I think they may want to rename the game to Elite : Dangerous / Safe Mode / Safe Mode #2
But that doesn't make any sense because there isn't a rating called "Safe Mode". Or have you misunderstood?
Becoming Elite - Ratings
- Getting the Elite rating (in any of the four rankings) automatically gets you into the exclusive “Elite Federation of Pilots” – and being a member of the Elite federation confers many privileges. It is also possible for pilots without the “Elite” rating to gain admission to the EFP, but access to the organisation is extremely difficult: one must show extraordinary promise as a pilot to be admitted.
[...]
- Once admitted the pilot will be awarded a badge including the “Elite” logo, but with their current rank below. It is expected the majority of these will be “Elite: Dangerous” and “Elite: Deadly”. Those with an “Elite” rating get the original, unadorned badge.
(emphasis mine)
On another note: where do all those troll replies come from? Are all the mods still on holidays?
I fear the combination of increased traffic and real-life commitments has seen a significant drop-off in moderator action recently. In the last couple of days I've seen an increasing number of troll posts of the type that would have been silently nuked just a couple of weeks ago, along with posts including casual racism and comparisons with sexual abuse. I suspect the signal-to-noise ratio has just become too small for the mods to stay on top of it all.
Well to be fair, playing in private games out of fear of others is cowardice. Also, Elite is not a sandbox. You can't build anything. That's pretty much the basic idea behind the term. I mean, what do you do in a sandbox? You build.
Or you destroy what others have built and bask in the howling and the salty, salty tears. Whatever floats, or indeed sinks, your boat.
Ive been playing open and never once lost a ship to another player, not once but alot of ship lose to npc however
I nearly lost a ship to an NPC interdiction because I was so busy keeping an eye on what the dozens of hollow pips were doing that I didn't see the pirate NPC sneaking up behind me in the confusion of scanner returns. In that case the humans certainly added an extra element of risk to the proceedings, but probably not in the way FD intended.
What's amusing in all of this is that neither side of this argument is aware of the actual numbers, yet proceeds as if they were. We have a few threads, some with polls, in which people have professed their preference for Solo, Open or Group play, but no way to be certain whether those figures are truthful or how well they scale. The Mobius PvE group has 1800+ members but not all of them will be online at the same time, or even necessarily playing in that mode. I am a member of Mobius' group but mostly play Open, not out of any desire for more interaction but simply because I'm still submitting bug reports and Open is the "purest" form of the game with the most networking traffic and therefore where more bugs are likely to manifest.
Whether Open is swarming with PKers, or Solo is awash with carebears, is sort of irrelevant when we don't know the numbers, absolute or relative. If FD wanted to be really contentious and set the Lion among the Eagles they could offer a status page on the game selection screen that said
x players are currently in Open,
y are playing Solo and
z are in Private Groups. Or, if not raw player numbers, what percentage of those logged in were in each mode.
They'll never do it, of course, because it would lead to forumgeddon. I'd love to be privy to those numbers, though.
