geldonyetich said:
The only other point I would make is, egads, is it ever a grind. Once you've got your Cobra (~350k credits), you might as well settle in for flying the same ship for a couple weeks, because the Type-6 Transport (2M credits) is a downgrade in all things not cargo hauling related, and the next ship will run you a whopping 6M credits. If you're good, you might be able to manage about 300k credits an hour, but most runs you'll be lucky to get in under 100k, there's a great deal of randomness to which profitable opportunities you are likely to encounter.
I think the key thing with this game is that your enjoyment will depend partly on what your personal goals are. The game doesn't at any point tell you what your goals should be, so success is how you define it.
For example, my friend's been playing the game since Christmas and still only has a few hundred thousand credits, because her goals involve exploration, a bit of bounty hunting and just slowly upgrading as she goes. She's not considered it a grind because she doesn't define her success in the game by how much money she has. Equally, she doesn't consider that I'm "better" at the game because I've got more money than her.
I, on the other hand, am trying to increase my bank balance as much as I can, as my personal goals include buying the Anaconda (~147m credits, not to mention a ~7m cr insurance cost and another 15-20m credits I'm budgeting for upgrades after I buy her). Our personal goals are different, so we play the game differently and derive different types of enjoyment from it.
One other point I've seen made frequently on the Frontier forums is that the game has been designed with a niche appeal in mind. It's unapologetically a game aimed at fans of the genre and of the original Elite, so there may be a limited appeal outside of that niche and that's something that potential buyers should be aware of.