my issue with elite dangerous was, and still is the imbalance of punishments.
a player could be coming out of the black after months of exploration and billions of credits covering 100s of systems for UC, in their battered ship low on health and armour..... and a purple haired pirate in their meta FDL can blow up the explorer.
the explorer loses months of stuff...... the pirate loses nothing, even if they lose the fight - which is hugely unlikely - the worst they face is a credit loss of a few mins to recover. they dont even lose bounty vouchers any more.
yes fleet carriers allow explorers to mitigate, and they can use solo or what ever, but it is still really lobsided in terms of punishment for failure with some roles losing potentially months and others losing only minutes
Yeah, it's not great by any means. But, as you indicate, the work around is to switch to solo mode.
Honestly, I wonder if the better fix would be for exploration data to be preserved if your ship was destroyed? Very other activities "fail" if your ship is destroyed... a lot less than when the game launched. In fact the only examples that come to mind immediately are exploration data loss and loss of cargo. Even a cargo carrying mission might not fail if you weren't able to carry all the cargo in one trip and can still meet the minimum threshold.
Probably the reason they will never make that change is to keep people from going out in the black for x amount of time and rapidly returning home by self-destructing.
The most amount of complaints about C&P comes from players caught out by accidentally assaulting a ship resulting in it being blown up or those still learning how to do Odyssey stuff cleanly. Increasing punishments just means making their game worse, no-one elses.
I have to disagree with you here. I've been doing Odyssey stuff since it came out and I know how to do missions cleanly. The problem is that takes a lot LONGER than causing some (or a lot) of collateral damage. The entire dynamic of settlement missions is different from space missions. If you're sent to assassinate a ship - barring a few cases of highly dangerous illegal missions where you take out politicians - they have no guards. It's you and the target; if it's a wing mission, their might be a wing of enemy ships. Regardless, you can engage them all and leave with no repercussions. At a settlement, there could be 20+ staff (plus reinforcements if alarms go off long enough) that will all go hostile to you even if you scan your target, prove they are a criminal, and take them out. It's realistic, but also tedious. And the rapid notoriety gain you get from the firefights in settlements is much faster than anything you'll get doing space missions (unless you deliberately set out to blow up civilian ships for no reason).
If settlement missions paid more, this would be offset. They don't. Settlement missions take longer, pay less, and have more complications to deal with than the majority of space missions. They need to increase the threshold for notoriety gain on settlements by a LOT; fines/bounties are fine, but not being able to clear them isn't. And spare me any arguments about it being accurate because your murdering a bunch of people in a settlement - this is a universe where stations blow up ships, possibly full of passengers, on a regular basis for loitering!
Also, I would add that settlement missions originally NEVER generated notoriety. They
fixed that several months after Odyssey's release. All they did was drive players to focus on anarchy settlements as much as possible to avoid the headache.
Yes, I know some people like to sneak around in these missions. That's fine. Good lord, they have a whole selection of missions that require that! The worst offender being ones where "you can't harm any personnel." But for the rest, let us take the gloves off!
One last bit: I don't enjoy murdering everyone in a settlement that gets in my way (usually). I'd much rather there be a non-lethal take down method and mechanic for hiding the unconscious bodies. But FDev deliberately decided against allowing that because that would have raised the PEGI level of the game even more. They removed the middle ground. And anyone who has done a lot of Odyssey missions should know that it's often safer to kill select personnel and then disable the alarms than try to fully sneak. If you're spotted, the penalties are worse and the difficulty increases. You don't think it's odd you can rack up more fines and bounties by having someone spot you doing illegal activity and then getting shot versus just shooting them in the back in the first place?
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