While I see what you're going for, solutions that try to change anarchy factions into one big community who just roll with the punches, or in another example I saw yesterday "just move all anarchies to the edge of the bubble, it makes more sense anyway" - these kinds of god-handy alternatives aren't going to fly with Anarchy PMFs. In isolation, if we were discussing an upcoming game that people haven't been playing already for 7 - 8 years maybe that'd work but we've been growing our modest empires within a specific ruleset since 2015 along with everyone else, so Frontier moving our faction to some RNG location or removing our agency over it is not the solution we're looking for. We'd sooner have our faction government changed to something else, or probably sooner just quit doing the BGS altogether.
I sympathise with the devs in a way, you can't play fast and loose with a chess game that players have been invested in for this many years and that might be frustrating. Having to step on eggshells with BGS changes might be limiting if you come up with some cool new ideas, but in this instance it's them having dropped the ball in balancing and been too slow rectifying it. Anarchies have somewhat different mechanics but the same would be true for every group out there - if the victims of the imbalance were Feudal factions and people suggested "lol just change Feudal factions to make them work like RNG Crusader Kings NPCs" or something, everyone who has hitherto worked on one of these factions would be very annoyed - as I'm sure you'll appreciate.
It's easy enough for outsiders to say "I always thought anarchies should've worked thusly..." or "seems like the most obvious solution is to move them all to the seagull nebula" or something, but such a change would be worse in our eyes than what's currently happening.
yeah.
Personally if I were to do something like that it'd be something that applied to all factions and I'd have baked it in from the start - something like a passive buff to influence actions (and nerf to negative ones) that applies
if there are no systems of that government type nearby, possibly scaling with range to the nearest one. That way, maintaining vast swathes of, say, corporate systems and nothing but corporate systems (regardless of whether it's the same faction or several different ones) would be less viable, and it'd cause other government types to eventually bubble up in spots here and there.
But that'd still only mitigate the effect, it wouldn't change the cause.
Another possible tweak would be to have the 25% cut taken by interstellar factors work in the anarchy faction's favour as they're basically making credits off of it. Sure you'd have to bounty hunt four times as much for the same effect as a lawful faction, but maybe out-of-system bounties would help balance that. Having them make gains from using their services to
clear bounties would be something that allowed them to directly benefit from players committing crimes against other factions, which is very flavourful and as far as I'm aware, unique outside of the mission board.
Fixing black markets so selling your stolen gear through them would be a massive step.
Buffing the payout of illegal missions (and activities in general) and adjusting C&P to be less of a pain in the long-term might encourage players to do those things more, which would lead to a steering of player behaviour through shifting incentives.
In odyssey in particular, making the criminal factions harder to raid for goods and data might also shift things - allowing players to choose whether they go at them in the way that gets them some bounties from the lawful factions, or the way that's "legal" but results in a much tougher fight. Tougher guards, twitchier hostility (treating the profile scanner as a weapon regardless of whether it's in cloning mode or not - they don't
like bounty hunters) and so on. Faster reputation drops for even non-murder kills - coupled with a mechanic by which a faction hostile to you will occasionally drop off an assassin at a settlement while you're doing some
other mission, so even players that want to stay legal have to worry about people coming after them if they go around killing people just because they can. Hell, one of the concourse mission givers even has an assassination mission flavour text where they're sending you to kill someone
specifically for stealing a power regulator off them and trying to pass it off on the black market. So... stealing power regulators is a thing people will send hitmen after you for.
Interesting.
Either way, shifting mechanics is one thing, but it's shifting player incentives to
trigger those mechanics that causes the really tricky stuff.
