Do you not see a problem in open only being used for combat professions and the non combat ones in solo?
No, I see no problem at all. Players that want the PvP conflict play in open, players that don't want it play somewhere else, with the mode switching guaranteeing that people can still play together whenever they want, without any kind of hindrance or handicap, regardless of their choice.
And sincerely you won't ever change my opinion on this. I played WoW in PvP servers for the better part of a decade due to having friends that refused to play on a PvE server, hated every single time that we were attacked, and never in all that time initiated the conflict against other players. That more or less cemented my opinion that locking players into a PvP environment, by any means, is fundamentally wrong.
So, I see any case where an unwilling player is attacked as a blow to the very core of what a game should be, rendering it pointless. Transforming what should have been an enjoyable activity into just a way for those that don't care about ruining the day for others to get a quick fix. And the only reason I don't see this as happening in ED (or at least as it being widespread) is because players can switch modes without any negative consequences.
It is, after all, a game. A leisure activity. And, as a leisure activity, it only makes sense if the player is enjoying it, having fun.
I'm unhappy because than we get into the situation we are in now. It becomes easier and preferential to switch modes rather than do anything else and stay in open.
The easiest thing of all would be to just not play. It's a game, you don't get anything tangible out of it, anything of use in the real world. Playing a game is done because the player enjoys the experience.
So, those that find the "do anything else" part enjoyable, do so and stay in Open; those for whom doing that means damaging their experience and making the game more frustrating than fun get the choice to avoid it. Choice helping make the game better from everyone, except for those that want unwilling victims.
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I should write a book about the stuff that white-knights spout on these forums. "Blame the community - not the broken game" might very well be the first chapter.
Well, yeah, if Frontier's objective was to get most players happily playing in Open, they made quite a few glaring errors in how they set the rules and the consequences for player actions. Worse, most of those issues are fairly well understood; after all, MMOs kept running into them since at least Ultima Online back in the 90s, and MUDs had to deal with those same issues since quite earlier. Games with open PvP have always devolved into boring FFA PvP unless strong controls — like CONCORD in EVE — are implemented, and Frontier seemingly didn't bother learning this before releasing ED.
That being said, adding the game modes, which allow players to still play and enjoy the game even if the Open mode ends more frustrating than fun due to human nature, was a stroke of genius. It's what allows players that are chased out of Open to still be players, instead of ex-players.
- Anarchy systems could have had the capability to be much more dangerous (look at the other Elite games, and Oolite). Nope - too hard for certain people! "I should be able to access any system in my unshielded, unarmed end-game Cobra." So, we get the bland, unvarying easy-mode throughout all systems.
I believe this one was a concession for having a far harsher death penalty than in any of the previous games.
In any other Elite game, what happens if you go to an Anarchy system and are killed? You just reload the game, with everything exactly like it was before you took the trip. No cargo loss, no insurance buyout, no failed missions, no consequences apart from a few minutes of gameplay lost. With so little consequences, the devs can make the game as hard as they want, and the players for the most part won't complain.
But, in ED, what happens if you die? Without being able to just reload the game, you lose a fair bit of credits paying your insurance buyout, your cargo, any unclaimed bonds, any unsold data, potentially fail any missions you were attempting, and so on. With the death penalty being this high, Frontier is more or less forced to make the chance that the player will die far smaller than in any of the previous games, hence the boringly easy gameplay.
There's a balance between death penalties and difficulty that many players don't see. Devs need to manage how much frustration the player is subject to while playing in order to avoid the player just giving up on the game. Due to that, the more frustrating the death penalty, the rarer it should be applied to the player; in other words, making death sting forces the devs to make the game easier than it otherwise could have been, forces them to allow players to escape death with ease.
Incidentally, thanks to that, I believe we will only ever have a chance of seeing Anarchy systems truly dangerous if the current death penalties are for the most part scrapped.