An awesome concept, ruined by serious flaws:

1. Horrendously convoluted interfaces and bad controls - the worst in any game I have ever played. The simplest of tasks are needlessly difficult. Most menus don't even accept mouse input. There is a serious lack of basic quality-of-life features. The tutorials are lacking, nothing is well explained, so you will have to spend a huge amount of time looking things up on google and youtube.

2. Awful balance, in terms of PvE, PvP, and ships. This game is "grind-to-win". You can get seal clubbed by NPCs and players right from the start. You either meet players way above or below your level so there is never opportunity for a fair fight (my first multiplayer interaction was getting "ganked" by 2 pro seal clubbers in fully engineered Cutters, while taking off from a landing pad). The devs do nothing to fix this.

3. The grind, and lack of content. Having any chance to defend yourself against hostile players requires many hundreds of hours of engineer grinding and combat experience. While exploring space has its moments, it is not enough. All the missions have lazy copy paste design, and many are broken to varying extents. Despite thousands of players, you can go days without meeting anyone, and even in busy systems, bad server "instancing" means you will often still be alone, or alone with a pro seal clubber.

4. Bugs, glitches, and down servers. 6 years after release, there are still countless things that don't work properly or randomly glitch out. The netcode is very bad. Sometimes you can't play at all when the servers go down as this is an "always online" game.

Such a pity, as this game has great potential.