As an old UO veteran, it would be fair to say that Open mode is like Felucca. Solo/PG is nothing like what I remembered Trammel to be. There is a cohort of players are simply not fun to play with. Before the split, these players ran rampant as PKs. After the split, this cohort moved to Trammel and used other ways to mess with other players. Aside from a few instances in the Mobias mega-PG, they simply don’t have access to the players who least want to play with them.
You're right, I certainly over-simplified there. The distinction being that Trammel in Elite is invite only. Obviously this was Frontier's attempt at eliminating griefing entirely and by and large it works. PG 99% and Solo 99.9% effective in this regard. The occasional butthead slipping into a public PG before being moderated being that 1%. As we are all aware, the only real point of contention comes from players affecting others with impunity through in game systems. (Powerplay, BGS)
There's a post early on in one of the old threads linked above I'd like to point out in which a guy named Havvk says, "You cannot and will not be allowed to tell me how to play the game. I'll play how I damn well please, in solo, messing up your BGS on purpose knowing that you're nothing but helpless against me."
The mentality shown here is, quite ironically, a form of griefing.
As you point out (helpful graphic apt at explaining this btw!) some players will always find their way to ruin someone else's fun. Darrack and Felix highlight this as well. Even Richard Garriott knew this. His major mistake being that he assumed there'd be enough folks roleplaying virtuous anti-pk's to police the nefarious murderers out of the kindness of their hearts, without any added incentive from the game to do so. That was not the case. My counterpoint here is you cannot eliminate the aspect of human malice from the equation completely within any multiplayer experience. Pad blocking and ramming in stations being two unique examples I'm aware of in which griefing can happen in Elite sans direct PvP pew pew. In other games it's simply killstealing, trade spamming, and any number of other things that can be done to annoy someone. Haters gonna hate. The most extreme example in any online game would be huge groups re-logging to intentionally crash the server or some other direct DDoS attack. Even playing in solo doesn't protect against that highly unlikely yet possible scenario. I'm not arguing for one mode over the other in this paragraph, just pointing out the facts as I understand them. I'm passionate about game design and really enjoy talking to fellow players about it!
The name actually stems from the Elite Federation of Pilots lowering their standards to admit lesser ranks to meet demand.
I guess “Elite: Who let the riff-raff in?” doesn’t have the same edge.
Yeah I understand this. We can link this vid of Braben (his name be praised) as much as we like but the talking point of the game being "dangerous" will never go away imo.
More accurate I think to title the game Elite: Dangerous (if you want it to be, whatever, doesn't phase us just buy it)
Nyuk nyuk.
I sincerely doubt that would get much traction. In most MMOs I’ve played that are similar to Elite Dangerous Open, special “PvP Servers” withered on the vine.
I feel this common talking point isn't quite entirely worth its salt. Yes, the playerbase is smaller. Yes, often is the case PvP only servers stagnate. One can argue over the validity of time and resource investment into a small percentage of a game's playerbase. However these facts do not inherently invalidate the value of a player with interest in PvP buying & playing the game.
"In most MMO's I've played that are similar to Elite Dangerous Solo, special 'multiplayer servers' withered on the vine."
A humorous take but illustrates my point. I hope.
Anyway I really liked the idea of the California Nebula being a PvP bubble of some sort. After today's stream though it looks like PP 2.0 might actually have a chance at making the majority of players happy. It'll be exciting to see how the near future plays out!
