But there are still too many glaring, game breaking issues, and I'm worried these issues will never be sorted out. Because Egosoft, you have a track record of releasing features for your games that are not play tested, and calling it done. Even though half the community cries out for refinement of many of the features you release in your games, I don't know what it is about you that makes you ignore these pleas from your fans. But you won't revisit your feature updates to make sure they are in good standing with the players of your games.
The one single biggest game breaking element to X right now is the pilot ranking system. If you can't make it work, then it should be scrapped. I appreciate the time you spent to implement such a thing, and it's a very interesting turn in the X series. But alas Egosoft, it is broken as all hell and doesn't work for the life of me. Distribute Wares is an absolute complete waste of time, and so we are stuck with Autotrade that is good out to 3 jumps. This is a complete and total waste of your dev time to bring such a lackluster and broken feature to your game, forcing players to go through hundreds of random pilots to get one that has the ability to autotrade.
I have made suggestions on this forum on how to fix the captain ranking system, it needs to be completely reworked. And I mean COMPLETELY reworked. I have put my own time and thought into formulating exactly what this system should look like, to alleviate the massive issue everyone playing this game seems to have with having a to find a captain that will work with the ship they have purchased.
Distribute wares is a total joke because apparently it only works in the starting system, and apparently it only works with wares you already have in your hold, and once your hold is empty you have to manually restock that ship, telling the pilot what to do. With this level of micro-management, how in God's name are we supposed to manage a mess of 100 freighters all doing their thing, it's literally humanly impossible to tell every single ship how and when and where to do every single transaction. You have not provided us with the ability to loop our command orders, so we have to manually go in and do everything one thing at a time.
This in my opinion absolutely horribly and completely BREAKS the game for me.
Don't get me wrong, I still love X4, and I feel you are one of the few devs out there who are actually honest with your community, and doesn't implement crap like paid content such as loot boxes. You have stayed away from a pay to play model. You release the game, it's the full game, people pay for it once, you spend years updating your games, and X4 is a beautiful game in so many ways. I want to enjoy X4 the way it's intended to be enjoyed. But this piloting system, and the lack of automation in my freighters, is so utterly horribly implemented it just ruins the entire experience for me. There's no possible way to get around this issue either, and so, there's no possible way to continue playing this game and getting yourself built up into a huge empire, if you have to tell every single ship you own where to go and how to get there, and what to do once there. It's sad, and so, until some things are fixed, I will have to step away from X4 for a few more months. I will come back in 6 months to see how it's going, to check out your new DLC and to read the update dev blog.
So, thank you Egosoft for being such a great company. But at the same time curse you for implementing willy-nilly, untested changes, that you refuse to go back to and ask yourselves the question: Is this working the way we wanted it to? Is it pissing off our players? Did we kinda just slap something together and make it a part of the game and call it good? Should we revisit, modify, or just scrap the idea?
Without these questions being tabled and discussed at Egosoft, your games will never really be what they truly could be. Because I don't know who the director at Egosoft is, but there are far too many strange decisions being made there that hurt every single one of your titles you ever put out. I mean seriously, going back to Rebirth, who thought it would be a good idea to port it to console, and throw the player into the albion skunk for the entire game, instead of making rebirth the X it should have been? It's stuff like this that hurts you. Anyway, I hope this "letter" I have written sinks in with you. I hope you get the point, and really go backwards, instead of forwards, for a little bit, and revisit the choices you have already made, and make sure they are fleshed out and polished, before you move on further to your DLC's and possibly even the next title. Don't leave us hanging with this absolutely horrid pilot ranking system and pat yourself on the back and say "yep we really did the best we could there". Don't do it Egosoft.
That's all for now. Have a wonderful day you crazy Dev team. You will be seeing more of me in the future
Happy X'ing!
