Balancing individual versus guild play
Me.
If it is polite and enlightened
I can't promise that - but I'll give it a go
It does strike me that a chunk of this call for Guilds & Player-owned infrastructure comes simply from having a massive environment to play in, but little variety in the content available. The social experience is flat, to say the least. The potential for the game is nowhere near achieved, and irrespective of how you feel about Guilds - it's clear that the game will have to continue to evolve in order to survive.
My question is - working on the principle that objections to EVE-style Guild/Corp functionality are so strong that FD won't consider it; what can be introduced to fill that need?
Three content suggestions from me:
Crewable ships (think Battlefield vehicles in space, with slots for 2 or more players to fulfil different functions).
Player professions (a player can actually sign up for tours with the local police, Major Faction Navy etc)
Larger scale bounty hunting (actually tracking and hunting specific criminals - maybe even players)
(Still scribbling notes on social suggestions - but I'm already on record with the Guild-chat/tagging/friends lists being what I want)