The sad thing is you're not wrong. That is the way it seems. That's the perception. Hell, even the mission givers say as much when they're asking you to massacre ships. "Look for your targets in a RES."
Not, "Here are the coordinates of a recently observed convoy." Just "Go to the spawn point and wait for the rats."
This game was supposed to be so much more.
As for the PVP/PVE thing, I was searching the forum archives for specific posts I made back in the mists of time, just to see how little has changed. I couldn't find the specific posts but I did find a few threads discussing the PVP/PVE dichotomy and the dreaded "g" word, how it fit with what little information we had on the game's design, and what FD could build into that design to preemptively mitigate some of the issues. One of my posts in one thread was from March 2013. Yes, five years ago and 21 months before the game's launch we were having the exact same conversations.
The sad thing is that if you dig through the Design Proposals and some of the discussions that emerged from them, ED in its 2013/2014 design phase remains one of the best attempts at creating a game that could have balanced PVP and PVE elements without the need for flags or PVE-only servers or any of the other divisive baggage that normally comes with multiplayer MMOs. The unusually large nature of the simulated galaxy worked in the game's favour, and the design elements that were proposed to be built atop it used that to their advantage. Sure, it was never going to be perfect and there would always have been attempts to game the game rather than play the game, but FD sure were holding a lot of good cards. It looked very promising indeed.
And then they launched too soon. Despite all the warnings. Despite the reaction to the enforced-PVP of early beta. They launched too soon with a barebones product and an effectively nonexistent criminality system that's only now, three and a half years later, being addressed. Hell, in a game in which fear of non-consensual or asymmetric PVP had been largely downplayed because "players won't have reason to congregate in the same places" what did FD do at launch? They reduced the "random" start positions to a slack handful of systems and introduced Community Goals. [where is it]
They had the opportunity to develop and to present at launch what could have been, might have been, the most balanced PVP/PVE experience yet available in an MMO-like. But they fumbled. They dropped the ball. And I'm not sure that's a fumble from which it's possible to recover any more. Too many players and groups of players have entrenched their interactions with the game into one or more playing styles that are fundamentally incompatible, and which risk being disrupted if any attempt is made to drag some elements back in the direction that the Proposals outlined. You only have to look at the backlash against the new C&P to see how near impossible the task would be without royally annoying one or more groups of players. And I don't mean "you changed Engineers" annoying. I mean "this is no longer the game I paid for" annoying. I don't think FD has the nerve for that sort of fight any more.
Thank God for the modes. They may not have been intended to be the ultimate PVP/PVE filter, but they needed to be. They've effectively saved this game from its own shortcomings on multiple occasions. Because while there are vocal players who hate that the modes are there, and even a few who may have abandoned ED because of the frustrations caused by them, I guarantee their number is nothing compared with the multiple exoduses the game would have seen if they weren't.
BTW Frenotx, one of my posts from yesteryear that I was looking for dealt with the possibility of basing NPC behaviour in Group and Solo modes on player activity in Group and Open. As long as a sensible C&P system was in place and limiting criminal behaviour to low security and lawless systems (I told you this was pre-launch!) I thought this made a lot of sense. So if unusually powerful player aggressors were for some reason -- even an out-of-lore reason -- attacking lots of ships in a particular system, similarly powerful NPC aggressors (or larger numbers of weaker ones) could be spawned in those same systems in modes or instances where the players weren't present. Player agency would be used to influence the "threat level" of the galaxy as a whole, regardless of mode. The modes would effectively be filters for interactivity types, but there'd be no "easy mode."
You can imagine how popular that was. Many PVPers hated the idea of only being able to shoot other players in the face by proxy as it were, while many PVErs couldn't stomach the idea of another player or players being able to influence how difficult their game was. Even if they could avoid it by flying somewhere else.
It's just not possible to square the circle on this one. It might have been, had the right things been implemented from day one. But they weren't, and now I fear we're always going to have this situation. Even for players who switch between PVP and PVE activities, ED is effectively two different games.
