@insanephoton, I disagree with your starting area point. There are things for each career for every starting player to do, such as Piracy in LP 98-132 with little repercussions, a good mix of economies for trading, etc.
Also, the Empire is indirectly backing the E.P.P., I was wrong about the Imperial Stornghold idea. But a thorn in the Federation's side wouldn't be exactly worthless to their biggest enemy, right?
Lastly, what's with the angry wording? Are you angry at me for being enthusiastic about a game?
I'll stand by my point on starting areas. While it's true that the current starting area is pretty good for getting into most of the career options, but there was almost a sense of everyone being crammed into the same place to help FD stress test the networking code. We're moving on from Beta, the 22nd November is start of Gamma and 16th December the full release. Since Gamma seems to essentially be the start of the full game, that's when various kickstarter pledge level starts will come into play. A few have the option of starting from the Founder's system (location yet to be revealed). Some will start at Lave and others have less precise starts. From memory they include 'at the edge of Imperial space' , 'at the edge of Federal space' and 'at the edge of explored space'. The vast majority will have the basic start of a Sidewinder and 100cr, as far as I remember it was from a random location in human space'.
We all know that the current net code still has issues, how much they will be resolved in Gamma is unknown. The full release will bring in a large number of additional players. It would make sense to spread the players through human space to minimise the stress on the net code.
If the economies remain more or less the same and FD doesn't decide to somehow resolve the Eranin conflict, there will be little reason for most players to visit. The prices won't attract many traders. If the traders aren't there, then the pirates won't be there and therefore the bounty hunters won't be there. Only mercenaries and combateers will have a good reason to visit.
I would imagine that the Empire might well decide to give covert backing to the E.P.P. despite any ideological differences they may have. Eranin is sufficiently far away from the Empire for that not to matter. Part of the value of a proxy war is that you can cause your enemy problems without directly getting involved in the conflict. It would be interesting to know who's idea it was to try and spread the conflict to Dahan and I Bootis. It's almost as if someone wants to provoke the Federation into making a full scale military intervention which could be very bad for the E.P.P.
Finally the 'angry wording' , sorry about that. I was in an irritable mood at the time, probably as the result of reading too many doom mongering threads. It may also have been a bit of RP as I get a little fed up with the general anti Federation tone in the forums at times, there's a limit to how many pro Imperial postings I can read before getting the urge to counter them
