The issue with changing a product to reach for new customers is that one risks alienating the current consumers that are happy with the current product, while at the same time might fail at attracting the new customers they want. It can work in some cases — when the current product is terrible like Final Fantasy XIV was at launch, when most of its consumers agree that the change is a good one — but it's usually a big risk that can kill a product as easily as it can save it.
And I don't think ED is in such a dire situation that making some radical change, such as nerfing mode switching or separating the modes, is helpful. Neither do I think that this kind of change is consensus among the player base.
Now, I'm not saying that every change is bad. There are some changes to improve the game for pirates that seem to be consensus among the player base, some of which you have been suggesting yourself; making NPC traders a more worthy target for pirates, for example. But changes to the modes that nullifies long-standing promises is, IMHO, going too far.
And here is somewhere we can't look eye to eye. Nothing to lose and nothing to gain is exactly what I want from PvP
Not joking. I like playing PvP just for the fun of it, preferably with others that are playing for fun also. Rewards tend to attract players that are there not because they find PvP fun, but rather because they want the reward. Since playing with this kind of player tends to not be as enjoyable for me, I prefer to PvP when the game doesn't offer rewards at all, and thus reward-seeking players aren't there; it might mean less players interested in PvP, but for me it makes the fights I do get into far more enjoyable and pleasant.
It's why I'm not completely sure I will keep playing CQC for long. The devs seem intent on turning it into some kind of long term contest, on offering some rewards that can be taken back outside CQC. That might make me quickly lose interest in the CQC.
But then, of course, I never got ED for the PvP. Rather, I got ED because, among other things, I was assured that I would never have to deal with PvP in it.
In my view, the issue isn't the reward, and neither the risk by itself; rather, it's the amount that is lost when the player loses the engagement, the punishment for failure.
PvP, on average, can't happen more often than the time to recover from a PvP encounter dictates. That is not an opinion; it's a logical impossibility. If you make the loser of a PvP match need a few hours to recover, then a PvP match can't happen more often than once in a few hours, otherwise the players engaging in PvP will just bleed resources until they are forced to stop playing.
The "sheep and wolves" arrangement does change this a bit, by shifting how much PvP each player takes part in; the "sheep," who tend to lose the fights, rarely see PvP and have time to recover; the "wolves" see far more PvP, but need proportionally less time to recover because they win most fights and often have less to lose in the first place anyway. But this requires a large number of "sheep" for every "wolf," and ever since MMOs started to proliferate, those "sheep" need to be willing; there's too much choice nowadays for players to ever be forced into that role, they would just change games instead. As a result, I'm not aware of a game where this "sheep and wolves" arrangement worked well ever since UO first implemented the PvE world of Trammel over a decade ago, and I believe expecting it to work in ED is foolhardy at best.
It's why my suggestions to improve the situation focus more on reducing the loss; lower buyback, cargo insurance, part of the exploration data and bounds (and other kinds of credit that vanish on the ship's destruction) preserved through death, etc. Allow the defeated players to get back into the PvP action faster, so every willing player can find more fights.
It might increase the number of players that fight to the death when they see a pirate, as they would be losing less than currently, but it's my belief that most of those that actually find the whole piracy RP engagement pleasant would play along.
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If you are talking about games like EVE, DarkFall, Mortal Online, etc, then the whole point of those games is the PvP, including facing players that might be playing the psychotic stereotype. They are advertised as such, and players supposedly know that when they purchase or start playing those games. And even then they have to deal with a large player churn issue, as they tend to retain a lower amount of new players compared with more laid back games.
ED was never described as such, never had the mechanics that would allow this kind of gameplay to prevail, and its very underlying network architecture precludes that, so you can't expect ED to imitate those games, even if you disregard the issues those games typically deal with or how such a change could drive away many of the current players.
If you are talking about the majority of MMOs out there, they tend to allow players to ignore each other without penalty. ED's mode switching is just a different take on the PvP flags or login-time server choice that have been used in MMOs for over a decade.
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