I’m curious to find out if, as I suspect, it will be a mad land grab despite everything being Beta and subject to changes (and no doubt some of those seen as nerfs.)
A mad "land" grab it will be thanks to the "seasoned-CMDR"-friendly costs and requirements - in other words, any naive, half-unaware of the game, barely new player that tumbled out of their first medium ship, can dive in headfirst. The kind that has always been the perfect fodder for the relentless squadron recruitment spam in starter locations, disguised as friendly outreach, where these "helpful veterans" pretending to be your friend are really just socially engineering out their next gullible pawn, constantly enslaving the naive new members en masse via their expertly honed sales pitches.
This will only serve to the benefit of big squadrons with bloated rosters of hundreds and thousands members, pushing their indoctrinated half-new player masses in any and all directions to gobble up as much territory as they can early, while FDev are still unaware of their yet another balancing fiasco in the making.
That, instead of fostering diversifying system ownership at early stages, by letting the actual seasoned, more knowledgeable CMDRs, whether aligned with any squadrons or not, be the pioneers of this update and ensure system ownership is more evenly distributed between CMDRs of varying affiliations.
I had already forseen this happening, though perhaps only not to the extent of a few particular groups totally dominating the playfield. Meanwhile, some (not necessarily on these forums) are outright in some silly unreasoned denial, or dismissing the issue - not necessarily out of ignorance, but because we apparently need every last scrap of information before we´re even allowed to discuss the topic, or some other hum-and-haw excuse. And let´s not forget those quietly muffling the discussion, because drawing more attention to the problem would only hinder their land grab plans.
