Not the point I was making - lots of good stuff.
I get what you're saying mate, but FD have had a long time to sort out the crime and punishment issues the game faces and have done pretty much naff all. I don't expect that to change any time soon.
Moebius is in game and (apparently) works well already. An 'official' Moebious would require minimal administrative effort and no programming whatsoever. A few of the good ideas about additional safeguards posted above would be nice, but I think the main attraction of the mode would be so obvious it would self select the kind of player who wants to play there. Sure it would be vulnerable, as Moebius is, to 'raids' by griefers and gankers, but 'real' PvPers, particularly organised player groups, would be unlikely to risk their position in the companies eyes with such antics.
For instance: I play a tank shooter in development right now called Armored Warfare. It has two game modes, PvP, where 15 vs 15 teams battle it out on large maps against human players and PvE, where 5 players try to achieve basic missions on small maps in the face of vast hordes of stupid as mud AIs.
On the face of it PvP should be the better game- tougher opposition, better terrain with enough space to make full use of your vehicle's abilities.
Unfortunately, like most on line shooters, it's infested with a small number self entitled armchair generals and outright trolls. They block friendlies shots, push friendly tanks into enemy fire, even kill their own team mates, all the while spamming the chat box with derogatory taunts and insults.
There is no physical difference in PvE, you could do all of those things and even have some justification for doing them- fewer friendlies means more in game goodies and credits for the survivors. But I haven't even heard of a team kill in PvE, much less witnessed one. The chat box is used for friendly advice and encouragement and players often stay on after their own tank's been knocked out to offer support to team mates. An extra set of eyes is really handy and much appreciated!
In AW, some players seem more drawn to co-op than versus. Funnily enough, on the official forum, there are any number of whine threads demanding that PvE be nerfed into the ground, or even removed completely. The same sort of comments- 'no risk', 'cowardly players', 'hiding' etc that PvPers use on this board abound. Yet the PvEers seem pretty happy with the early version of their preferred mode. Their suggestions aren't for more bonuses and in game points, but rather for tweaks to the AI, more demanding missions, removal of irritating bugs, adjustments to some maps. The imagined benefits of PvE- safety and lots of in game currency- aren't what they seem interested in. They want more difficulty, an even better experience.
I suspect that there are really two broad types of gamer- those that see themselves as part of a community that they can support and those that see a community as something they and others can use to their own advantage. I'm not saying either is better, nor am I saying that I'd necessarily spend all my time in the proposed ED co-op mode, but if the guys who've voted so far are representative of the wider Elite community it strikes me that there's a pretty solid case for offering a PvE mode. If around half of us would like to see something in the game that would be fairly simple to implement, I can't see any compelling reason not to offer it. Moreover, if it did turn out to be flawed- as dull as dishwater, say- then we could all just come back into open and decide that it's worth the potential extra hassle.
ALL players have choice - and they all participate in the same background sim, no matter which mode or platform they choose to spend their playtime with.
