I wouldn't really care, because you didn't quit while fighting me. I'm not the rabid combat-log-hater like some others anyways.
And what do you want to prove by exploding? In that time to low-wake nearly twice you would've escaped ten times. So why bother at all?
The PvPers I meet all cheer for me when I shoot back. I have three now on my list who complimented me after my fights with them that
I was the first one of two dozen or more who fought back in Colonia. Nothing like "I want cheap kills", on the contrary. I don't deny that type is running around too, but the list of top PvPers I have in my friendlist now is all different.
It's sad for you that your experience differs that much from mine, because for me this game is wonderful, and a real good experience overall.
I didn't say that they're
ALL PvP combateers were the same - just that "on average", it would appear to me, anyway, from conducting live experiments, that mostly it's just for cheap kills with a lame, untrue (illogical) "justification" attached to it.
Logic would dictate that you wouldn't outfit a ship with weapons that can one-shot "in order that the target fights back". Fundamentally, the destruction is the thing, not the combat itself with these fits being used to engage targets that can be one-shotted by them.
It's great there are some players that would applaud you shooting back - but those are the ones that play largely for the combat itself, not just the explodey. There's a fundamental difference at play here. To those players - they have my respect.
Not so much the ones that use outfitting which obviously and self-evidently has the capacity to one-shot (or even two-shot) "vessel A" which they then continue to engage "vessel A" using that ship. That's clearly and self-evidently not for the thrill of combat - that's self evidently and obviously then for another explicit reason other than "for combat". That's fundamental and incontrovertible logic.
If it were me, and I was looking for a decent
quality of PvP combat, then I would definitely not "over-equip" my ship. That's simply logic at work. To pit
myself against another
player sounds like fun and interesting. To pit my
ship against another
ship? Tedious. I already intrinsically
know that ME in a combat engineered FdL will destroy ME in a trade-equipped Python carrying 100T of cargo. Same player (ME), therefore same "skill", but clearly and foretell-ably a different outcome of "combat" due to different ship. Boring.
If it were me and I was playing a "pirate", I would scan for cargo and on finding nothing would disregard that target. That's fundamental logic right there, which often appears to be lost on some "pirates". Are they stupid? Or do they think
I'm stupid?
(I expect the argument would be that there's no slot/mass overhead for a manifest scanner due to all that firepower and hull defense required. Baloney - targeting a trade vessel automatically creates an equipment-Delta, a pirate can most definitely afford a manifest scanner. Plus - the less "one-sided" the equipment advantage, the more likely it is that a player will stick around to be pirated. More likely that "fun" will be had. Logic wins out.)
If it were me and role-playing a blockade at a CG, then I'd manifest-scan the ships to find out whether they carrying anything I was blockading against. That's fundamental logic, which appears to be completely lost on the blockade that targets ships
leaving the NFZ after delivering any cargo they were carrying. Do these wings of FdLs that explode single trade-fitted ships leaving the CG location think I'm stupid? Or is the anti-logic of their
fake roleplay lost on them? LOL (Same story on the manifest scanner - a blockade vessel can definitely make space/mass for a scanner - just one scanner per wing of 4 - and don't use uber-FdLs - and likely the blockade runners will more likely stick around to "play" with me, rather than log, because the "play" just got more interesting, "even" and a bit more "balanced". Logic wins out. Again.)
I'm not sad that my experience is "different" from yours - I just dislike this form of forced "PvP" - but at least I have put myself out there as an experiment and can comment on this with conviction, from direct experience, rather than guesswork, conjecture or extrapolation. Which I couldn't do unless I stuck around to take a few explodeys. Plenty of rebuy money and no lost cargo being risked, LOL, evidently the target/aim was the
explodey ship, not the
cargo after all...
I too absolutely adore this game. I obviously play it a slightly different way from you - which is a GREAT thing in my view - we are not all the same and we all have lots of different things we enjoy about the game. And that's a large part of the game's strength and it's breadth of appeal (despite still being a bit of a niche!).
What sullies the game is the way it can be played by some to the detriment of fun by others. It isn't solely a FPS-like game where the sole content is to engage other players, but I do find it pretty sad (and tedious) that some appear to play it like it was one of those games. The sad part is the poor excuses they use, because they are such transparent and illogical "reasons" that do not bear up to any kind of scrutiny. This is the saddening part, for me. Not that it is played like a "must destroy all other players", but because the "reasons" given for doing so are so self-evidently codswallop.