What is it with people who feel entitled to read a title, glance at the OP then post bragging about how they didn't read the opening post of the thread? It is the most stupid of all forum actions. If you don't want to read it please do not clutter up the thread for those who will read it and end up reading all your narcissistic comments of look at me I'm not intellectualy adept to focus on two minutes of reading an article that someone has spent half an hour pouring their heart and soul into.
And there we have the nub of it, the entitled ones, our bright prosperous future embodied in the TL;DR instant gratification generation... If you have nothing intelligent to add to the conversation please find a corner to sit quietly in and do your colouring in and eat the damned crayons if it makes you happy, as long as you do so quietly.
@Sidey, I share a lot of your sentiments expressed there, although I myself am merely a horizons beta sprog, not a dangerous beta or alpha graduate. We have had some seriously sharp AI, and kept buffing them so an Elite NPS would always put the fear of god into a CMDR. Sadly that sharp AI has been nerfed to heck, when we ought to have kept the sharp AI for the high combat ranks, and had each combat rank of NPC a distinctly different proposition. The way balance this is as you say to make the governance type / security level really mean something so in high security systems you have elite cops patrolling and jumping into every scuffle protecting the innocent and in anarchy systems all the pirates are elite, RP - Anarchies are so tough only the best survive...
But no, Sandro galoot decides we need to match the NPC's that spawn to be proportional to your own combat rank, so nowadays I rarely see anything other than elite NPC's. We aren't really elite if everything we see in the void is also elite, we are more effectively run of the mill and the rest of the lower ranks are retards.
So many fanboys in here, its hard to start a decent idea rich conversation. I often find those probably TL;DR generation fanboys shoot me down for saying we need story telling mechanics they say its a sand box make your own story, even though I'm saying I want the events in the galaxy, missions getting done, factions going into booom, war, famine , expansion, bases getting assaulted, pirate lords getting whacked, hostages liberated, etc... Ought to make it into the local news, the local news and galactic news would be procedurally generated narrative based on what is happening in the galaxy.
I disagree with you one one thing though, powerplay sucks rectums. It doesn't connect to the galaxy at all, I have seen me dock at a coriolis in an ALD system inder the direction of Federal traffic controllers. How does that work ALD is the fracking emepror of the empire, why has she got federal traffic control in one of her own personal star systems? Because power play means frack all, thats why.
Tie powerplay in to the BGS and I might be interested, make BGS factions aligned to a powerplay figure head, or truly independent, if they control a system then their figurehead controls that system and they recieve an influence effect boost like +5% on all postive actions (like the aisling / winters BGS bonus). ie: handing in 100,000cr in exploration data would have the effect in influence gains as handing in 105,000cr. If another powerplay faction aligned this BGS faction would now be oppressed and suffer a negative percentage influence effect modifier (that 100,000 effectively becomes 95,000).
I could go on but I suspect this is getting TL;DR
