Like I said in a previous post, I'd be happy with ED if the BGS made some sense and made the game exciting to play. I know the BGS triggers certain events in the systems, like broken down ships in need of fuel in a system at war, or NPC's requesting food in systems in famine, but all of these are hidden away in signal sources and the player has to choose to interact with them.
The BGS never seems to directly interact with the player. It should be programmed so that in a system in civil war you could become a legitimate target by getting caught up in the crossfire, or you could be stopped by a military patrol, or when you enter the system you're instructed to report to the checkpoint, and if you refuse you may be intercepted or get a wanted rating.
Or in a system that's in outbreak, and your ship has landed at one of the infected facilities, you may find you're unable to land at some other place because they're afraid you might be a carrier, but you can go to a medical ship to be cleaned.
Or in a system that's in famine, and you have a cargo hold full of food, you may get stopped by pirates who want to steal the food for themselves, like happens in real life when food parcels are sent to places in Africa and some criminal gang tries to hijack the trucks for their own people.
Or flying into a communist dictatorship where the leader is paranoid, so you're not allowed to dock if you're allied to someone else that they see as an enemy.
When you start off, you're always "space scum!". When you land at a pirate base, they talk to you the same way as a wealthy alliance system would in exactly the same words. I think pirates should start out hostile to most players and you have to win their allegiance by doing piratey things, like attacking other ships for cargo, black market trading, completing missions for them on the mission board.
Things like this would make the game more believable, and give the galaxy that the game is set in more life. It'd make it feel like a real place with real people and all of the fears and anxieties that real people have, instead of feeling like a game designed in a speadsheet where every faction, irrespective of what affiliation they are, treat you exactly the same with the same cookie cutter responses.
Technology has moved on tremendously since the days when Elite 84, Frontier and First Encounters were created, and there have been additions made to ED that the older games could never do, but the worlds the older games had felt more alive than ED because things weren't hidden away in signal sources and instances that the player must interact with before the content shows up. Those games gave you the content. Imagine what ED could be like if it was more dynamic.
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