I am totally with Alex on his explanations for the changes. It’s a vastly unpopular voice, but the game is currently too easy PvE-wise. I can still outrun all dangers and it never should have been like this. It’s still a burden from the new combat system that we have now: every NPC and animal needs to stand still while attacking. It first stands then decides to attack in a certain direction. This direction is based on the players position at the moment the NPC/animal stopped running. This allows it to easily avoid their attacks entirely by casually moving away from the impending attack.
The most stunning example of this is when you are running from a tiger. It will just stop running first to jump at you and then always hit the air because you have moved away a few meters in the meanwhile.
More things have been in the game which are actually a total no go for a PvP survival experience. First of all the third person was a really questionable decision because it allows players to see what is going on behind their character. Normally you would have to keep track on enemies and turn around to get yourself an overview on the situation. With third person perspective formation-based combat in groups will never be required. It just doesn’t matter if enemies are behind or in front of you. Other games don’t allow third person because of this huge advantage. Now I have little hopes this will ever be changed, it appears to be deeply embedded in the combat system.
Then the toxic event log which is just snitching on you whenever you have contact with any player owned structure. How is secrecy, surprises and thievery ever a thing when a crystal ball is telling immediately what happened and even worse - who did it. It makes absolutely no sense to give every player a debugging tool at hand to manage their bases and get the intelligence who attacked them while they were strolling around on the other side of the map. I understand the need for this in EA to get faster feedback on bugs and exploits but this all-knowing admin stuff should have NEVER EVER made it into the finished game.
Another thing is the resource balance, I guess it will also be the most unpopular decision when black ice is finally made more expensive as it should have been in the first place. Currently there is no midgame. The game isn’t forcing players to manage resources to gain necessary safety. You will never see T2 on official servers, because T1 is already relatively safe and T3 isn’t too expensive. This was different before building was made cheaper at the same time with rolling out new tools with higher rates and we got more ichor sources (now there isn’t even a limiting resource for T3).
And at last one of the most annoying things was probably not an active design decision: repairing and rebuilding while getting raided. It’s just so ridiculously easy and cheap that raids can be fought off with a laughable amount of effort.