I don't think it's fair to say I'll contribute to them being punished when it's actually the complaints and stance of the hardliners that will be the cause of it.
Citation needed.
I think it's tragic if Elite sells well but actively scares away most of its player base with such harsh treatment. Some new players want to establish themselves in the game alongside the fellow community. There are bullies attacking only players they can overwhelm either solo in bigger ships or in wings.
Nice anecdote, if PVP was an undesirable element of the game it wouldn't be in, but of course that won't stop you from stroking your victim complex more. PVP games have consequence to your actions, and Elite Dangerous is a PVP game. PVP isn't just about shooting people; economic PVP is a very real and widely engaged in activity in a wide selection of games(IE, EVE, WoW, Archage, etc). The entire point of having a persistent universe in a game and providing a player with the agency to act on the elements of that universe is so that there are consequences to those actions. Reversing or denying those consequences is to deny the game itself.
Also, there are buttons called private group and solo, use them. They let you do just that.
Unlike NPC'S, a wing of players can wreak havoc on your shields and smash your powerplant/drives within the FSD cool down period following an interdiction.
That's the point. Why would I enter a wing if it didn't make us more effective?
If someone is bullied harshly and given only one option to accept death then I don't think they're someone you can call a cheat like you would a person who actively engages a target and disconnects rather than accepting the defeat with honour.
This is really hard to understand from a grammatical point of view. What I think you're saying is, "If logging out is cheating and being killed by someone isn't what is said hypothetical person(the one being killed) to do?" Correct me if I'm wrong. Anyways, assuming that is a correct interpretation, they die then and now they have to figure out a way not to get into that situation again or minimize exposure to that risk.
I hope you'll let me indulge in a little anecdote of my own.
Back in EVE my corporation used to live in wormhole space, pretty much the most dangerous space in EVE, not even the nullsec alliances or coalitions wanted anything to do with it. Occasionally we would have to import large amounts of fuel for our [stations]. Originally we thought it was too dangerous to do it with a large freighter as the only wormholes that would generate back to known space would usually exit in lowsec, but then we found a method to make the freighters enter warp far faster without having to sacrifice cargo. This dramatically reduced the risk of bulk imports of goods.
Instead of giving up on the idea, we attacked the problem and figured out a solution. That's really one of the great joys of open and expansive games like Elite or EVE. We had cause to come up with a better solution for our problem
because there was danger.
I dislike this sensitive topic because I get attacked for making defensive points and I'm well aware some of you are diehard principle merchants.
Public discourse without criticism is the death of that discourse, because otherwise its a massive echo chamber. Someone disagrees with you, deal with it. Tell them how they are wrong. Someone says something mean that doesn't have any intellectual bearing on the conversation or the idea. Well that's tough nuts, people aren't always nice on the internet. But guess what, it doesn't make your point wrong so you can ignore it.
Perhaps the best solution would be to incorporate 2 open modes of play. Open Play where players must opt into combat via a request or else they're only vulnerable to NPC fire. The other mode could be called Open Play: Dangerous. Full engagement that way. Splits the community but serves as protect the player base without harsh penalties such as banning player which would drive them to other games (and there are plenty!)
Or how about they just use the modes that already do that?
