This is a juicy thread OP. Let me get my thoughts in here.
1. I PvP in Open, and have done powerplay pvp when I was a Fed. I was introduced to powerplay pvp in the first weeks of playing almost 3 years ago by a CMDR Na'Qan. That started a friendly rivalry which developed into a friendship and mutual respect between The Imperial and myself. I've seen threads like this before, and these questions are asked by many on a daily basis in many discord servers and reddit posts. When it comes to Elite in general, I believe we have more questions than answers right now.
In my opinion, if I am powerplaying in open and/or affecting the BGS, I personally feel that anyone including an enemy has the right and ability to engage and try to stop me from what I am doing. I personally feel that running to SOLO or PRIVATE modes to hide from players in game is cheap and feels cheaty. It happens quite often, someone is in open, gets attacked and combat logs. Then they venture to solo to continue their BGS or Powerplay unhindered (PVE NPCs against a Engineered CMDR are a joke and pose little to no threat). So it kinda makes Powerplay PVP and Anti-BGS PVP countering pointless if someone can just run to another mode. So OP yes, I do agree that TO ME it is cheating the system.
PVP is alive and well, sure there are "Gank wings" and people who have no interest in BGS or Powerplay PvP out there, but there are many of us that do pvp for powerplay/bgs. I have also been hit with the argument that "Oh my T9 runs shieldless and can haul 700 merits at a time!" My answer to that has and always will be this:
YOU have the ability to outfit and engineer your ships properly. With the 3.0 system a ship can be engineered very quickly that can survive open hauling no problem.
Please don't hit me with the classic excuses like "I don't have time" Or "I don't have horizons" Or "I don't want to grind out the engineers." I have heared it all and it all comes down to you my friend.
Always willing to offer build advice to my PVE friends. If you need advice on getting into PVP or OPEN, feel free to PM me.
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