personal player chariots, but I shouldn't have to mod the game just to get a color scheme for my ships where they aren't all either black or gray with just a couple little touches of desaturated color on the edges...)

Beyond that, yeah, I was trying to think of ways that more missions that take advantage of X4's strengths could be added, and I was thinking that maybe we could have something like drone races, where players would have to fly races through checkpoints along the outside of stations (possibly to scan data leaks or the like). Players might be expected to have a dedicated S ship for this, or maybe be forced into remote-controlling a drone like which fly around stations to have a limited performance ceiling. The only problem is that you'd probably want specific, highly-built up maze-like locations to make traversal actually interesting, even putting the AI pilots you are racing against aside, in the way that the Torus is. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that would be a good "maze" structure would be something like the Spacelab in Segaris. If we fly a very small drone, however, we could have some locations "inside" of standard container station modules, and those could even be semi-randomized (with cargo crates) every time to create a Descent-like environment where players have to either race AI drones to data leaks, or possibly just steal key crates or scan data leaks and escape before a disabled security system comes back online. (The latter presuming we're doing an offensive mission where we pilot a hijacked cargo-transport drone through the container station module to offload specific goods, something that we normally just do with a station hack automatically ejecting goods into space, but this would add some actual gameplay to the event.)

Speaking of station hacks, they're really boring and players find it unfair when they're on the receiving end, as well. I know some players might complain about "mini-games", but couldn't we get some sort of abstract mini-game for hacking, at least? Having to go shopping in black market bars to get parts, assembling slicers in menus, then walking to a terminal and hitting the "hack" button, even if someone is watching you do it, with complete impunity is not thrilling gameplay. Couldn't there be something like a tower defense game, where you either build station network security or (if you're hacking, a reverse-tower-defense) assemble attacking virus teams? You could make it so anti-virus and virus teams are bought with resources from the normal gameplay, so you can just splurge on AGI heuristic cores to brute-force your way through, but better teams get through more economically. You could have research paths that upgrade all your anti-virus or virus units. You know, put some game into this gameplay, rather than just walking straight to a terminal and pushing the "I is hacker pro" button to launch your kiddie script.

[dtpsprt]

................................
I mean, Fight, Trade, Build, Think, right? Well, until you get a ship capable of it, fighting is off the table.

...............................

Actually one of the best ships to early cap a Minotaur Raider, a Dragon Raider, a Balaur or an Asp Raider (sometimes even a Moreya) is the Elite Vanguard (second only to Perseus Vanguard)!!!

[Wraith_Magus]

It sounds like its more about "I want to rush to the part of the game that I enjoy and skip the parts that I don't", which is fair...but Egosoft doesn't have to accommodate you to do it.

Except they really should if they want to make a game that's enjoyable for people.

Again, this is a sandbox game that should be fun for its players. It shouldn't gate off the parts of the game people are playing the game to enjoy behind stuff they hate doing and make the game a tedious chore, or they'll give players the impression the game is a tedious chore.

I'm probably someone who likes just being a space manager more than most players, and only occasionally dabbles in combat, but feeling like I can't even participate in combat until I get a good small fighter, which, on my first game, took about 5-6 hours, and was basically at a point where I was already able to just buy a medium-spec corvette, instead, which made the entire idea of small fighters feel like it was being pushed back against.

Likewise, I don't think players saying that, now that they know all the tricks, can bypass the early stages of the game with hyper-optimized cash-farming strategies really understand the point, since it's the players who are new and want to explore the game and don't know optimized strategies that get the most put off by this, and are the ones who are most likely to quit the game in frustration when they are excluded from the parts of the game they would actually enjoy.

Again, it's not about being able to get to terraforming or self-sufficient ship fabricators in 4 hours of playtime, it's being able to get to being able to tangle with a random Kha'ak fighter just because it's there without needing to exploit the stupidly generous plot missions most new players aren't going to instantly know give rewards way out of proportion to the rest of the game they're going to be exploring naturally like any good sandbox should encourage.

[Wraith_Magus]

................................
I mean, Fight, Trade, Build, Think, right? Well, until you get a ship capable of it, fighting is off the table.

...............................

Actually one of the best ships to early cap a Minotaur Raider, a Dragon Raider, a Balaur or an Asp Raider (sometimes even a Moreya) is the Elite Vanguard (second only to Perseus Vanguard)!!!

I've never tried doing so, as I found the Elite a garbage ship less useful than a Discoverer and vowed never to touch one again, but I'll take your word for it.

