I loved the combat in the game, I was a bounty hunter by trade - which meant it took me HUNDREDS of hours to get any credits. I think it took me an entire year to get into a Python. And then I realised that my super expensive ship was still only giving me a million or so an hour. Even the community goal bonuses (I often hit top 10) weren't enough.

Then I found out about the Smeaton passenger runs - made about two billion in maybe a tenth of the time it took me to make the pittance to buy the Python. And after that I had so much fun - buying new ships, fitting them for combat, running bounty missions in Co-op, flying fighters around my Anaconda...it was great. For the first time in the game I felt like I was doing what I wanted to do instead of grinding up to the 'fun part'.

But even that gets old after a while. Tried exploring and long range passenger stuff after that, but I realised that's only fun if you RP it in your head, the game really gives you nothing other than 'fly around a sun and press the hyperdrive button again'

And even a VIP passenger mission to Sag A, which takes me maybe three full evenings of gameplay, would only give me, what, 100million? It's just not worth it at all.

I still love Elite because it's Elite and it's a space game and I'll never say no to that, but it's so frustrating that the only time I ever truly had fun was once I did the Smeaton 'exploit' as they'd call it.

The sad fact is that there's no real meat in the game, so the very limited things you CAN do - new cool ships, engineer upgrades, Thargoid hunting - is EXPENSIVE, and hidden behind the grind.

Contrast to NMS which is pretty buggy still but even the actual literal grind of mining feels satisfying - and on top of that I have more ships, frigates and freighters in my command than I've ever had in Elite. Money here doesn't feel like a problem, I'm quite confident I'll never have to sit and grind or prey on a bug to make a billion here - it'll just happen while I'm playing the game.