Some players are simply not fun to play with. They cheat, bully, gank, and routinely violate the unwritten rules of fair play. In every MMO I’ve ever played that has had open PvP, the usual suspects are such a huge problem that they’ll depopulate a game’s servers, until the development team either implements a PvP switch, or goes bankrupt due to lack of paying players. At best, one in twenty players will opt into PvP… if those development teams are to be believed.
Bizarrely, despite this pattern seen in other games, a significant majority of players voluntarily choose Open as their preferred mode. The usual suspects are conspicuously absent, except around CGs abdicate handful of systems known to have significant player traffic, and even then they’re not much of threat to a prepared player, or those who play outside their local prime time.
Something is keeping down the population of usual suspects, and I believe it is Frontier’s tri-mode system. When you allow players to choose, on a session by session basis, who gets play with them, you get environment that is fun to play in for everyone… except the usual suspects. Those least interested in PvP, or interacting with other players in general, get to enjoy their game in peace, while the usual suspects discover that they aren’t the mighty PvPers they picture themselves to be, but annoyances that can be ignored… or swatted if they target the wrong player. Sooner or later, unable to get kills while getting killed in return, they leave for greener pastures.
The same was true of PowerPlay 1.0, and is doubly true in PowerPlay 2.0. In 1.0, the usual suspects, not pledged to any Power, briefly swarmed around Power capitals, regardless of whether fortification merits were outgoing or incoming, They soon vanished, long before most of those interested in the idea of PowerPlay quit due to the extremely poor PvE activities forming the base of the feature. That pretty much confined spontaneous PvP to combat expansions, or the extremely rare encounter between fortifiers and underminers.
Frontier’s networking solution for this game is extremely poor for direct confrontational PvP. Players host instances, not Frontier, which is ill suited to instancing players from different geographical regions, and the number of players in an instance is capped by the hosting player’s equipment. Open is not one giant instance, but thousands of individual instances where, when the stars align, you might be matched with someone you don’t know. Furthermore, player’s frequently have to jump through hoops just to be instances with their friends, let alone strangers. And of course, the reverse is true: with instances hosted by players, it’s fairly easy to “poison the well,” guaranteeing a private instance at the expense of other player’s transition times.
Finally, there is the question of the behavior of Old School PowerPlayers themselves. Not whether they are fun to play with when encountered in the game, I have had nothing but positive encounters to date, but in general. They should be the type of player significantly more likely to choose Open than the general playerbase. And yet, with one notable exception, the message we get from them is “We bravely do our work in Open. It’s everyone else who is hiding in Solo/PG.” So the question here becomes: Is the Power Playerbase significantly less likely to freely choose Open, despite near universal claims to the contrary, or is instancing simply that bad?
Personally, I think it’s the latter, not the former. Personally, anecdotally, and experimentally, everything I’ve seen indicates that unless both players actively cooperate with each other, you’re only likely to instance with strangers physically near you, and only if a potential host can support multiple players. Which means that even if a player is online during the daily global peak, unless they live in Europe, they might as well be playing in Solo. Thus, Open Only will not produce the results you think it will.
On the other hand, if instancing is actually good, and the Power Playerbase as a whole can’t be trusted to obey their own house rules to gain what is ultimately an ephemeral advantage, then why on Earth would anyone trust them to play by the unwritten rules of fair play? That type of player is not fun to play with. And if there are enough of them, PowerPlay 2.0 will wither on the vine, just like PowerPlay 1.0 did, as will any hope of Frontier ever adding any meaningful PvP content in the future.
YMMV
this!