The idea that you can create an instance of 32 players and cart them around from system to system, supercruise to normal space, without some serious hacking on the network side, is absurd.
Don't need to be 32. Roybe was testing it, and it seems to be currently impossible to put more than 12 players on the same instance, so if you can bring just three wings you are guaranteed to never see an opponent player even on Open. Heck, if you can bring two wings you are guaranteed to outnumber your opposition at least 2 to 1 if you ever meet someone.
ED was never meant to be a MMO in the conventional sense, so it picked a network architecture whose main disadvantage is that it doesn't allow the game to behave like a conventional MMO, but at the same time offers some very interesting advantages in reducing running costs and lag.
In an ideal world there wouldn't be multiple instances for each area of space, but the fact that there could be multiple instances shouldn't stop the game from working from the premise that there shouldn't be unless capacity or network demands dictate it.
Ideal world for you. For my part, I only got this game because I had a strong guarantee that I would be able to simply ignore any player that wanted to shoot at me.
It wasn't designed with Powerplay in mind, either.
For what you think Power Play is, true, it wasn't designed for that. The game was made to allow players to choose who they play with, the experiences they want, without being penalized for it. Players being able to choose who they play with, including the choice to never meet another player, was at the core of the whole ED concept from the start. Which is likely why they chose a networking model where blockades can never work, for the game they had in mind this wasn't a disadvantage.
Could it not set that if you are in hostile territory you have to be in open?
Only if Frontier is ready to face the fallout of breaking long-standing promises again, and perhaps even a lawsuit for false advertisement; not only Frontier has been repeating since over two years ago that you only meet other players if you choose to do so, they even explicitly sold ED as a single-player game on Steam.
So why don't people go in open for this type of activity? Because there is a chance that they may be challenged for doing something they shouldn't.
Or, for many players, simply because they don't enjoy playing in Open, or don't feel like playing in Open at that specific moment. The fact you enjoy Open doesn't make it enjoyable for everyone else.
That's fair enough. Give me my own solo game, uneffected by other players and I'll stay there, I think you'll find most Solo players wouldn't mind either.
Just to complement: unaffected by any other player except the "owner" of that specific instance. Which means running one galaxy simulation for each player in Solo.
It's what many of the players that purchased ED for the offline mode wanted. Without that, I, at least, want to have something that is as close to it as can be done within the framework of the game: a solo mode where I have access to all content and every reward, including being able to influence anything just like players in Open.
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