I think one of the biggest problems with Elite Dangerous is that Frontier Developments has made a huge mistake by taking any meaningful consequences out of the game in favour of being do whatever they want, whenever they want during the game, but the problem is, this kind of attitude takes more away from the game than it adds.
For instance, piracy is a huge part of the game and it helps to create danger within the universe and makes it more exciting for everyone else. With the current game mechanics this is however a farfetched dream, because the current game mechanics only give you a small bounty for your criminal activities when really the consequences if done correctly would add more depth to the game by making it feel like you are a pirate, a smuggler or even an assassin. By having a piracy ranking that goes up as you commit more and more crime the harder it becomes to harder to dock at action stations. For instance, if you are committing crime in Federal space it won’t be long before you are prevented from docking at any space station in any system belonging to the federation because you are a criminal scum bag. In actual fact, in high Security Systems you will be lucky if you managed to get to the station to even begin to think about requesting docking.
This would mean making more advantage of pirate bases that are dotted throughout the galaxy, and some of these may also be hidden deep in remote asteroid belts where they can take safe refuge from bounty hunters and police forces. It may even be the case that the murderers who have been banned from docking at any faction station apart from maybe a few independent systems can only dock and these are hidden pirate bases. That the bonus is that it would make great use of the new asteroid stations and actually give them a viable purpose in game.
These bases can also have unique missions and career paths that enable the pirate to rank up and gain access to top secret bases and engineers that can create unique equipment that only pirates can use in order to achieve the criminal activities. Of course, there is a downside to having pirate bases, for example, not having access to the best ships, the best equipment even A rated upgrades seeing as everything has to be brought off the black market and as such is very expensive and rare as well, seeing as the high ranking pirates have no access to high tech stations in any of the major factions area row of influence.
Being a pirate would also mean not having access to any of the best trade routes seeing as you can’t dock at any of the major faction’s stations. You may have access to some independent systems but that would be about it but they will most definitely not have access to the most profitable trade routes at all.
This alone will create so much game play for the players it will be amazing, but the problem is frontier developments has completely closed off any kind of meaningful game play by having the philosophy of any player being able to do what they want when they want. Instead what we get for piracy is some limpets and that’s about it, there is no interaction with the NPC’s and as a reward for a criminal activity all we get is a 9000 credit bounty planted on our heads to make us feel like pirates.
This then has a massive impact on those who wish to play as bounty hunters, because with properly developed pirates you can properly developed bounty hunters and as a rank they get access to their own engineers who can create unique items that enable them to hunt and track pirates. For instance tracker limpets which can latch on to pirate ships so the bounty hunters come for help find where the pirate’s base of operations are.
So please frontier developments change the philosophy of the way that you are making this game because right now you are making it very shallow very dull and there anything but the elite universe which is described in your rich lore that you have created.
And it is not piracy or bounty hunting which is a problem, it is all career paths that to the problem. Mining, trading, military careers, exploring, the whole lot is devoid of any meaningful depth. I mean can you imagine, proper developed faction paths, where you can rank up with the federation with a properly developed career paths, which could expand in to privateering, navy, spy's and double agents, the only way to partially rank up with two factions. But this can't happen with FD's current philosophy of lack of consequences in favour of a shallow do what you want when you want mentality.
EDIT: Can a mod change the title to "FD's huge mistake in taking consequences out of the game in favour of a do what you want when you want mentality" please.
