That argument goes either way, open mode players are players, too. And the conflict of interest was no resolved through providing equality, but favoritism. (Again, not criticizing the players)
Not favoritism, but choice. The basic idea of how multiplayer would work in ED is that every player has the inalienable right to block anyone else, regardless of reason, from appearing in their game. Open is merely a congregation of the players that don't want to block anyone else.
Thus, there is nothing special about Open. It's just a choice about who you allow to play with you.
In a different game, based on different ideas and focused on a different potential player base, things would be different. If ED was about players competing to see who best pushes their favorite faction's influence across the map, then it might make sense to promote a different idea about fairness, with the intent of making the game more enjoyable for its target audience. But ED was never meant as that kind of game.
Well, real world allows "bad" roles, as well, and both virtual and real world do offer consequence for those that break the social contract.
Perhaps. But pirating, smuggling, and other such activities in the game aren't breaking the social contract. They are supported aspects of the game, though, due to the rules laid out since the game was first presented, only among the players that choose to be subject to them.
If those things in game were breaking the social contact, like they are in the real world, then players would suffer actual penalties for doing them, things like rollbacks and bans.
That change in what is a part of the social contract and what isn't creates such a different environment that you can't even seriously consider extending the real world concepts of equality into the game world. The very concept of equality needs to be changed before being applied to the virtual world of the game because the virtual world and the real world are inherently unequal in ways that strike at the core of the concept.
In the game, the encouragement of "bad" roles is to increase diversity of gameplay,
Or, in other words, to increase the enjoyment that players derive from the game.
Which means that, whenever those "bad" roles actually reduce the enjoyment, they should instead be suppressed. Which is the main argument for providing game modes where such activities don't take place, for the players that find the existence of such roles and activities to detract from enjoying the game.
Which cycles back to the risk vs. reward argument that I refuse to play around with too much due to its intersubjective nature as I have pointed out on the very first reply to this thread.
Risk versus reward, in games, is a fallacy. A dangerous concept, even. Devs should use rewards to nudge players toward activities they will find enjoyable; blindly associating rewards with risk can lead, instead, to a game that pushes players into doing activities they dislike, and thus drives players away when it should be trying to attract them.
Or, in other words, risk versus reward, in a game, should be at most a subordinate goal, meant to be fulfilled only when it serves to point players towards more enjoyable parts of the game, and discarded otherwise.
Removing things to achieve equality is a bad idea, adding things, on the other hand, is a better solution.
Everything is relative. Adding something to a single mode is functionally the same as adding it to the game as a whole but removing it from the other modes. Falls back into your own argument that removing things to achieve equality is a bad idea.
Solo can control their interaction with the galaxy better than Open players.
For all intents and purposes, Open players in a wing can control their interaction with the galaxy even better than Solo players. Both for in-game reasons (predators tend to only go after lone prey, so players in a wing are safe from other players) and for metagaming reasons (it messes with the matchmaking, so meeting other wings becomes even rarer).
True, but it doesn't undermine the value of player encounter. Emphasis shifts to player encounter due to their potential of being far more challenging/difficult than NPCs.
And, for many, unenjoyable. For me, player encounters that aren't guaranteed to end amicably only serve to ruin the mood and make the game worse.
Which, BTW, has nothing to do with the difficulty, but rather with potentially meeting a living and thinking person that is intent on ruining my experience. Events with identical results can result in completely different experiences depending on the motivations, or perceived motivations.
