I am watching the pirate software guy's stream. The game is definirely promising and you can easily tell they are borrowing a lot of concepts from EVE, which is fantastic. There's a reason EVE is still around as active as ever.
But the whole premise of a huge dynamic world, with ecosystem, politics, war over resources and so on all sits on the economy. If they don't make it overwhelmingly player driven then there'll be no point to any of this. I will follow this but I've been burned too many times with promising MMOs to get excited.
For me this game feels like Steven Sharif has a vision and an expectation of how he wants players to play that game, but I feel that players are not going to actually play the game that way. Instead of building and shaping the world in whatever way they see fit, once all the cards are on the table the Rain Men of gaming will crunch the numbers to discover what is the most optimal way to shape everything and put their findings online, after which the efficiency crowd will use these findings to shape the world into this mechanically optimal vision. Anyone who tries to interfere with this will be ground into the dirt, and the players who won't play nice will be forced to either enter a life of banditry or quit the game. While that sounds exciting eventually one party will win: either the ruling class that makes the game a toy for the select few with everyone else being their goons, or the antiauthoritarians who tear everything down and crash the economy with no survivors. This makes for possibly good storytelling, but it's going to be a slog to play through. You're gearing up to fight a big raid boss? Nope, the chucklefuck alliance just burned down the capital and you now no longer have access to more resources. Either make do with what you have or get back to rebuilding, chump. It's going to be troll or be trolled, especially with the open world pvp.
