Hi TLDR below I am a GT/OB backer with a few thousand hours playing. I took two years off from playing SC and have been back about a month. I have played every day since. And yes we are in alpha but it is a live game too so the comments below are relavent. There's an amazing amount of new content and game is beautiful. However there's some problems. First space combat is way less fun than it used to be. I get that desync and lag are the cause for much of it, but the overall direction combat is going is worrying, there has been some good. Turrets and EMP are exactly where they need to be, fixed assit helped some, but auto gimbals.. uggg. I know it's to combat the server issues, but more of a concern is the equipment focused combat we have and continue to move to vs. skill focused combat we had in the 2.x builds. Devs please go watch some videos from 2.4 to 2.6x or better still pull that version from your archive and play it. That was fun combat what we have now isn't terrible (missiles and torps not withstanding) but it isn't something I would recommend to a friend. Which is sad given how much I love this game. BTW talking to other long time players apparently 3.5 FM change really killed good combat. The very wonky food and water survival mechanic flat sucks it adds zero to the fun of the game, I simply backspace to get around it. The temperature and wind thing are fine, but it simply gets in the way of the already too long game play loops and takes away from enjoying the beautiful locations. While I have always been more combat focused, mining and trading are pretty good. but unless you are at port O the loops take way too long. I have grown to hate all the planets despite their beauty, simply because of the time wasted. Rest stops same thing, takes to long to get around in them. I could go on, and I don't think it just me seeing this, if you go to twitch, the are less than half the normal viewers and this has been trending down over the last 6 months. Think about it, there were 9 "Tessa" missions, but they never got boring. There were some missions the more of us playing the more enemies spawned. 10 or more of us us jump in, talk about a fur ball. Awesome. There are no fun scalable missions currently. SC is most fun when played with others and the missions aren't there any more. TLDR SC feels less fun than it did two years ago. Changes in combat mission and game loop efficiently are needed to get us back to the fun game play we had previously.