Unfortunately, as I’m in Australia, the game is relatively quiet player-wise when I’m online, as it’s usually the middle of the night in UK/US.
But the point I’m trying to make is that the game requires me to go somewhere to seek out danger and mayhem. It would be nice (?) if danger and mayhem sought me out sometimes too.
It's never going to happen because FDev are obviously aware that there are plenty of risk-averse players. I'm not applying any value judgements to anybody's gameplay there by the way, or disparaging players who want a quiet life, we all like different things and there's nothing wrong with that.
A prime example would be the comment someone made about reducing the 'danger' from neutron stars. For me the only way they could be made less 'dangerous' would be if they were removed from the game completely, they pose literally zero risk to anybody willing to spend ten seconds understanding some fundamental concepts. Same with black holes,
'oh noes I flew straight into a singularity and err... bounced off it taking about 3% hull damage and a bit of heat!'
However it's clear from the forums that for every player who wants to be dicing with death each time they drop into a system, there's one who wants to just potter around at a leisurely pace doing their own thing. If FDev had created the game so that either of those competing imperatives had the whip hand, they would have probably halved their potential player base. Instead they decided to remove the need for that competition by essentially making the 'danger' (for want of a better word) largely opt-in. I can't see it ever changing because the game is like that by design, not by accident or because the developers are unaware of it.
Edit:
I'm probably somewhere in the middle by the way - for example I'd be happy for a bit more genuine risk to exist when exploring (being out in deep space 30K Ly away from the nearest humanity does seem like an activity that should be inherently dangerous) but then weighed against that is the fact that providing a possible instadeath scenario for a player who might have spent a year or more out in the black and would lose all their discoveries, plus make absolutely zero credits due to losing all exploration data, would be a brave choice for a game developer.
I'd be very happy for activities like smuggling and high-value trading to carry more risk; the old Robigo trade runs back to the bubble when you got maybe 7 or 8 separate pirates chasing you were fun but even then if you were decent at the interdiction mini-game the risk was minimal and interdictions have been massively dumbed down since those days too - last time I was in the bubble I managed to avoid an interdiction attempt from an npc FDL which doesn't sound hugely shocking until I point out that I was flying a fully laden T-9 at the time. Trouble is, I remember the forums before then and they regularly had people moaning about losing ships in that scenario, partly because they either didn't want to learn how to deal with them or just couldn't be bothered.
Look at mining now - you drop into a ring, a lone pirate appears, scans you and then leaves if all you have are limpets. That was a
direct response to players complaining about getting attacked for their limpets every time they went mining. For me, a good solution would have been to remove the pirates if you mined say 50LY from any populated system which would have provided an option for the risk-averse which required them to
make some compromises in order to benefit from it, but that doesn't seem to be FDev's style.
It is what it is. I made my peace with it a long time ago because it's clearly a fundamental tenet of the game's design ethos.
