Yeah its really annoying. It used to be a very long time ago now that if you dropped in a random location (not a res site) you wouldn't get any pirates at all, it was a feature not a bug i thought.
Try an uninhabited system? Im not sure this works either.
Luckily system security is also almost immediate in secured systems, so it kinda compensates. It was still better when you could do avoid pirates altogether with logic. Everyone is a combat happy player even while mining it seems.
That's because they have no game mechanic to provide to the player other than npc opposition.
What is the barrier for miners if not pirates? The roids are RNG. There is no skill or game involved with mining, you just sit in front of a rock and hold a button down ....periodically launching limpets.
It's apparently either too time consuming or too late to implement something fun and skillful for miners to have to do solely while mining. So throw some combat in.
You get the same thing with trading.
Trading is absolutely brain dead space trucking. There's no gameplay or skillful activity involved in it. Just tedious spreadsheet jockeying if you dont just rely on web-based scripts on third party sites to do the jockeying for you. So throw in some random pirates to interdict you.
Exploring? Well, implementing environmental hazards will probably take time and effort. Though for this one, they didn't even bother trying to think of a paper thin excuse for throwing a pirate after you. There's just nothing.
Combat was the only gameplay mechanic that was implemented in a mostly complete way at launch. So it's used everywhere in place of other gameplay mechanics.
But i wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that combat players are happy with the combat they have in the game. It's not like the npcs are hard to kill unless they cheat and killing the npcs is an empty accomplishment since the npcs are infinite, non-persistent, and it doesn't really mean anything in the game to kill them or not kill them.
