Its still better than zero, and it makes you think about your ship in more terms than cargo capacity or how long you can go in a combat expansion.
Not for the players who have zero interest in PvP. It isn't about cargo capacity or combat zone duration for them. It's that they either don't want to play with people, don't enjoy PvP, or consider PvP in this game, especially post-engineers, as an utterly unenjoyable waste of their time.
If then, in an Open context your exposure to hostile players is variable, that answers this question? Players don't have to run through hell-holes if they don't want to; Power discords will have options for all levels of skill, its in a Powers interests to nurture and protect players from overwhelming odds either through direct protection, wings, training.
I primarily play in Open, and furthermore I played Powerplay in Open, hauling fortification merits, for four months when it first started... and this was during a time when I played during my local Prime Time, which maximized my chances of being opposed by another Power's players. I was opposed
twice during all that time, and both times they were skilled enough that I actually needed the shields and armor I had installed. Furthermore, and much more importantly IMO, I had fun in the process.
Unpledged players were a much greater threat to my runs for two of those months, before they mysteriously vanished for some unknown* reason. By about twenty to one, IIRC (I lost count after a while). They weren't an
actual threat to me, mostly they required a few extra seconds to alter my flight path slightly to ensure my braking maneuver would minimize my window of vulnerability, but towards the end they were certainly starting to get
tedious.
But here's the thing, IMO. All the stuff you mention above gives me
zero incentive to
directly participate in PvP in regards to Powerplay, above and beyond playing in Open and evading the occasional attempt to make an interdiction attempt. Especially post-engineers, where I could potentially spend an entire play session, and
never crack the opposing side's shields, nor have my shields cracked in turn... assuming I'm running a PvP metaship, of course. That is time that would be
far better spent hauling merits or spending time combat farming.
And if I'm hauling merits or combat farming, I'm not running a PvP metaship, and there is
zero incentive to risk hundreds, or even thousands, or merits, in PvP combat with a reward of
one merit.
This is why I consider the whole "Powerplay is all about the PvP" to be, at best, revisionist thinking. It's the only "PvP game" I know where the
winning move is not to engage in PvP. PvP Powerplayers participate in PvP for the same reason I play in Open: it's
far more fun to play inefficiently than the alternative.
I thought you gave up direct Powerplay and now tended its BGS instead?
Day to day logistics are really the same: what pad types are there / distance from star / distance from capital in jumps. These are almost interchangeable.
The rest are really down to scouring a map for the biggest green spots with no overlaps, compared to retreating a faction inside a set radius so you can expand into it instead.
Then it comes down to BGS manipulation to keep favourable gov types.
It's not by choice. If I want to
directly participate in Powerplay, my choices are three-fold:
1) Spend my precious playtime combat farming. I don't enjoy combat in general, though it is tolerable in small doses. There's a reason that despite having played since Alpha, my combat ranking is only novice. The thought of spending an
entire play session doing nothing but combat is utterly unappealing to me.
2) Spend my precious playtime aggravating my tendinitis by going through the fast-tracking of fortification commodities time and time and time again, until my hold is full, mostly at the tier three level because I don't play this game enough on a weekly basis to easily maintain tier four, and
then make an ABA cargo run... and my tolerance for ABA cargo runs is around six runs before it starts becoming uninteresting. After that, the route becomes familiar enough that it starts becoming tedious.
3) Automate parts of #2: No. Just no. I play this game to
play this game, not watch my computer play it for me.
Is it any wonder I gravitated towards the BGS side of things? Frontier has managed take a feature with the most
interesting gameplay, and gate it behind some of the
worst in-game activities I've seen. (Only pre-Beyond mining and exploration was worse, IMO.)
That is why I found Sandro's proposal to add Powerplay missions to be appealing, even if it would be mostly decoupled from the BGS except in control systems. It has the potential to make my game
much more interesting than the current status quo,
especially if there are other mission runners in the same system... assuming that the game does
not go Open Only. Opportunistic direct PvP between similarly equipped ships, between players who are in Open by
choice, is
much more appealing than the current status quo of PvP-metaship vs cargo hauler, or the inevitable cheats and combat loggers that Open Only would bring to the table.
__
* Very likely, because most of the haulers, whose level of comfort with that particular kind of "PvP" was lower than mine, had already left for solo/PGs. That left players like me hauling merits in Open, who are utterly unappealing to those kinds of players. We're extremely difficult to kill in the first place, and we don't get salty in the unlikely event we get killed anyways. We're not the "content" they're looking for.
