just add endless solarsystems and give us opportunity to play as we want, that means dont be mad if " isolated islands of players playing in almost full autonomy ", because why not and blocking this with grind walls for valueable things (territory scanner, M container,lights etc) is very sad. Just be more creative offering other ways to play and let players keep the feeling of having a choice how to play at any time (give me factory on flying ship because you are telling me you can warp around in year 3000 but not able to put a refiner on a mining ship or ammo factory on supplyship or something). If you offer a "universe" to players, its very common having some of them playing completely on theyr own, because it is a "universe" and we dont need to be steered by you to play the game you expect us to play if you expect us to pay . This is the way how different things will evolve.
But stop looking to much at real life while designing a video game, instead of one thing: these damn stripes while flying through space... let me finally turn them off. if you track data youll see 70% will turn them off because its distracting, ugly and has nothing to do with moving in space. i think space would not even look like this if you could travel at lightspeed and we are traveling only at 30k km/h max so why striping everything ugly? Space is beautiful just beeing empty and having some non moving nebulas very far away. Coming closer and closer to a Planet was looking nice in the past but now its "is it there? oh i missed it because stripes where so distracting"...
I want so much planets that players didnt even hear about the most of them after years ingame. that warping thing (i dont like it) did make the current solarsystem very small, so there is much need on adding some hugeness again. planing a trip to another planet because it took 4 hours is more fun to me than grind 40hours for territory scanner which should be common tool in a world you are ming 90% of the day.
Having every Player inside fully editable Universe is very special in video game industry, paying for streched and time consuming gameplay is absolutely not. what i mean is playing 40hours to just get your territory scanner (but you want min. 3 of them to be happy). Right now everything took so much time and this makes everything so valuable that no one is stupid enouth to start a war or something, every big orga would loose its people because theyll be fed up with mining 4 hours to shoot one bullet on somebody. You are more giving us virtual jobs inside the virtual economy of your dreams than giving us sandbox to make our own and be able to create something other players could enjoy. Now tell me who would pay for a job? And also have in mind: Has EVE Online created the world wide hype every dev is dreaming of or did minecraft?
Happy Holidays to you guys