What Elite needs is a reason for pirating / ganking, to be punished by a crime system that actually works.
As your bounty increases, the police will hunt you down as soon as you are in a system and put bounty hunters on your trail, increasing in difficulty as your bounty increases (Anarchy / uncontrolled sectors excluded)
Also bountys should not be able to be lost on death, the only way to remove is by fine for smaller offences, to death for bigger fines.
The game does not have any reason for pvp / gankers to fear terrorising pve players.
fdev need to address this issue, as soon or later there will be no players left for them to attack and open mode will a expense to fdev not worth keep running.
What Elite needs is a reason for pirating / ganking, to be punished by a crime system that actually works.
As your bounty increases, the police will hunt you down as soon as you are in a system and put bounty hunters on your trail, increasing in difficulty as your bounty increases (Anarchy / uncontrolled sectors excluded)
Also bountys should not be able to be lost on death, the only way to remove is by fine for smaller offences, to death for bigger fines.
The game does not have any reason for pvp / gankers to fear terrorising pve players.
fdev need to address this issue, as soon or later there will be no players left for them to attack and open mode will a expense to fdev not worth keep running.
Well police response when you are wanted has increased - could go up a notich or 2, I suppose. If you are wanted you already get attacked by bounty hunters in other systems, Not had a bounty over 10K but I assume it already scales. The gankers and griefers have combat ships with very fast time to kill, NPC bounty hunters and police really are not a problem form them, but are for the likes of me.
What about NPCs, does murdering NPCs count under your proposal? I think it should by the way, as this is a thread about open PvE. Do not give me the pilot federation stuff either, Elite Security Forces are by definition members, and it is lore that the Pilot Federation started taking members from Dangerous upwards. NPCs have rights too, particularly if we are going to cater for the PvE crowd.
The current C & P uses death as the path back from Wanted. We all know this has just led to suicide-winder, so this has to be looked at. There has to be a path back from bounties, otherwise there is probably very little gameplay for a player after they have taken their firdt assasination mission where the target is clean, or scratched a security patrol in a res site. You need to avoid PvPers grouping into 2 to rinse and repeat farming each other's bounties. So what to do with bounties on ship destruction needs to be looked at. I think death should be ignored and the bounty timers continue, being reset on new crimes as they are now - so if your a good boy for a week your bounties becomes dormant, as they fo now.
The other problem is bounties are currently minor faction as jurisdiction. I think the game worked better when bounties were Fed, Empire or Alliance with the only the Independent minor factions being effectively limited to a system, as it was. There was a lot more adhoc PvP back then, if someone had a good enough bounty you would have a go, if you thought you could take the ship. Having a bounty was a bad thing back then, it frequently got bigger as system authority attacked you, and players started to take notice around 50K.
Some people will never come into open if PvP is allowed. There is a subset of PvPers that want PVP removed from open (there is a hardcore that want PvP removed entirely). No idea of the size of this community of players. Its a valid point of view, as a mod pointed out to me, the original DDF proposal on modes did suggest an open pve mode. Those that want PvP removed are as out of order as the folks that want BGS and Powerplay to be PvP only in my view. You are not going to get those that do not want non-consenting PvP back into open, if PvP is even possible.
C & P alone will not allow PvPers and non-PvPers to exist in the same instance. Make it too punishing and Gankers just swap to indirect tactics such as suicide Eagles, the punishment for crime is severe so they find ways to make non-PvP players the criminal as it is wost than ship loss- would you really want to be pushed to the anarchy systems, because you missed a hollow triangle snekaing up on you (or its a stealth suicide eagle)? That is what your proposal would turn open into. Watching your back for the sneak attack, meanwhile piracy dies a little more, and PvP bounty hunting remains on life support.
I think Open-PvE is the only way, but given this thread, there is absolutely no way I would play in it - the architects are way to extreme and passive aggressive for me.
Upshot C & P is hard to get right, and not the saviour of the game.
Simon
(LOL, and yea, I forget off-line mod 
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
