(Apologies for the late and possibly terse answers to these; I was in work all day with nothing but an iPad. Great for reading the forums, but a nightmare for typing long replies. These had to wait until I got home).
Speed fines work in general although there are some exploits, true. Further, if fines were calculated as an increasing percentage of assets (double the percentage with each new offence, hefty minimum fine) then it becomes unsustainable very quickly because potential rewards from grind do not equally grow exponentially.
That's been suggested before by myself and others; any values that quantify punishable actions should rise exponentially but fall linearly, the idea being that one-off errors of judgement are relatively simple to recover from while recidivism is heavily penalised. This would work for financial penalties (although exploits that punished the innocent would have to be closely watched for) as well as for more indirect effects such as the likelihood of a station refusing docking permission, or of NPC authority ships hunting the criminal.
The main problem with the math here is that there are no mechanisms to hang it on to test it. Until FD implement something,
anything remotely close to a serious attempt at in-game punishment, it's all academic. And sadly leads to the sort of circular threads that this one has rapidly morphed into.
There was a good reason though, he was trying to fly supplies in to a CG, that's why a wing of 4 was there, blockading the CG.
OK, I'll give you that. In an ideal world I'd say it should be even more granular, and that some CGs (e.g. arms smuggling in the build-up to a civil war) should attract violent opposition from both NPC and PC pilots, while others (e.g. famine relief) shouldn't. Unless there's a political reason behind the famine, of course, rather than a natural disaster on an otherwise peaceful world.
Alas the background simulation doesn't support that level of geopolitics yet, which means all CG opposition basically boils down to "I don't like that people are doing a CG, I'm going to stop them," even much of the stuff that's supposedly RPed.
But in this case, in the current build, you're right. The poster I referenced was somewhat naive entering into
any CG in Open play.
I would fully expect wings of gunships run by NPCs at a CG, same as I fully expect the players to show up that way, and FD should be tossing them in the mix for the CGs.
Back in the DDF I actually suggested on more than one occasion that the game should keep tabs on which systems had high levels of player piracy in Open, and spawn similar numbers of NPC pirates in Solo and Group modes so the playing field was level.
Of course that opinion, which was contentious even back then, was based on an idealised vision of the game as outlined in the ongoing DDF proposals by FD developers and in the various conference speeches given by David Braben. Having seen how the mode balancing has actually turned out, thanks in no small part to the chronic lack of an NPC authority presence, I don't think the game is remotely close to being ready for that sort of mechanism.
Maybe
way down the line, when the rest of it is balanced. I still like the idea of NPCs mirroring PCs, so that player activity in any mode (be it pirate, trader, or bounty hunter) would be mirrored in all modes by NPCs "making up the numbers."
But I fear the game may never be balanced enough to allow for that.
Well I guess Frontier made a rod for their own back when they made the NPC's so weak, now a lot of PvE'ers expect them to stay that way. I personally prefer a challenge over NPC 'whack-a-mole', but each to their own I guess.
IMHO Frontier should make the AI of NPC's 25%-50% smarter in solo & group mode to balance the drop in challenge, why should any mode be easier than any other? Mode selection should be purely about the level of social interaction you want - not the level of challenge you want.
See above. Not all that long ago I was in love with the idea that the challenge would be equal across all modes, to the point where NPC activity in Solo and Group should mirror player activity in Open. But without meaningful differences in security levels, and without equally balanced authority response, it would be a disaster.
That's the context I had in mind when I said I'd quit. If I logged into the game and couldn't jump anywhere without the threat of instant destruction (or a series of inconvenient high-wake escapes) because FD had seen fit to spawn wings of FAS tanks against anything that moved,
in the absence of any other balancing changes, then I'd leave.
Not because I don't relish a challenge, but because a random die roll for instant death (or doing the high-wake boogie twenty times a night) isn't my idea of enjoyment. For many players other than hardcore PvPers, that's basically what Open play has turned into. If the other modes went the same way thanks to OP NPCs, I'd be gone from the bubble. I might still do long-range exploration to chill, but that would be all.
