Som interesting responses so far, so thanks. A few different opinions too, which is always nice - and complicates!
Can you please explain this a bit more. I'm unclear what "hurt" or downsides you are trying to explain for starting in Solo and then moving to Open.
Ok.
So when you start in your Sidewinder with 1000 creds or whatever, let's say you start in Open.
You start learning what to do, and part of that is dying.
Dying from lots of reasons.
Learning to fly, learning to dock.
Hitting the station, breaking the law.
Getting killed by NPC's and by other players.
Things like this is part of learning the game, and will make you a better player. At the beginning, it doesn't matter how many times you die. You just keep taking a new Sidewinder and keep on going. So the actual cost to you of gaining this experience is zero, credits wise. You lean all aspects including meeting and dealing with other players. Eventually, you will either make progress, or decide you have now enough experience to do it better, and just start again with a new start. Or, you cannot deal with it and play in Solo. Win for you all around.
Now, take the same thing but in Solo. The same happens, but you do not deal with other players because you never see them.
You start to make progress, maybe get some new guns or a new ship, probably start trading etc and then you think, ok it is time to try Open.
You go into Open and all is well then one day you get smacked around by another player.
You don't know how to deal with it, you have no experience to do so. You die.
Now instead of it not being a big deal, you are on the forums raging about how you have lost everything, "MILLIONS!!!" how a player killed you or "GRIEFED!" you (they didn't but your raging at this point) and so on.
All you get told when you describe how you die is what a noob you were for not doing x, y, z action to make it not be a big deal or avoid entirely.
See what I mean? If you had been in Open from the beginning and learnt how to spot other players, avoid them or even kill them then you wouldn't experience this. Even how to communicate with them would often save you pain. But you don't know how.
This is why I would say go into Open right from the start and experience everything. You can go to Solo later if open is not for you. It is a bit harder to go the other way. Not impossible, of course , just a bit harder.
See post #14 below for example. He sees an event on the forum on maybe from the newsletter, and flies to Lugh to join in.
This is good fun, he is there doing stuff for a few
hours but now he dies because he doesn't expect some players to go there and be fighting on Feds side. I stress hours to show how this doesn't happen every 5 mins. (mostly not at all in truth).
He seems amazed when he dies quickly to two players in his little Eagle. Because of this he advocates not playing in Open until you have mastered everything. Ha. Doesn't make sense at all. My point is, you will never master dealing with other players in Solo, because you never see them. So get it done early when it doesn't matter
