The argument, recently made here, that "space should be dangerous" is misleading, because it depends on a perception of space travel and of the in-game universe that is by definition created solely for the purposes of this specific game.
Space travel is dangerous by nature, and will always be so - even with ED-style technology - because space as an environment is intrinsically hostile to life (as we know it). But that's an environmental danger. The argument here in the endless PVP/griefing/ganking/carebear threads is whether or not spacefaring society should be dangerous. And that, of course, depends on our choices as players. Nothing intrinsic about the game - not the way it's built, not the way FD or DBOBE himself intended it - and certainly nothing intrinsic about space as an environment, requires that we be dangerous to each other.
All right: I'm a pacifist, the ultimate carebear, with unrealistically optimistic hopes for humanity's ability to civilise itself. I accept that too many people still find too much fun in attacking each other - and I accept that a certain number of players (though I wager the proportion isn't as high as they like to make out) find fun in being attacked. But I realise that, much as I think it'd be great if we could, we're not going to improve tribal and conflict-orientated human nature in a computer game.
But don't think that the conditions we might want to apply in a computer game - unrestrained violence and person-provided danger at every turn - are anything to do with how realistic the game's idea of the future is. Why, for example, in such a technological society, would we even be manually flying ships from A to B just to carry cargo? I know I've said before that I want to play truck-driver-in-space, but I'm not for one moment arguing it's realistic to do so. Nothing about this argument is about what's realistic. It's solely about how we, collectively, want to play a computer game in 2016.
As for piracy, I agree with TJCC: the 'pirate' thing has become tedious. Yes, DBOBE might have intended for players to be able to 'roleplay pirates', and that's fine - but I don't honestly think he intended for it to become the crux of the Open game, as it seems it has. The fact that the dispute keeps recurring on the forums over and over and over again suggests that the state of PVP in this game is problematic. It's not, I think, what was intended by the game's designers - hence the stated vision for 'meaningful' and world-consistent PVP hasn't withstood the game's release to players who don't want meaningful PVP, others for whom PVP is only fun if someone else isn't enjoying it, and still others who don't want PVP at all.
ED tried to be all things to all people, and it was a great attempt, but it hasn't worked. You cannot cater to both groups equally in the same open universe. Yes, we can patch and sticky-plaster it with legal consequences and more fines and bounties and suchlike, but in the end these'll only be part measures. If Open play is important to FD then an Open PVE mode is essential. We see it's essential from the popularity of Mobius (which, for those agitating for mandatory PVP on the basis that it's needed to produce 'emergent gameplay', is an example of 'emergent gameplay'). But this is loading the responsibility for keeping a massive chunk of the player base happy onto one public-spirited player who can't be expected to remain public-spirited forever.
Yes, the game's called Elite: Dangerous, as PVP players constantly remind us. But aside from that being a pretty meaningless title (akin to calling a war game Colonel: Captain), the well-worn, PVP-centred interpretation of that title is inconsistent with what FD and DBOBE initially indicated the game was supposed to be, which was an open game you could play the way you wanted to play.
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