While I agree it's turning into that, it didn't have to. The original question was how to make the PvP that already exists in the game more meaningful without changing the context in which it exists, so the whole open/solo thing SHOULD have been irrelevant to this thread. Unfortunately, meta-warriors will meta whatever the original discussion was....
That's one way to look at it. Another would be that this subject keeps on coming up over and over and over again because it's important to players and it hasn't been resolved.
Personally, my feeling is that it won't be resolved, that it
can't be resolved, because the game is built (and perhaps not deliberately, but still) in such a way that it will unavoidably create tension between two fundamentally incompatible play styles, because FD - with the best intentions, I'll happily accept - didn't want to choose between those player bases.
And this isn't me saying "It was obvious", by the way. It wouldn't have been obvious to me if I'd been in FD's shoes. But with the benefit of hindsight, whether we dismiss it as the work of 'meta-warriors' or not, we have to accept that it is evidently a problem for ED, and it clearly isn't going away.
And I read the 'article', sunshine.
Stay classy o7
"Sunshine" and "stay classy" don't fit well together.
The problem with this of course is that you miss out on a lot of opportunity for player interaction as as 80% or more of the ships you meet are NPC (and that's being generous it's probably more like 98%+) unless you only spend all your time in CG systems and suchlike. After a while you would get bored of trying to hail NPC ships and assume everything is an NPC and I think this is the main reason why it it how it is today.
I suppose there are also hybrids of this:
- each player can choose for themselves whether they appear as a player or just appear as an NPC.
- Everyone appears the same, but there is a way to at least show that there is at least one player (non NPC) in your vicinity.
- Everyone appears the same, but if someone fires on you they are revealed as a player (or vice versa).
- Status as a player is only revealed upon scan.
I suspect these have all been debated in the past on these forums too and by the game designers during initial design.
I assume someone's suggested it already, but I wonder whether one possibility might be to mark out players against NPCs using hollow markers, but hide any further information about players in supercruise.
At the moment, I can scan someone in supercruise and find out their name, their ship type, their faction, and most importantly their combat rating. Based on that, I can decide whether or not to interdict them: maybe I'm looking for a combat challenge, so will pick an impressive-looking target; or maybe I'm looking to torment some weak, barely armed Hauler in my Epic War-Python of Magnificence.
So what if, while I'm in supercruise, all my scan tells me is what my scanner has already shown me: this is a player. I can find out more details once I get them into normal space - but of course to arrange that, I need to make the decision to interdict them or not. Once we arrive in normal space I might find (let's assume I'm a piratey type) a nice juicy Mostly Harmless cargo ship with minimal defences... Or I might find an angry Anaconda bristling with hurty bits and with an Elite commander sitting at the helm.
That increases the risks of taking up a piratical play style, will discourage those who
only want to pick on
weaker players (while still providing opportunities for those who seek out genuinely challenging PVP), and still allows for non-combative player interaction.
