That feels like a very FPS mentality to me. When you play a game like Battlefront or Battlefield or Overwatch or what-have-you, dying is just part and parcel of the process. It messes up your K/D ratio, it might lose you the match, but everything is happy and fun, you give as good as you get, and everything is grand. But not everyone playing Elite Dangerous is that kind of gamer, and not everyone who plays multiplayer games understands that as being an implicit part of what "online" and "open" means. Most of my MMO experience comes from MMORPGs, where PVP might happen, but it tends to be limited to specific areas or situations, and/or there are going to be consequences for people who just walk up and grief you. I'm sure a lot of people (again, myself included) are out here playing Elite Dangerous not necessarily because it is an MMO, but because it is an Elite game: I started out with Elite on cassette in an Acorn Electron, and played the heck out of Frontier when the house finally got its first PC. I - and I'm sure others - play in Open because that's the game "as intended", and while I do so well aware that there is a risk of PVP, the risk of griefing is not necessarily something I accept, because I'm not from a part of gamer culture where that is "acceptable".
First off, welcome; no need to apologize for jumping in now as opposed to earlier. Your sharing of your perspective is what's important here, as it helps to further round out the discussion.
I'll share something again I believe I've mentioned earlier, but which is sort of prescient to your comment I've quoted above. I have no background with the original Elite or any of the sequels (Frontier etc) from "back in the day." I didn't even properly understand what the current version, Elite Dangerous, actually was until a couple months ago when I finally paid attention to it. So as much as it sort of pains me to say it (because I know it may cause grief - of a fashion - for some), I literally draw a blank when people reference the original game; I'd never heard of it till recently and have no direct, personal understanding, awareness or appreciation for its cultural impact or beloved standing. Sorry. (I did watch the Youtube video about the making of Elite, but again, not the same as having lived it, obviously)
I have in fact played FPS shooters since the early-ish days; I bought Half-Life expressly and exclusively so I could download this really cool mod called "Counter-Strike." I've still never finished the Half-Life campaign, though I've played a lot of CS in all its forms since. Battlefield, CoD and Overwatch, too.
My real passion is combat flight sims, though, and that's how I came to Elite. Although I missed the glory days of Red Baron Online, I played a lot - thousands of hours - of its spiritual successor, Rise of Flight, and was an early backer for the reboot of the IL-2 Sturmovik franchise, now known as Great Battles. Own a couple planes for DCS, have IL-2 1946 as well, and played Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator back in the day, and Falcon before that. In those games - which have a much, much smaller active online population than Elite or a typical FPS - you will routinely face the same pilots night after night in every play session. They will kill you over, and over, and over again, until you "git gud," because that's the game. It's not in any way, shape or form personal.
No real MMO experience beyond a game called Naval Action, which is a Napoelonic era open world / sandbox game inspired heavily by EVE Online. In that game, I played as a solo privateer, hunting off the enemy coastline for players in trade ships, which I would interdict and try my best to capture. In Naval Action, you actually can take the other player's vessel and make it your own (you then have to get away sailing both ships at the same time, which you do by splitting your crew between them. It was difficult and exciting). Ships themselves had to be crafted following an even more involved version of our engineering material grind. So capturing a nicely "engineered" trade vessel represented taking away a significant chunk of another player's in-game time and effort, for your own benefit. I had an alt in the enemy faction that I'd use as a fence to sell back the captured ship to the nation I'd taken it from. Pretty griefy, but that was the game.
So you can imagine that, when I came to Elite and learned how you could replace your ship and all its modules & upgrades for a only a 5% rebuy cost, and how you could play in Solo or PG whenever it suited you and you didn't want to experience PVP, I was pretty taken aback. I had never, in all my time in gaming, experienced anything that was so "warm and fuzzy"; my impression was quite honestly that they wanted to make loss almost meaningless, so that players would be emboldened to fly with abandon and gusto. You know, "Fly Dangerous", as the motto goes. I assumed that everyone could look at those features and figure out that the game was actively encouraging you to live it up and go for it, because they were making it as easy to recover from loss as possible.
Well, obviously, that's not the case at all! And this thread has been educational for me in that regard, to say the least.
And that, in a nutshell, is why this thread exists. It's a place for people to share with one another our expectations around Open. As we all know, FDev have made the choices they have, and we are left to make the most of it, and some have chosen to play as villains in the RPG-ish world of Elite. I have my personal reasons and background for playing the way I do, and salt extraction has nothing to do with it. But that's just me - and I don't speak for anyone else. Though I am interested in other perspectives, and the insight and experience they bring to the table.
