None is better per se, they both have pros and cons so pick wichever suits you at the time.
I personally enjoy playing in OP most of the time. The player interaction sure makes the game richer and even a hostile encounter can be a pleasant experience, provided the other player is not an a..hole. Wich, by the way, is way more rare than a lot of Open-haters would have you believe. I encountered one in something like more than 50h of play. Then I must admit that I try my best not to attract problems at all times : I do not trade without shields, I do not go in a well known pirate hunting-ground with a cargo bay full of rares and a ship which cannot defend itself, I always greet "suspect" radar contacts in a friendly manner to humanize the encounter, etc.
Then there is solo. Which is a lot more dull, because of the lack of human interaction, because NPCs are always the same, because there is no incentive not to take risks since it is always so easy once you've had your hand on the game for the first 2 or 3 hours. The duller thing about it is that since all the instances you pop in are freshly generated, the world trully doesn't feel alive. When you arrive at a RES, it is first empty and populates before your very eyes. When you arrive at a station, there is never traffic iside and around it at first (except fo the security vessels). All the NPCs spawn at the same time as you outside of the station, they are only a few and will never have a bounty or illegal cargo, they will never dock/undock in a hurry and buzz past you at 300+ m/s inside the letterbox, a remote station can have just as much traffic as one in a starter system, etc.
But it also has advantages : if you just want to grind money by trading, you will do it faster and more easily here, and you can take "risks" and strip your ship from its shield generator and put an extra cargo rack without any fear of things going bad. You can also have all the wanted ships for yourself and have no fear of your prey being killed by a careless / kill-stealer player. You can test unusual / experimental loadouts without fear of being at a disavantage or interrupted. And last but not least, if your internet connection goes slow / unstable the other ships won't start rubber-banding all over the place, your hits / kills won't randomly not register, you won't get a bounty if you attack a wanted NPC less than 10 sec after your scan told you it was complete and your SC transistions / Hyperspace travels won't take 10 times as long as usual which is really nice when you don't have a lot of time to put in a game session.
TL : DR - I'd recommend you to play in OP when you can to get the full ED experience and go in solo only when you want to optimize grinding, test things, your internet connection goes bad or you don't have a lot of time for your session.
And there you have it, my (very generic and conventional) view on OP vs Solo.
I personally enjoy playing in OP most of the time. The player interaction sure makes the game richer and even a hostile encounter can be a pleasant experience, provided the other player is not an a..hole. Wich, by the way, is way more rare than a lot of Open-haters would have you believe. I encountered one in something like more than 50h of play. Then I must admit that I try my best not to attract problems at all times : I do not trade without shields, I do not go in a well known pirate hunting-ground with a cargo bay full of rares and a ship which cannot defend itself, I always greet "suspect" radar contacts in a friendly manner to humanize the encounter, etc.
Then there is solo. Which is a lot more dull, because of the lack of human interaction, because NPCs are always the same, because there is no incentive not to take risks since it is always so easy once you've had your hand on the game for the first 2 or 3 hours. The duller thing about it is that since all the instances you pop in are freshly generated, the world trully doesn't feel alive. When you arrive at a RES, it is first empty and populates before your very eyes. When you arrive at a station, there is never traffic iside and around it at first (except fo the security vessels). All the NPCs spawn at the same time as you outside of the station, they are only a few and will never have a bounty or illegal cargo, they will never dock/undock in a hurry and buzz past you at 300+ m/s inside the letterbox, a remote station can have just as much traffic as one in a starter system, etc.
But it also has advantages : if you just want to grind money by trading, you will do it faster and more easily here, and you can take "risks" and strip your ship from its shield generator and put an extra cargo rack without any fear of things going bad. You can also have all the wanted ships for yourself and have no fear of your prey being killed by a careless / kill-stealer player. You can test unusual / experimental loadouts without fear of being at a disavantage or interrupted. And last but not least, if your internet connection goes slow / unstable the other ships won't start rubber-banding all over the place, your hits / kills won't randomly not register, you won't get a bounty if you attack a wanted NPC less than 10 sec after your scan told you it was complete and your SC transistions / Hyperspace travels won't take 10 times as long as usual which is really nice when you don't have a lot of time to put in a game session.
TL : DR - I'd recommend you to play in OP when you can to get the full ED experience and go in solo only when you want to optimize grinding, test things, your internet connection goes bad or you don't have a lot of time for your session.
And there you have it, my (very generic and conventional) view on OP vs Solo.
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