Sorry to dive into this conversation on page 58, but I've just recently restarted / got back into the game after a few years away, and I have some thoughts on this.
The main thing to consider IMO is that there is a difference between PVP and griefing. There are situations in this game that will put you at a higher risk of being attacked. For me, it's mostly been accidentally dipping my toes into the edge of a trespass area before I'd figured out how SRV missions were supposed to work. Pledging support for a particular faction through Powerplay is going flag you for attack by the opposing faction. These are situations where you bring the danger upon yourself, and you "deserve" the attack that is coming for you. As you progress through the game, however, as your skills improve and your ship improves, NPC pilots pose less and less of a challenge. By playing in Open, you're opening yourself up to the possibility that an actual person might come after you in those situations, someone whose skills might match yours - or in my case, someone who is almost certainly going to absolutely wipe the floor with me without breaking a sweat. Even something as simple as interdictions: I don't think I've failed to evade an interdiction since I climbed out of my first Sidewinder, but I imagine with a real pilot chasing me, that would dramatically change. By choosing to play in Open, there is an exciting element of added risk and potentially added challenge.
That's not the same thing as griefing. You're using that term, so I assume you understand what it means: to cause grief. That is the crux of what people tend to have a problem with, because your intention is to have fun at their expense. If you're both in on the joke, that's fine. If it's someone who is good at PVP, who can hop in a combat craft and come get revenge, or if they're someone who does plenty of PVP and it's just karma balancing itself out, wonderful. But not everyone you kill is going to be so goodnatured about it, and you have to know that, else you wouldn't be referring to it as griefing.
That feels like a very FPS mentality to me. When you play a game like Battlefront or Battlefield or Overwatch or what-have-you, dying is just part and parcel of the process. It messes up your K/D ratio, it might lose you the match, but everything is happy and fun, you give as good as you get, and everything is grand. But not everyone playing Elite Dangerous is that kind of gamer, and not everyone who plays multiplayer games understands that as being an implicit part of what "online" and "open" means. Most of my MMO experience comes from MMORPGs, where PVP might happen, but it tends to be limited to specific areas or situations, and/or there are going to be consequences for people who just walk up and grief you. I'm sure a lot of people (again, myself included) are out here playing Elite Dangerous not necessarily because it is an MMO, but because it is an Elite game: I started out with Elite on cassette in an Acorn Electron, and played the heck out of Frontier when the house finally got its first PC. I - and I'm sure others - play in Open because that's the game "as intended", and while I do so well aware that there is a risk of PVP, the risk of griefing is not necessarily something I accept, because I'm not from a part of gamer culture where that is "acceptable".
I'm not trying to accuse griefers of being oles or anything: you do you, my version of gamer culture is no more valid than yours. But conversely, your version is no more valid than mine, either. The question your posing is, if you don't want to be griefed, why aren't you playing on Solo? Well, because playing on Solo also excludes me from any non-griefing PVP as well. I don't want to avoid people who have a "valid" reason to attack me. I want to go into dangerous areas and have them be legitimately dangerous because of the possible presence of hostile players. But if I get griefed - if I get killed by someone who did it for fun, who did it just to be annoying or trollish, who is trying to ruin my day - then heck yeah I'm going to be annoyed by it. It is annoying. It's going to cause me grief. Is that not the whole point of griefing?
