Why do many people think that newbies (and this is especially useful for them) know about the blocking mechanism?
I think that many newbies are not very familiar with these mechanisms.
Have you seen training scenarios in the game? Was there a training to include a player in the block list?
And if another player kills you, do they write to you that you can use the block list?
Why, when choosing an open game, there is no message that you can be killed here just for fun?
I don't think it would hurt to add "PVP enabled" in big red letters on the "Open Play" select. But "blocking" is a common mechanic across a lot of MMOs, and griefers are also common across many games.
If the argument is that the tutorial should be better, then I'd agree there. There's a lot of things that aren't obvious to new players, which is why the Fuel Rats tend to rescue players from
the same systems over and over.
But I don't think it's a good idea to enforce options like blocking on new players. The issue isn't really that PVP occurs, or even that mismatched skill-level PVP occurs. The issues come more from "seal clubbing," where gankers camp Deciat and newbie systems to attack random players. Well, I say random, but it isn't really random- they don't attack players who would stand a chance against them in a fight. But I digress.
There's a lot of issues going on, but it seems to boil down to this:
- Players get attacked, either by pirates or gankers. They decide to move to Solo or move to relatively unpopulated areas
- Pirates and gankers can't find anyone, so they clump up in high-traffic areas (Engineers, newbie systems, CG, etc.). Because the more experienced players have learned to avoid them, the only targets available are newbies
- Newbie enters game. They're likely aware that PVP is a possibility. They enter a high traffic area
- Now a few scenarios arise. A pirate might attack them, but newbie likely doesn't have a lot of cargo and probably isn't interesting PVP to the pirate. A ganker will attack them, because they're an easy target and "noob salt tastes better." Maybe some gankers try and say "this teaches them the game is cut throat" except that the only places that are like this are high traffic areas.
- Eventually, the only ones left in open in those high traffic areas are PVPers and noobs.
The current state of open means zero risk for traders/explorers 99.5% of the time, and getting curbstomped the other 0.5% of the time. I have never run into a pirate, I've only run into gankers, so there isn't even the reward of emergent gameplay or interesting RP if I go into open. It's not because the game is "crunchy" or "doesn't handhold", because Kenshi is set up in a similar way but is much better at signally risk/reward. Nobody has a complaint about a new character wandering up to a beak thing and getting eaten, because the thing looks intimidating and you've probably been attacked at least once before then and know that your character is weak. And in Kenshi, there are rewards for going into higher-risk and more dangerous areas later in the game.
ED isn't like that. There's no reward for doing exploration/trading in open. If people want to do PVP they can do PVP. If they don't they can do private group, solo, or blocking. It's got nothing to do with toughness, and instancing problems caused by blocks can be as much of a nuisance as having to redo hours of cartographic data.
If we wanted to promote the more "RP-heavy" or immersive PVP (IE, piracy) over ganking, then the game system should reflect the rewards of one being higher than the other. Which it already does, since you don't get someone's cargo if you blow up their ship. If we want to improve the tutorial to teach new players about the different social options, then I'm all for it, though there may be other areas of the game that need tutorial love as well.
So I agree that it's a problem, but I disagree with your solution. Maybe you could have it prompt the player after successive deaths to the same person (Sort of like how some games ask if you want to change to Easy difficulty after losing to a boss a few times). The thing is, most activities done by new players which would be undone by this sort of thing are easy to recover from. The most annoying one is if you get ganked at Deciat after getting meta alloys, since 300 Ly back to Maia is a long trip on the early ships.
