You've not convinced me to stop playing, nor to be concerned with anyone else.
Unfortunately the changes to our interface in 3.3 prevent me from showing my faction standing, so I can't show you what I have accumulated, but I will say, without a doubt, that even post 3.3, it IS possible to gain reputation and influence with a faction that is locked away, like MFI, however it has to be done in a very roundabout and indirect manner, which is incredibly tedious.
Time, perhaps a lot of it, will tell.
By that token, so could anyone and everyone else, almost assuredly mitigating whatever I do without so much as noticing.
A circular argument at best, see #1 above.
Is that why? Were you there for that decision? Offline, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. Online, what little difference it ultimately makes is still approaching zero.
Re-reinterating, others do not matter to me. Each of us our our own problem. I owe no one anything, nor does anyone owe me anything - well, except for one fellow, and it's $5, but that's a different matter entirely.
I suspect, if anything, the contents of any given, unexplored system, are known to Stellar Forge, but the "where is it right now" are not calculated for an undiscovered system. Likewise, when a system is void of players, I suspect they go into a sort of "suspended animation" state, where calculations for that system are not made again until someone enters that system. It likely explains why previously undiscovered systems usually show all their planets in nice, straight lines, since nature abhors straight lines.
That first visitor establishes a "baseline", and the next visitor has the positions of bodies calculated from that baseline during the jump-in loading sequence of Frame Shift jumping. At least, that's what makes sense to me to do, to avoid unnecessary calculations and data bloat.
