Which would be fair enough if there was any benefit to the fighter escort.
5% trade bonus vouchers! ("Fighter escort" sounds too much like hard work, but sitting in a station so 3 traders can combine SCO with wing nav lock and near-teleport from star to station has got to be worth some token payout and does more to keep them safe, right?)
But as soon as you introduce a PvP blockade everything changes:
- Most of the time the only option is to high-wake and therefore not accomplish the objective.
- Escaping a competent ganker does take some skill. You can't just boost forward and leave.
- The attacker risks absolutely nothing and there's no practical way to make them leave the system.
That's the big difference between your FE2 example and what we're talking about here.
Not really. All of those points are absolutely identical to the FE2 case:
- if you can't defeat your attacker, your only option is to high-wake (which in FE2 isn't endlessly repeatable and will fail things like mission timers much more rapidly than in ED)
- a pirate attack in FE2 is not meaningfully escapable in normal space (if you had a faster ship and were willing to fly two days real-time to the station to not trigger the re-intercept, maybe?)
- pirates in FE2 also risk absolutely nothing (sure, you can kill them, but they're NPCs) and if a system has pirates it'll have pirates the next time too
The more important difference is that a PvE encounter is designed to be winnable [1] and a PvP encounter is almost by definition not winnable for both sides.
Similarly when the Thargoid Scythes were briefly intercepting passenger traffic in supercruise well clear of the previous Thargoid Zones, or going back
much further, NPC pirates would interdict and attack returning explorers, that wasn't popular despite not being PvP. [2] The problem isn't that it's PvP, the problem is that it's a required potentially-losable encounter for the player, and ED isn't really set up to make those an expectation.
[1] Though even then FE2's early game was brutal. Same reverse difficulty curve as ED, but it started off a lot tougher. Even as an experienced player starting a new run I'd die considerably more in the first few hours of an FE2 game than I have in ED at all.
[2] Arguably it was
way less popular, precisely because NPCs are way more common than hostile players, even in Open. Back when NPCs would attack explorers I flew with an escort wing and we got regular business. Once NPCs stopped attacking explorers, the hypothetical of a player attack was far too irrelevant to keep the group going.
Good question tbh. I think it's because Elite is a pretty easy and chill game. So it attracts a lot of players who log on to relax in a low intensity setting.
This is the key bit (and why above I suggested that maybe interdiction should be removed entirely from the game as just not fitting with the direction it's gone in).
Good game,
terrible Elite sequel, is I think my general opinion nowadays.
An explorer losing literal months of exploration earnings is not common in most games.
Exploration is impossibly hard to balance risks for, even ignoring PvP, because of that. Again to fit with the "pretty chill game" they should really just make exploration data not lost on death: you're not supposed to be able to die while exploring, so why punish someone who manages it beyond "you're now tens of thousands of LY away from where you wanted to explore"
As others have said the C+P system simply can't solve for those losses... unless unless it actually penalizes the killer with the amount they destroyed. That would actually be hilarious. They should do that. Kill an explorer with 500 million in earnings? You now owe the Pilot's Federation 500 million credits
That wouldn't help the explorer "oh no, my killer has to grind for a couple of hours and I still lost months of scans" [1] and would be really easy for Sidewinder-station-rammers to exploit by picking up a bunch of Stratum exobio scans to quickly cost their victim a billion credits (speeding is a crime, punishable by death)
[1] This is essentially what we're always discussing when talking about punishments of this sort for PvPers: how many minutes or hours PvE grinding buys you various sorts of "unpopular" PvP kills as an indulgence. Could we go further and make it an earning opportunity for Frontier? 1000 ARX buys you one "punishment-free" PvP kill? Buy ten get one free? Halve the cost per kill if you use the Python 2 Ganker Pack with complementary shipkit and paintwork to carry it out?
In my mind it should be harder to commit crime in a high security system. [...] but the commander was famous for camping engineer bases in open.
Most engineer bases aren't in high-security systems (of the starting five, for example, two are low security, one is Anarchy, one is high security, and one is medium)
Are you saying it's absolutely fine for someone to blow up players trying to engineer their ship at Eurybia (Ryder), pretty much okay at Khun (Martuuk) or Wolf 397 (McQuinn), maybe allowed as an occasional treat at Wyrd (Dweller), and definitely out of bounds at Deciat (Farseer) - at least, unless someone gives the Deciat Blue Dragons a big BGS push?
If not, system security level is basically an irrelevance for PvP prevention, at least in terms of the actual hotspot systems.
