I backed in 2013 for the singleplayer campaign (this was before the MMO part blew up and dominated SC's identity, when SC was just going to be a relatively humble Freelancer 2.0 made in a couple years using off the shelf technology). When the servers went up at the end of 2015, I was impressed and pitched in a little extra money to upgrade from an Aurora to an Origin 300i. This was back when there was only one planet and 3 moons, so the 50 players flying around on a server bumped into each other all of the time and you actually had social interaction, emergent gameplay, people sneaking onto ships, battles, etc. Also, the game had pretty good performance.
As more and more stuff was added, the gameplay began to suck more and more. More planets, moons, and spacestations were added, so the 50 players per server were spread out across a huge star system and never really bumped into each other anymore. Stuff started breaking like NPCs and the mobiglass. It got so bad that planets like Levski and gameplay elements like racing had to be removed from the game just to keep it stable. Performance got worse and worse. And unfun systems started being added like dying of thirst, spending 24 real time hours in prison simply because a player touched your ship and died, or losing your entire inventory upon death. Now I just treat SC as a walking simulator. It really is impressive to wake up in an apartment, take the elevator down to the floor, walk around the streets, ride a bus or a train to the spaceport, go to the hanger, hop into your ship, fly over the city, fly out of atmosphere into orbit, hyperspace to a spacestation, land, go inside, and sit down at a pizza shop and eat pizza. Very immersive. If only the game was actually fun to play, which I doubt it ever will.
Disappointed that I never got the singleplayer game I was promised, but I had a ton of fun during the first few years of the MMO servers being up and that was worth the price of admission, IMO. Don't imagine I will ever drop more money on SC, though.
