After uninstalling the game, I got to thinking about why HG have resorted to implementing another cheap and nasty reward scheme - both of which are counterproductive and make the game less fun.

There's two problems.

1) Conflicting game systems which undermine each other.

2) A failure to consider the all important player experience.

Rather than expounding on both I'm just going to give a few concrete examples.

Living Ship Spawns

At one point I set about determining exactly how the living ship spawn system works. A prominent NMS youtuber had stated in one of their living ship videos that they were going to, but never did. So I surveyed several systems and catalogued the appearance and stats of every ship in each. Also cataloguing the same for regular ships which spawn in the same locations.

I figured it all out.

Since I'm super into the living ships I considered doing the same for every system I explored and publishing the results to help people find a ship they like.

There are two reasons I dismissed that as a waste of time.

First, we know from multi tools and regular crashed ships that they change across updates. This is why the wiki has a version / update field in their catalogue. Spend hours searching online for a particular MT you like, portal to the system, travel to the planet, navigate to the exact coordinates. Maybe it'll be the same MT but all importantly it won't be max stat.

Second, the living ship system itself doesn't lend itself well to such sharing. Unlike regular crashed ships or MTs you can't just go straight to the coordinates of the one you want. The game randomly sends you to a living ship somewhere in an adjacent system. So even if you give someone / everyone the location of a ship they like the look of, it's still a long and tedious search.

So the value of cataloguing and sharing is greatly diminished even before you consider that the catalogue is only valid until some update changes everything.

Procedural Generation and Semi-RNG Loot

NMS has out of this world procedural generation which theoretically provides the ultimate in replayability. Because there's near infinite variety.

Until you consider it in combination with other game systems and the resulting player experience.

In any game equipment matters and NMS is the same. Upgrading is either a matter of save-scumming RNG or searching online for a system which some other player has discovered reliably drops a max stat upgrade, or whatever it is you're looking for.

Considered by itself obviously the intent with their particular spawn system is to facilitate and encourage exploration. Loot every freighter to see if it drops a max stat upgrade.

Hard core explorers and people with lots of time to kill - which would have been me had I kept playing - might do that and appreciate it - but the vast majority of players will just see it as a waste of time. Why bother actually playing that content?

Google. Find a max stat upgrade. Do that freighter and never bother with others.

So the near infinite variety of content is for the vast majority of players reduced to a small handful of systems in all of NMS's universes. Colossal waste. City of Heroes at launch literally survived on procedural generation variety. There was no typical MMO end-game grind for better gear. Players kept playing because the game was fun and there was at least the proc gen variety of mission environments to make content feel less repetitive.

Nexus Mission - Build a Base

Randomised nexus missions are a problem trying to force players into content they might not enjoy. But on top of that there's also a terrifying lack of thought invested in some of them. The player experience perspective is all important.

I'm super into base building. Other aspects of the game killed my interest before I got very far but I enjoy this part of games immensely and NMS has a very solid base building system.

But they managed to make an incredibly craptastic nexus mission for them. When it would have been super easy not to.

What is the mission?

Drop a base computer. Build a small assortment of specified base components.

Not actually build a base. Just tick off a checklist dropping essentially random base components in a totally random and haphazard fashion.

And while it's not a mission requirement, you'd obviously immediately disassemble the components and base computer. For the sake of tidiness, to reclaim resources and to get the faux base out of your limited base list.

Is that fun? No.

Is it immersive? Hell no. It's random and stupid and you sure as hell wouldn't do it unless there was some half-arsed reward scheme like this.

Fun and immersive procedurally generated base building content would be this easy.

Direct the player to build an actual small base somewhere for a good reason. A ship has crashed and the survivors need temporary shelter until they can be rescued. A colony ship was robbed by pirates before arriving at their destination and need emergency shelter. A research ship has unexpectedly discovered something amazing on a super hostile environment planet and didn't have the necessary supplies to build suitable shelter. Etc. etc.

Build a real base. Which the game doesn't treat as belonging to the player for the purpose of base list and teleport. And which the game will automatically delete after say, a week.

Much more fun and immersive. You wouldn't go nuts and build something massive or worry too much about appearance, but the player experience would be that you had built a real base and helped people in need.