I would love for this game to have modding support. If someone could take this game and mod in X-Wings, TIE Fighters and YT-1300s and have them dock at fleet carriers modeled after Calamari Cruisers and Star Destroyers, it would automatically be a better Star Wars game than anything produced in the last 10 years. I could also see this work for Shuttlecraft for Star Trek, and being able to dock with whatever your favorite Enterprise is.
There are 3 major things that we would need to even consider this, and I would love to see development pivot towards this venture.
A true offline mode. We need to be able to have a mode where everything is ran from your local machine. I believe this would require a major downsize in the scope of the game. We don't need billions of systems, I'm not sure we even need thousands. I could see a bubble of systems no larger than 1000 systems, but perhaps have an upper limit of 10,000. I have no idea what else would need to happen but basically we should be able to play offline. This is a big deal anyway since the servers for this game will eventually shut down and will be useless without this feature.
Player hosted servers. Once they allow for offline mode, they should introduce a scaled down server hosting tool for players to run their own servers based on the scaled down version of the game. This is for when the official servers go offline and also for running servers for different mods.
Modding tools. Give us the ability to create new ships, weapons, stations, planetary bases, etc. We should also be able to create our own database of Star Systems. Consider a Star Wars mod where we need to be able to create hand crafted systems based on locations in the lore. Custom Star Systems with a custom Galaxy Map. These tools could also be used for players to add to the base game and tweak things to our liking based on the existing Elite Universe.
These things would add a lot of value to the game, and giving control to the players would help eleviate some of the long standing issues with the game. We haven't had a new ship in 4+ years. Let us add in our own and it won't be Frontier's problem anymore.
