Elite: Dangerous

Pointless grind. To be clear, there are missions and ranks that can be achieved, alliances that can be formed, open world at it's finest, with superb graphics...all of that. It's a very enjoyable time suck...but it's pointless. I have been playing the game for weeks, hours each day. I've purchased a federal gunship, and a federal dropship with which I can do missions (I'm mostly harmless still...and a warrant officer in the federation) so what? I am careful to select only legal missions, and still I find that I'm swarmed by federales and blasted out of the sky, and thrown into prison. Loss of ship (federal gunship) and 1 million credits. It seems to me that the programmers themselves have placed enough 'nerfs' into the gameplay that I can almost hear them laughing about the thirty bucks I threw down on the download. Also, to be clear, I put in about a thousand hours playing the open source FREE version of a very similar game, and it had some (SOME) of the same quirks in gameplay too...but in this game they've been expanded on instead of fixed. I was really very excited to see what commercial developers could do with the source code. That ended quickly. A few of the nerfs explained - There are docking computers to land automatically inside a space station, yet the MANUAL controls fail in FSD (like warp drive in science fiction tv) when the programmed, RNG controlled "SLOW DOWN" prompt shows up because you missed the almost inaudible cue that lets you know the developer has his foot placed firmly on your accelerator again....you are not in control at that point. The 'plot course' feature commonly fails for fuel consumption restrictions (really? it's an automatic plot course feature of the game...c'mon) and the targets for missions randomly get 'realigned' with landing zones that are NOT the selected target (just for fun, you know). In all, it's a beautiful graphical, hypnotic, waste of time piece of junk software. Unless your a masochist I suppose.