Which reads as if risk minimisation is the only sensible option and any lack of perceived challenge won't be considered to be something that the player effectively did to themself by equipping OP gear.
It'd be interesting if reward was actually linked to risk, i.e. two players carrying out exactly the same activity in the same place would receive differing payouts based on how little risk they undertook (based on ship and equipment / engineering selection).
Half of players are at or below median skill - and while Frontier have offered increased challenge in optional encounters over the years, e.g. AX combat as one example, they don't force anyone to engage in it, it remains the choice of each player. It's pretty much a given that some players won't be satisfied with the upper limits - and I'd expect there are relatively few of them, which may well make the Dev time investment justification (in relation to adding even more challenging scenarios) more challenging.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see more challenging opt-in scenarios added - but don't see the justification for making the game more difficult for all players to suit a subset.
I fundamentally disagree with factions offering different rewards based on how ill-equipped the player is. It punishes those that bother to improve their equipment as well as being plain illogical - why would someone pay more for someone to dig a hole with a spoon rather than a shovel? Players equipping themselves properly should be the norm when they want to get stuff done, not a difficulty slider. Overcoming "Risk" should be taking on a difficult mission and overcoming it through a combination of skill and preparation, not "drinking 8 pints of beer before loading up the game and wondering why the game is so hard".
The point that I am making is that the very act of entering into a dangerous environment or taking on a high-rank mission is the opt-into difficulty that you are talking about. Yes, Thargoids are opt-in, just like how taking on high-ranked missions, dropping into a HI CZ or visiting anarchy systems is. By taking on an Elite ranked mission you are literally asking for the game to give you its greatest possible challenge. As I pointed out before, I also believe that carrying high-value cargo should also be treated as opting-in to higher difficulty engagements; this would allow traders and couriers to further regulate their difficulty by careful choice of cargo. There's even filters on the galactic map for those that want to restrict their travels to high-security systems and don't want to accidentally wander into lower security space!
I'm fully aware that half of players are below median skill, but
the problem is that the highest difficulty content is balanced around the average player with some reasonable kit, rather than balancing the middle difficulties around the average player. They have shoehorned 100% of the game's available difficulty scale to support 50% of the player base, leaving the other 50% out of the loop.
To be honest, the fix I would suggest for missions is quite simple: condense existing missions and squash them down into roughly the Master and below ranks (so the current Elite rank missions would be the new Master rank missions), then scale up the difficulty for the Dangerous, Deadly and Elite missions. It's reasonable to assume that someone attempting these missions is highly equipped, so they could quite easily be balanced around Big 3 users in say, the top 25%, 10% and 1% skill brackets respectively. Obviously, the rewards for these higher ranks would be improved to provide a mechanical incentive for players to attempt these challenges and so encouraging higher risk. Similar things for general system security levels, RESs and CZs, although in their case they might need new ones adding as there isn't much leeway if you are only dealing with a few different difficulty settings. This isn't about taking options away from players, players who aren't confident could still do everything that they currently do as long as they are careful about where they do it and what work they take on, it's about partitioning off a little bit of the playground for those that actually want to stretch their legs a bit.
And in-part, I feel like Elite's strong aversion to difficulty very much contributes to the grindyness of it all, as everything is locked behind grind rather than challenge. There's very little incentive to get better at the game and work towards challenge based goals as they don't really do anything in the game. There's always more stuff to do in the game but once you hit the endgame there's very little challenge unless you shoot yourself in the foot prior to attempting the challenge. Even the few remaining challenging things (soloing wing assassination missions and larger Thargoids) don't provide any real in-game reward compared to attempting the easier tasks and so mechanically reward the grind rather than the challenge. It's also why so many people resort to PvP and continually want fresh meat to gank, the game isn't providing them with the desired challenge and so they turn to other players to be their "content".
Among the players here, i rate myself as "average at best" pilot. Which probably still is very optimistic. When playing with some friends, who re-discovered the game around X-mas and also now play once every few weeks, i am basically a piloting god among them. Only when you sometimes play with real beginners, you realize how much your experience really helps you.
And yet, these " real beginners" you were playing with, how many of them would regularly be seeing rebuys if you sent them into a HAZRES or CNB with a fully engineered Cutter? While I know full well that players who are very new to the game are faced with a steep learning curve, I find it hard to believe that anyone with 100+ hours of flight time could be so very vulnerable.
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