Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Your first point about NPCs is irrelevant to increasing rewards for playing in open. This isn't a discussion about NPC difficulty, or perhaps you have misunderstood one of my points.
The argument seems to be about players offering a greater challenge than NPCs. Therefore NPC difficulty is entirely relevant, in my opinion of course.
Encountered risk? I think you mean encountered hazard there, and a hazard is not the same as a risk. A risk is the possibility of harm, a hazard is the thing that causes you harm. To clarify, in this case the risk is being in open (possibility to encounter hostile players), and the hazard is a hostile player. Whether the hazard is encountered is irrelevent to basic risk assessment, where precautions are taken and bonuses rewarded because you are exposed to additional risk, not just compensated when you encounter a hazard. It's comparable to some jobs having inceased pay as a reward because of the increased dangers involved. Solo and open are not the same because the risk is different by design. A blanket bonus would, therefore, be appropriate by accounting for risk.
Thanks for the terminological correction. NPCs are also a hazard in the game. The outcome is the same, ship destruction, when the player suffers a loss in a hostile encounter. So the basis of the comparison seems to be relative levels of probability of a hostile encounter and the hazard posed by the encountered situation. Averaged over the galaxy the risk associated with player encounters is rather small (as the average player density per system is tiny), in hot-spots it's rather high (as players seeking player targets seek out places where players congregate).
Not all jobs where there is a risk of death pay the same though - so that seems to take probability of a hazardous situation occurring into account too.
You could also apply that same risk reward to mission. So if you're doing an assassination contract in a corvette you get a lower pay than a sidewinder. That could be interesting to gameplay, unless you assume the NPC is basing the reward on your skill/reputation as a pilot such as through combat rank. That would certainly make things interesting, but is very different reducing the risk to completely removing the risk by mode. A very good idea though.
Modes only remove the risk of player encounter (well, Solo guarantees that, whereas even in large PvE Private Groups there are (soon-to-be-ex) members who "forget" the rules from time-to-time), not all risk.
Regarding the challenge offered by each mode, Sandro had this to say:
Hello Commander Ozram!
I think you are perhaps conflating two separate issues: the amount of challenge present in each game mode, and player versus player interactions. I think these are so fundamentally different that comparisons might not be particularly useful.
The challenge of playing in solo being too low (without taking sides) is a valid argument to make, although it might better be phrased as "the opportunities for challenge are too low in Elite Dangerous". It's actually something we are interested in looking at.
However, cranking up difficulty will not make Open more enticing. Conflict between actual people, even within a game, is a very different matter to taking on NPC ships. It has many psychological and social elements that would otherwise not be present. Incidentally, increasing the difficulty of NPC engagements would also make Open harder rather than fairer, so there's also that.
Perhaps the bottom line is the different modes are there to enable Commanders to play how they want to. We don't want everyone to play in Open because we want some sort of Armageddon PvP scenario. We just think that playing with other people, both cooperatively *and* adversarial, can be more fun, which is why we advocate Open play.
So in the context of a karma system, people playing in Private Group or Solo mode are not relevant. Why should folk in Open be interested in what goes on there? This is about making player versus player interactions more equitable *in Open*, getting more folk in there, surely?
A risk based payment model for missions would be a very interesting development - as the bored player in the meta-Engineered tank build would be paid less than the player who completed the same mission in a lesser ship. That, in itself, might very well incentivise players seeking challenge.
The collusion piracy changes as you point out have indeed been implemented in game, so we can see what the future will bring.
Indeed.
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