I happened to download it again today. Woke up in an apartment on some cloud city base place. Walked around for 10 minutes, went to a spaceship showroom, caught a space taxi to a space yard. Couldn't find where they keep my spaceship now and turned it off.
All valid points but I'm really starting to enjoy it. It has certainly been mismanaged and dollars have been squandered, but from sheer brute force via a silly cash supply cool things are appearing.
PVP bounty hunting is win. Sometimes it's in a ship, but I like to wait and do a FPS hitman job. It's even better if target is in a group. Can be clunky, really clunky, but when it all come together it can be like nothing else.
The community are nice but can be a little overenthusiastic.
The community feedback seems almost non-existent afaik which is a damn shame. They're definitely doing plenty of stat analysis to alleviate some gripes though, and not just the bugs.
It is getting there slowly but I'm not sure it'll ever go gold. It's just so bloated and splintered I'll be amazed if they ever fix major bugs. All that money though. It buys a lot of shit, some of it very good.
The bounty-jail thing is great. It was to stop players with expensive gear ganking the hell out of everything. The bigger the bounty the more that'll come after you, in groups if needed, so you get these cool sandbox experiences. Get caught and go to jail, and in jail you get to meet a lot of likeminded nutjobs who form criminal gangs.
I'm betting there's a lot of mutual back slapping internally about tech achievements that aren't shippable product.
I know developers like that who have no focus. They are completely fixed on building something to meet their own shifting desires (read as willing to scrap work and starting over to meet a grander vision) within a very loose (read too loose - these guys need tight supervision) brief from management, and take an age to ship anything if left to their own devices.
A user community can make noise. But investors? That's something entirely different.
I don't think of this glorious mess in terms of a roadmap or even a game. I see it as a shitload of cash spent on a thousand crazy things and as a bloated mess it's as magnificent as it is opulent. It's spectacular and shit and I love it because £40 buys a lot of insanity for your buck. I've spent £50 on games I've barely played but I'll always check in on this nutjob of a project.