What about calculating the risk? How many players will be afraid to undermine (PP) or to ruin the minor fraction influence if they could be affected in Open only? As I understand, the OP‘s point is: nothing should be changed because nothing is absolute. There is no way to stop undermining or decreasing minor fraction’s influence by PvP. Oh, yes, nothing is absolute but *relatively not so difficult* is something different from *absolute safety*. Moreover undermining with Cobra or Clipper is something different from undermining with T-9. And everyone deserves a chance to face his opponents in shared BGS. Just for fun.
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BTW, my personal feeling is: I don’t want to ruin someone else’s BGS play with my trading, BH or selling exploration data. To ruin someone else’s efforts in *shadow* mode is below my dignity.
Ah, now this is a good point. But first, can i please ask you to use the right word, its faction, not fraction!
And my point with this thread isn't that something shouldn't change. That's a topic for a different thread. This thread is meant to be squarely aimed at why if you are defending (or even attacking) a faction, you are best focusing on PvE activities, not PvP, because the PvP gains you nothing except, possibly slowing down those who are working against you... unless of course, you outnumber those attacking, so you can afford to do both (PvP to stop some of those attacking in Open, while at the same time, PvE to counter those who get through in Open and those working against you in other modes).
Anyway, back to your main point, the risk.
Let us take the situation with SDC's system being undermined as an example. That worked very well, because there was a large group of people who undermined them from Mobius or solo. There might have been some doing it from Open as well (IIRC there were some groups involved in Open).
By bringing the risk factor in like you suggest, would this have worked if it had occurred in our fantasy Open only environment (and of course, the reason it happened would never have happened in this fantasy world, since there would have been no Mobius for SDC to infiltrate in order to kick off this action in the first place!), but let us assume that SDC had done something else that had attracted the ire of around 20,000 members of the community, many of which felt the need to strike back.
Naturally, can only speculate here, and there are a number of possible outcomes. We no longer have the PvE only environment, so those PvEers would be more used to loss, used to either (reluctantly) getting involved in PvP or at least experienced at running from it. There would also be less players involved in general, because the more hardcore PvEers would have either long ago stopped playing ED, or simply removed themselves from the more populated regions of the bubble in order to avoid PvP.
What happens in this situation, especially when factoring in risk. There would be a decent number of players who, despite their anger at SDC would have decided to not get involved in any in-game action, because they simply are not willing to take the risk. What %? Unknown, but its not going to be anywhere near 100%. Remember, there was a lot of rage, and, once you are committed to playing on Open, you have to accept the risk of it.
What is the risk? The risk of losing your ship, which is the insurance cost, any cargo, and time. How do the PvEers offset this risk? Well, cargo is largely not going to be an issue directly, since unless they are trying to affect the BGS via cargo deliveries (which was badly nerfed a while back - with good reason), the only cargo you might be carrying would be mission based cargo, which you largely don't care about losing if you die, you don't pay for it.
It really comes down to loss of ship. You can offset the impact of this loss in two ways. Either fly a cheaper ship, or you make sure you are flying something which can always escape.
This brings us back to one of the main points i made in the OP.
Two of the most popular ships to fly while affecting the BGS would be the CM3 or the Clipper. The CM3, most PvEers who have been playing for a while simply won't care about losing anyway. But its fast enough to run from most encounters, having the highest boost speed in the game, and a very thin profile, making it hard to hit from behind once you get some distance. For those with access, the Clipper is ideal, unless they need to get to an outpost. Fast, powerful, plenty of room for cargo, good enough for almost any PvE encounter. You can be taking both combat and non-combat missions, as well as room for a SRV bay for doing any planetary assault missions.
Therefore, even factoring in risk, i'd say you'd still have more than enough PvEers getting involved in this action, in order that SDCs faction would still have been toppled. Slower perhaps, the PvEers wouldn't be trading in Anacondas and T9s, they would have largely given up on some activities, focusing on those where the chances of success were higher or fit with what they could do, but there are usually enough missions of various types to find something that will work in your favour and to the detriment of your target.
Still, its rather speculative without a real example to go by.