Elite Dangerous

They made the grind a loooot more bearable

Consistent Engineering (e.g. 5 Rolls to get full on a G5 rolls, always) and missions that give you a respectable amount if mats.

As for PP2. I like the idea. I hate the execution.

It has definitely brought back life to the game. People are organising themselves to take and defend systems.

It's just that merit acquisition is extremely unbalanced.

It's way easier to reinforce a system by parking your carrier in thr Lave cluster, stocking up on rare goods, flying back and then dumping that in the market.

A cutter full of rares can give you north of 20k merits. Meanwhile you won't have the time on a day to counter those 20k by undermining unless you deploy some cheese strategies like focusing on Fighters at a stronghold carrier.

And the annoying part about that is that the enemy can do all this in Solo. No way for you to prevent them influencing the system but to outgrind them.

Simultaneously feels like there's not much to do but not enough time to do what you want. Pretty good overall though. Powerplay 2.0 seems solid so far. Much easier to get points but you need a ton to rank up.

Having a blast right now. The unfun engineering material grind always kept me from building more ships and investing more time. Now it's much better balanced with the deterministic engineering rolls (each grade needs exactly the grade number if rolls to finish, e.g. g4 needs 4, g3 3 ....) and the increased payouts from missions.