I've ganked a few dozen CMDRs in the last week. The last one accepted my friend request, after talking about their goals (and why I gonk), I invited them to my FC and handed them 400m in credits to help their journey. Explain to me again how I'm driving people out of the game?
You evil bovine, think of all the immersion you've denied them! LMAO
Seriously though, can confirm: when Cow and I go a-gonking, we have a pretty high success rate of getting people to accept our friend requests, and this leads to all sorts of fun in-game shenanigans.
Sometimes we do 1v1 fights, sometimes he helps them out with money (as above) via trading commodities on his FC, or he uses his FC to jump them somewhere to gather materials, or one of us wings them in to just literally give them free money and materials as we turn in massacre missions, or we simply offer some genuine and sincere tips on how to improve their builds or whatever, or tactics on how to avoid ganks. We've done every single one of those things in the past few days alone.
Basically, we're having the kind of spontaneous and often co-operative experiences it sounds like many of the respondents in this thread are looking for. We're really, literally, just two chill dudes playing a video game and having emergent experiences with other players on a regular, near-nightly basis.
That frequently involve spaceship destruction, either of our own and/or other players' ships. But I mean... it's a videogame, right?