Disagree that mining and harvesting needs a hauler.  The field container with unlimited space and 10 minute timer is a blessing for miners.  In that other game you needed a dedicated hauler cause someone could steal your ore, in this game you need a sequer back at base with a t4 lwf.

Yes its more efficient with a hauler (you will be mining for 10 minutes longer per 80U).  And you might have to scan down some new fields within range.  But with teleporters next to all the bases there are a lot more areas in 5 minutes range than you think.

Infestation artifact sites are easily solo'ed.
Any spawn on on alpha island is easily solo'ed and some spawns on beta islands can be solo'ed too.

This said I would like to see some solo content that isn't made easier with a blob. I just don't know how to do that in an open world situation unless squads were effected by interference somehow and even that would be easy to get around.

The term anything you can do I can do better really applies to solo and squad players here. Perhaps add more infestation sites that instead of spawning just 2 or 3 NPC's create a temporary spawn for say 30 minutes of their current spawned NPC's.

The less static mobs the better. The more searchable content the better. More roaming NPC's (Weak ones) would be nice too as a counter as well. And roaming NPC's of different factions should fight each other. Not very well but they should at least shoot each other a little.

actually, i skip every post of him that starts "its easy". Making babies is also easy...
mostly because he demonstrated low reading comprehension-skills of those posts he was replying to.

the main issue with this game is, that everything is so fixated on loot.
- Loot needs cargo space
- average john doe new player has not much cargo, speed or dps/mining efficiency
- to make a reasonable ammount of money you need lots of loot = lots of cargo
= grind, grind, grind, grind.

and if you get from regular loot something that someone else as industrial could build with same or less quality -> no or low demand of that item.

Solo things should be catered in every game.

But the focus should lie on group and corp stuff. Worked well in most games till now

Backdraw with sandboxxy where crafting has a sense is that you cant go fishing and crafting with your main in the offtimes, you need a 2nd account in this case. But as long as price is "normal aaa rate" for 2 accounts, i dont care

True, and with packs of 6, where 3 are ewar with ECM its hard to keep the ewar dead long enough to keep a lock on the 3 damage bots in the group.

On the other hand, once the group was broken up, it would be easy to just sit there and farm them all day at the slower repop rate.

So, maybe just a little slower on the respwans of larger groups, so if your around average applied DPS for the appropriate bot type, you should be able to kill 4/6 before the first one repops.

I think its important, even if its not said with each post, that I'm always trying to think about balanced play for all roles.

The ability to deal with different size, repawn rate, and power npcs is going to be highly dependant on the group or individual making the attempt.

So, what we are really looking for is a greater 'range' of spawnings in both the alpha and beta islands. One way to do that, is to make them roaming spawns, so they aren't just farm bait for powerful groups, but they can still be challenging for solo players.

Because Jesus said so...

What I'm really hoping for on the new content islands, is that they are full of npcs.

I mean solid red blotches on your radar, locus swarm quantity, but that most of them are non-respawning.

This would be like a 1 time new Island event, where we would have to go in and clear out the Island. Alpha would be fun, but I imagine that this on a beta Island would be fantastic, where you not only have to manage a fight with dozens of NPC's, but that there are other players there trying to kill you also. There would be no docking up until the path to an outpost was cleared.

In the case of the next release, of 6 Islands, maybe they are opened up 1 every 8 hours, to give every time zone a chance to participate in an new Island event.

At the risk of sounding the Rift horn, I have to admit that the invasions are the best part of the game.

What I'm suggesting is more like the artifact scan mechanic, but instead of 1-2 bots, when you open an invasion cache, you get 20 bots, 2-3 at a time over 15 minutes.

Or something like that, Invasion I, II, III caches with increasing power and quantity.