Regardless, this goes back to my previous post, in that most new players are going to try fighting Ns before they try fighting Dragon Raiders, and an Elite with Mk1 engines and pulse lasers is going to be torn apart by an N that is vastly more fast and maneuverable than them with constant hit-and-run attacks. Starting the game out, I felt like the Elite was absolutely useless for literally anything but hunting down those criminal drones around stations and combat was just off the table for me until I could afford a much better ship. (And when I could afford a better ship, I could afford a Miner that would get me out of this pit of poverty and on to the part of the game that was actually worth playing, so why stay in the garbage part of the game with slightly less suck?)

If you're fine with the extremely limited options in the early game, that's fine, but the main appeal of this kind of sandbox is that it allows players to have a wide variety of options as to where they can go and what they can do, and the current starts are extremely limiting, making a lot of players unable to do the things they enjoy until they put in a lot of time doing stuff they hate - and the newer and less informed they are, the less efficient they are going to be getting out of that pit, and the more unhappy they'll be. I don't doubt this leads to a lot of refunds or negative reviews on Steam and people who try the game for an hour and just decide it's not for them warning off all their friends instead of spreading the word. In short, it's cutting into the success of X4, which in turn cuts into the development budget to fix all the bugs or spend the effort to add more content to the game for everyone else to enjoy.

And again, a new player is going to find online most resources telling them that crystal mining is "the best, fastest way to start the game" and every single video or guide up says that's what you should be doing, so many players are going to try doing that... which is exactly what was nerfed, specifically to spite those newest players and turn them off from the game, apparently.

[dtpsprt]

Except they really should if they want to make a game that's enjoyable for people.

Again, this is a sandbox game that should be fun for its players. It shouldn't gate off the parts of the game people are playing the game to enjoy behind stuff they hate doing and make the game a tedious chore, or they'll give players the impression the game is a tedious chore.

I'm probably someone who likes just being a space manager more than most players, and only occasionally dabbles in combat, but feeling like I can't even participate in combat until I get a good small fighter, which, on my first game, took about 5-6 hours, and was basically at a point where I was already able to just buy a medium-spec corvette, instead, which made the entire idea of small fighters feel like it was being pushed back against.

Likewise, I don't think players saying that, now that they know all the tricks, can bypass the early stages of the game with hyper-optimized cash-farming strategies really understand the point, since it's the players who are new and want to explore the game and don't know optimized strategies that get the most put off by this, and are the ones who are most likely to quit the game in frustration when they are excluded from the parts of the game they would actually enjoy.

Again, it's not about being able to get to terraforming or self-sufficient ship fabricators in 4 hours of playtime, it's being able to get to being able to tangle with a random Kha'ak fighter just because it's there without needing to exploit the stupidly generous plot missions most new players aren't going to instantly know give rewards way out of proportion to the rest of the game they're going to be exploring naturally like any good sandbox should encourage.

You are hitting a nerve here... and you are correct (imho). Very little thought is given to new players (unfamiliar to the X series). And what's worse when they go into forums (here, on Steam, everywhere) they ask questions and they get answers that are actually "tailored" for seasoned players...

The whole "tutorial" system should be thoroughly reviewed. Agreed it was never a strong point for Egosoft but times change and so people. The "joy" of discovering how to turn or dock the ship all by yourself is a thing of the past... Also a stark warning should be posted in all the pages (Steam, GoG, Egosoft etc) where people can and will buy the game not to take into account "tutorial videos" before so and so date (the date before the last game update)...

[dtpsprt]

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If you're fine with the extremely limited options in the early game, that's fine, but the main appeal of this kind of sandbox is that it allows players to have a wide variety of options as to where they can go and what they can do, and the current starts are extremely limiting, making a lot of players unable to do the things they enjoy until they put in a lot of time doing stuff they hate - and the newer and less informed they are, the less efficient they are going to be getting out of that pit, and the more unhappy they'll be. I don't doubt this leads to a lot of refunds or negative reviews on Steam and people who try the game for an hour and just decide it's not for them warning off all their friends instead of spreading the word. In short, it's cutting into the success of X4, which in turn cuts into the development budget to fix all the bugs or spend the effort to add more content to the game for everyone else to enjoy.

And again, a new player is going to find online most resources telling them that crystal mining is "the best, fastest way to start the game" and every single video or guide up says that's what you should be doing, so many players are going to try doing that... which is exactly what was nerfed, specifically to spite those newest players and turn them off from the game, apparently.

The starter ship has never been a ship worth it's name in any flying sim (that I know of), or in desperate need of a lot of improvements/modifications, it's part of the "genre".

For the rest I can't argue as you have seen from my post above...