You know what I mean. For practical purposes, private groups which will immediately ban you for any hostile action against another player are PvE modes. The only issue is that they don't have unlimited populations and aren't as accessible as open or solo.
Sure, but then that's down to the developer, not developing PGs beyond essentially a 'play with friends' list, rather than a system that has a full delegation model and allows for respectable scale and actually publishing them in some fashion.
David Braben's comment wasn't that they could only ensure PvE by disabling direct damage. It was that even after they disabled direct damage in a PvE mode, griefers would find ways to be disruptive that wouldn't be easily dealt with mechanically.
PVE in most games, essentially means you see a representation of someone else near you (ghosted players, typically), but there is
zero interaction possible. That's the extent developers have to go to, to ensure compliance. It's the only way they can be able to say "this is PVE". Because anything less, means there's risk of interaction.
A lot of games use the concept of 'teams', in Frontier's case, wings. So they could have it so that limited interaction is enabled between wings of people, and none outside of this, but again, this becomes complicated to manage and this just creates 'wing to grief' behaviour. The game does have to assume people are going to be a , and have methods to manage that.
I'd venture to say that very few of the people who want to play ED as a purely cooperative game would agree with you about PvP damage constituting "most gameplay aspects" of the game, or being the only way to interact with other players. They would certainly disagree with you about it not being enjoyable. That's fine though, varying tastes are why it's essential that both open PvP and open PvE exist side by side.
You're missing the point. I can directly, and indirectly affect your experience. This can be dropping some cargo for you then ramming as you collect, or shooting you. For PvE to function, I have to be prevented from doing both, because I could ram you whilst you are collecting and cause damage. In PVE? I have to not be allowed to do this. I don't get to have a choice to "play nice", I will have to be programmatically forced to be nice.
What people mean for Open PVE, is to somehow have full contact interaction, but never any
risk to that interaction. This is, programmatically speaking? Practically impossible to do at scale. Mobius essentially works, because people are expected to behave a specific way, so that there is the ability for full interaction as a consequence. Yes, Frontier could have a no damage model, where all collision and weapon damage is removed, but you can still interact, but this is then an endless game of whack-a-mole removing an exceptions where people "find a way".
That was Braben's point. They elected a simpler model, which is open, solo, and PG for those who want to essentially play PvE with benefits (full interaction). No-one said it was going to be perfect.
