The Past 48 Hours: On how emergent gameplay happens

[Stealthie]

I can see where this point of view comes from, but why even worry yourself with the presumed intent of the other person?
Bear in mind that any assumption on your part of their negative intentions is automatically a negative judgement that you will bear. This is the game, how it was designed, NPC pirates will gang up on you and destroy you in no time if you let them, and you will quickly be killed for loitering - what were the intentions of the game designers? Then there is the BGS: you spend months tending to your favored factions, only for all your work to be destroyed in a few days by another bigger player group who you can’t even see.
Wasn’t my intention to psych-analyse you by the way ;-)

It's fine.

Honestly it's probably that I wish there WAS a proper, overt, unambiguous PVP "thing" that we could get involved with in ED ("What about powerplay?!" but, erm, no) so having some rando' shoot at me just seems kind of "hollow".

Back in the day, it seemed like you could find some ne'erdowells causing trouble in Deciat, for example, wing-up with a couple of other players you'd never met before and get stuck in.
These days, if the same thing happens, you just see ships blinking out of existence while the system-chat remains busy and you're left on your jack with the outlaw.

I still usually play in Open, in the hope of stumbling across others who're doing interesting stuff, but there's much sighing and rolling of eyes.