The next. Why should players who decide that it's cool to blindly attack NPCs (or perhaps he attacked the NPC during powerplay or a given mission) be subjected to much lesser penalties than if they attacked another player?
Basically, from a game design point of view, having attacks on other players have greater consequences than attacks on NPCs makes sense because when you attack another player you are knowingly doing something that can ruin that other player's experience. When you attack a NPC, it's merely a piece of code created to be an opponent or target, and thus there are no negative repercussions from the attack to anyone else.
It's one of the main reasons why the design of PvE games and of PvP games is often wildly different. PvP games need to make being the target engaging and enjoyable, while PvE games don't need to bother about it. Take crowd control, for example: in a PvE game, giving players a crowd control ability that takes skill to use but that lasts a long time and for which there is no counter is perfectly fine; in a PvP game, having that same kind of crowd control is game-breaking.
And yeah, I do think players and NPCs should be treated very differently in ED. Among other things, I believe bounties accrued from killing players should be far greater than bounties from killing NPCs and that the rebuy costs from PvP should be drastically reduced or even waived altogether.
Their attempt to make a defacto pvp-for-sport arena - CQC - has so far failed to curtail a certain player-type's apparent need to pvp-for-sport in Open.
CQC would never succeed in getting the seal-clubbers away from Open, sincerely, because the kind of player that goes seal-clubbing in Open isn't the same that enjoys instanced, loss-free, evenly-matched PvP.
I do still think CQC a worthy addition to the game because it caters to a kind of PvPer that, before it, wasn't catered to in the game at all, though.
This would not solve it, in my opinion.
If a player drops into an instance with ships already in existence then there must be a player there. If there's only one other ship....
Similarly, if a player drops into an instance, from the player already in the instance's perspective, they have just opened another P2P connection therefore the new ship must be a player.
Worse. Just play while monitoring your network activity (the default Windows Resource Monitor already allows you to do this per process) and you will be able to determine when another player is in the same instance. And this is something that can neither be detected nor worked around, at least not without moving away from the peer to peer design.
In reality, there are systems in place intended to make crime unappealing, when without them it would be a simple way of obtaining what you want from those too weak to protect themselves. These systems are legal (you can be fined, or go to prison, or (historically) be executed); or they can be social (there is shame and stigma in being seen as a criminal). And perhaps most importantly there's also the moral safeguard which leads most people to reason "I won't do that because it's a nasty thing to do and I wouldn't want it done to me". That basic empathy is probably what prevents more crime than anything else - but there are people who lack that empathy.
This is why I absolutely require knowing if my target is a player and, if it is, whether that player wants to fight, before I even consider pulling the trigger. I played WoW in a PvP realm for over half a decade, most of that time playing an hour or two daily, and never in that time I started a fight with the opposite faction (apart from Battlegrounds, but those are like CQC, everyone there is pinning for a fight).
It's also why I refuse to help in any way, or even play with, those that wouldn't at least make sure their target actually wants a fight before opening fire. If the player doesn't care about others enough to make sure his attack isn't ruining the game for someone else, I don't want him in my game at all.
For the people that keep coming on here saying they don't want any form of interaction, why are you commenting at all? There is a Solo mode just for that purpose. And yes, once in a while when I want to interact with just friendly people I go into Mobius. Which, incidentally is also full of people that don't want to interact with anyone at all.
I don't want any PvP interaction, sure. I
do want to interact with friendly players (or at least players that can't/won't shoot me), though.
And no, Mobius isn't enough. Besides not being official, there is no actual mechanism to prevent player attacks, and there is a glaringly obvious potential point of failure in that only a single player is allowed to accept, or kick, other players.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
