And you know -why- Trammel came about? You know -why- every influential or important game since then has gone out of it's way to include non-pvp content? It's not because people cry, it's because people vote with their wallets and the elitist, pvp-centric games have repeatedly, constantly proved they don't fight in the same league, financially, as the so-called carebear games.
You want a slice of that lucrative player base, you don't listen and cater to *ONLY* the hardcore killer d00dz. It doesn't matter how loud any side cries, money talks, the end. Any of the hardcore PvPers here need to understand that. They're just not as important as they think they are. It's a stone cold fact.
Yep, cannot argue against that at all. Prior to voting with their wallets, there was a fair bit of crying on forums going on, though. Almost as much as crying from the anti-Trammel crowd after introduction.
Bottom line was that many playing styles were entirely eradicated and replaced with stock- and treasure-piling styles, parading around in town where it felt that the only separator was how much bling characters could amass and wear openly.
And there's nothing wrong with that, people love to pay for bling parades. And if that gives them a feeling of accomplishment, in all seriousness, good on them.
The styles eradicated happened to include my favourite character style I enjoyed playing in UO. Actually, thinking about it, it eradicated two of them.
I had three "main" characters, including a classic blade-warrior with whom I co-founded an anti-PK guild (which incidentally had grown to be the largest guild on the server at the time) and a trader/alchemist/scribe character - my grind character to get the moniez for other adventures.
I had by far the most fun with my non-combat thief, though. Mainly snatching valuables via social engineering. Other than that, trying to snatch the odd valuable off of players by skulking around in the wilderness or in dungeons - and it was good fun to get yourself in place as non-combatant to begin with let alone escape after the deed.
Having said that, I fully understood the chagrin bank thieves and packy-slaughtering PKs caused and looked down on that style myself.
The one thing that made me appreciate UO was when my brother and I (we played together) ran into a PK for the very first time. And we ran for our lives. That thrill, the ecstasy of arriving within town borders and surviving the onslaught (with only a bunch of logs and planks in our packs to begin with) was mind blowing.
And then the form of camaraderie when you had to bond together to fight off the player villains. Won't get the same sense of accomplishments standing ground against incognito, probably NPC-driven evil.
In a no-risk & no-loss world you will never experience that. And that explicitly includes Elite: Dangerous with the only potential loss being a few credits to rebuy your specced-out ship which hardly hurts at all.
Disclaimer: I haven't reached top-tier ships, yet, might start to hurt when I get to fly bigger stuff than my DBS. But then again, I only lost one ship so far. Due to a piloting error.
And as a final point, it bothers me that posts like yours make it sound that every player who enjoys playing non-secure games are 1337-killer-d00dz or grief-4-lulz types. That simply is not true. We had a much more varied landscape of players playing interesting styles. From "Ima Newbie" via "Galad the Looter" styles, even players posing as a band of orcs and so many more. All of which are eradicated or made obsolete by making a game super safe.
And I reiterate again: I understand that the large majority of people prefer a safe game environment. Understanding that does not mean I may not remember the more varied, exciting and colorful "games of yore."