Hah... From the very beginning of my reply, I made it very specific about your assumption as to how people suffer from combat logging. I made it explicitly clear since the very beginning that PvP isn't all about blowing people up for fun. As I've already pointed out, piracy is a profession that involves negotiation and if necessary, forceful extraction. The last thing a proper pirate wants to do is to destroy a trade ship. It's bad for business and it attracts unwanted attention. Combat logging nullifies any meaningful interaction and is responsible for turning a good amount of pirates into what people now refer to as "griefers." I've seen it happen with my own eyes since I've been an administrator for the most well-known piracy player group for over a year now since ED was released. On the other hand, the real "griefers" can easily hide behind combat logging and make exacting vengeance/justice impossible for real bounty hunters.So we have a sandbox without proper crime and punishment, so the only source of that would come from players. Guess who wins in the cycle of combat logging? Unsurprisingly, the "griefers." People that want legitimate interaction are being boned over and over and are frankly sick of it.Guess why we don't have a functional multiplayer with meaningful player conflict?
Thank you.
And yes, I do completely agree - Bounty Hunting and Piracy are real professions, and while they can be practiced on NPC's, it frankly is far less interesting and challenging than interacting with another actual person.
Now Bounty Hunting does not require much interaction, as it has a very simple and straightforward premise: Pilots marked as "Wanted" are to be blown up.
Piracy, on the other hand, almost necessitates player to player interaction. Ideally Pirates should not be destroying other ships. And any "good" pirate is going to have some level of understanding - not wanting someone's mission cargo, just regular cargo, not destroying the ships they are robbing, and, conversely not being the ones to log out themselves when their "helpless" prey turns the tables on them and ends their reign of terror in a hail of blasters and bullets. And I'm willing to bet at least one of them has as well.
But, I'll also point out that we, the players, are not "the law", nor even enforcers of "the law". That role remains solely in the NPC hands of System Authority and Internal System Security - until such a time that we are able to join these factions and be commissioned as law-enforcement officers, which would open the door to many, many interesting missions and new styles of game play. And like any sandbox game, while we are free to make up our own rules to our own games played within the sandbox, these rules are not "law", and not everyone is obligated to play by "our rules". Let's take the all the way to the analog world - in days long past, we would go into the outside world to "play". We would make up our games, agree on the rules, and play by those rules. And if someone else happened to come into our area, they might find themselves targeted by waterballoons, nerf darts, flashlights - whatever it happened to be that was a part of our games.
And sometimes they would want to join in our games. Sometimes they would not. And those of us that were not beginning to show signs of needing professional help would simply accept that not everyone wanted to play our games, and we'd leave them alone.
Coming back here - and I will just pointedly ask - if we happened to cross paths in Open, and you should decide I look like a good target and you should happen to desire to pirate me and I say "I don't want to play your game, leave me alone and pirate someone else" are you going to respect that, respect me and respect my experience, or are you going to open fire on me, bombard me with hatchbreaker limpets or otherwise continue to harass me because I don't desire to play your game by your rules?
Or perhaps a better question - Would you attack a group of Fuel Rats because they happened to be in your hunting ground?
And this remains one of the biggest reasons I play 99% of my time in Open - because I want to enjoy the game without having to deal with other people and their visions of what the game experience is to them. And if you do happen to see me running about in Open play, I'm likely only taking video of someone else doing whatever they happen to be doing, or explaining various elements of the game to day-0 players who find themselves overwhelmed by the experience. Or I might be making wakes for people to scan, or I might have been blowing someone up by request to clear their bounties, but I don't believe this is required any longer.
I won't deny either that the role of "Galactic Pirate" did catch my attention when I first started considering picking this game up, but I never did get into it. I found too many other occupations to be far more interesting and entertaining, and I came to realize that, at heart, I am a naturally law-abiding galactic resident.. for the most part.
