What does BGS stand for? I've seen it used a lot but can;t for the life of me figure out what it means (even though after you tell me I'll probably go DUH and slap myself )
Background simulation. Powerplay is, at the moment at least, 'projected' onto the sim in that it has rather strange, but minimal -- and I believe unintended -- effects on, for example, what happens in systems that are physically within a sphere but aren't one of the flashpoints created by the mechanic.
The sim itself is, in my opinion, a thing of beauty, even though there are known and longstanding bugs with it - flawless beauty is cold and uninteresting. The point I made regarding the architecture of the game centres on this - while everyone else is out fighting clan wars or the like, it would be quite possible for
one CMDR playing in open to dock in a system with a low population and trigger strategy-blocking local events such as civil unrest, famine, lockdown, etc., and that's not even going into how the BGS and faction influence interact (civil wars? Check. Expansions? Check. Wars for control of a system? Check.) If FD were to include player-owned stations, it would require fundamental (and arguably unfair) adjustments to the simulation if you wanted to avoid the situation of the player faction losing their station due to the activities of even one very determined CMDR. Again, why should player factions hold privileged status in a simulation that also allows for players to support NPC factions or play in solo without ever interacting with another CMDR directly? Moreover, contrary to what has been posted elsewhere on the thread, small groups of players -- say four, in a wing -- can have a surprisingly large effect on even high-population systems.
With the instancing system working as it does, and the mechanics around interdiction and combat being as they are, players don't even need to go into solo to achieve specific goals. Powerplay bundles hundreds of CMDRs together. Small groups - tiny, even, by MMO standards -- can have a significant effect provided they know what they're doing. This is why, imo, Powerplay is
intended to have minimal impacts on the sim. If a large player corporation of, say, 1,000 players were actually to start interacting directly with the sim, they would be able to stomp across populated space in short order. The simulation is, again in my opinion,
simply not intended, at the most basic level, to handle large player groups. Chaging it to suit large guilds would break the game for so many of the unaligned CMDRs.
For the record (and I repeat myself here), I'm
in a player group. I
like player groups. I think that
large player groups would be an
extremely bad idea for this game for the reasons given above. Introducing large player groups would probably require an extensive rewrite of the sim - large guilds and player-owned stations would
break the simulation.
Engaging with the effects of trade, bounty-hunting, mercenary work in and out of conflict zones, the mission system and how the simulation reacts to it is endlessly interesting and really highlights to me how the game is (currently) centred around small groups of players working together. To repeat, I don't think that the players asking for guilds and player-owned stations really know what they're asking for.
It's not impossible to make Elite into first-person EVE; it's just a metric ass-ton of work (that may or may not work) that would utterly change the character of the game at a basic level. If such changes were to come about, I'd just say: be careful what you wish for.
