I think you misuderstand.... the pvp community is made up of different groups with different playstyles. Nobody is saying 'if we don't get what we want we will gank noobs in deciat' as some kind of threat.. its just what ends up happening because of circumstances.
Of course - however a subset of that community has engaged in such behaviour.
When the behaviour of a subset of the PvP player-base seems to be condoned by a not insignificant subset of the PvP player-base, what is the rest of the player-base expected to think about that?
Sure but we could say the same about solo players exploiting... Its silly to generalise.
Exploiting? Affecting the game's mode shared game features from any game mode isn't an exploit....
Recently players mainly in solo/private were exploiting onfoot data points for out-sized merit gains... They had to do it there because they would've been stopped easily in open.
Were they really "mainly in solo/private"? Given that there are two versions of Open and no guarantee that players in the same location in the same game mode will be put in the same instance by the matchmaking system....
Yeah they definitely were, we had lots of players looking for them and never found any...
While suggestive of those engaging in it (whatever their normal play-style preference - as it cannot be assumed that it was those who don't enjoy PvP) were not in Open
That has often been the expressed position of at least some of those seeking to remove the effects of players in Solo and Private Groups from mode shared game features.
Yeah our powerplay group had dozens of players checking settlements in specific systems that were showing unusually high merit gains for the opponents 2 hours after the cycle changed... Nobody to be seen in open. Why do you think fdev stopped that method of merit gain?
Ganking isnt PvP
No you really wouldn't, the folks that hang out in these systems seal clubbing don't have any interest in a fair fight.
By who? Let me go stand in one of the thousands of data ports in the hundreds of Odyssey settlements, how long do you think it would take you to find me?
And travel via APEX.
That would be very hard to implement given the game doesn't flag contacts in journal.
It would not require to rely on the journal in any way - as the game "knows" whether a player instances with any other player(s) even if it does not publish it in the journal, i.e. each blip on the HUD shows whether it is a player or not.
