It's fairly obvious that many self-declared members of CODE get their enjoyment from getting easy kills. I am sure that some members of CODE see this as RP and adding the "Dangerous" into the game title, and will defend their role as such, but I'm equally sure that many (and I suspect, most) members just want to legitimise their kill sprees. Fundamentally this latter group get their kicks by spoiling someone else's day, killing because they can, and not because it advances their game or even their declared intent.
Whether you call it legitimate RP or griefing, if the net effect of CODE actions are to drive people away to Solo then CODE are damaging their supposedly declared principles (encouraging Open play) much more than they are adding content to the game. The declared rationale for CODEs actions in the Hutton CG are specious at best and look to me as if they only exist to legitimise their actions. They say it's not griefing because the game mechanics support how they play, but many of the activities that have been evidenced are judged to be griefing by all but CODE. The CODE spin doctor here claims that everyone can play the game the way they want to play, which is valid, but the way that many members of CODE want to play the game have a disproportionately deleterious impact on other players. This cannot be a good thing in the long term because it either drives people away from the game or into Solo.
I would sincerely hope that unsavoury roles remain in the Elite universe, because they add a genuine frisson of excitement. However, I also hope that such activities are appropriately treated by the Elite universe, rather than accomodating illegal activities due to the leniency of the outcomes. If it was possible to severely dent a pirate's existence in-game, I suspect we would have many players wanting to form genuine BH posses to hunt CODE. As it stands within the game at the moment, this is pointless as catching and killing CODE members just costs them a small bounty and they just restart.
The impression I get is that most CODE members just want easy kills, and they worked out (after 5 days!) that they could find them at the Hutton CG, so they just created their lame "rationale" for doing so. Some of us have experienced first hand, and others have collected the evidence, of some pretty unsavoury activities by self-declared CODE members: admittance to using hacks, pad blocking, firing without warning. When I took up a defensive role at Hutton, the CODE representatives ran away at the first sign of resistance. Hardly the actions of a group committed to acting out a RP vision or adding content to the game. It's perfectly fine for them to send many other players back to the ship rebuy screen after 2 hours supercruise, but at the first possibility that it might happen to them, they run like scared rabbits.
For all Fang's protestations here, the CODE principles and justifications for their member's actions are just there to hide the fact that the game mechanics currently accomodate (if not encourage) actions which are perceived as griefing by pretty much everyone else. I hope that Frontier find a way to balance the mechanics, and that Elite becomes as "Dangerous" to their play style as their play style is to other players, and the long term future of the game.
