I think this speaks to an important demographic split:
Some people have no interest in shooting or being shot at, but are willing to put up with a limited amount of noise in order to meet interesting people. For example, I wouldn't mind meeting you in deep space and having a tense moment before realising we're both nice guys, so long as more than 90% and less than 100% of guys I meet are indeed nice. But when I can reasonably expect people will want to kill me (even if perfectly legitimately), or if there's no risk at all, then the game becomes a poor use of my time.
+1
I remember playing a game called Ultima Online. It was probably the very first mmorpg - released back in 1997. The game was a true sandbox. The only safe places in the game were in the towns. Once you set foot outside of town you where fair game and could be killed at any time.
What happened was the game became a magnet for all sorts of cyber-psychos who mercilessly butchered players, new and old, with little consequence. But early on what this did was cause people to band together and begin working in teams. A real community spirit was born. If player killers were nearby a band of anti-player killers (bounty hunters) would go out and fight them or chase them away. Communities sprang up and stuck together for protection.
However the player killers numbers grew since at the time there wasn't adequate negative consequences for playing a 'bad guy' in the game. Eventually the PK's got out of hand and people quit en-mass.
The developers then decided to split the world in two and have one world with the original rule set and one with new rules - effectively eliminating non consensual PvP altogether.
I was one of the people who called for a new rule set - one where I could play the game in peace without worrying about whether the guy behind me was trying to steal from me or kill me. But within a few months I regretted what the developers had done, and I wasn't alone. What had happened is all risk had been taken from my gameworld and it became a shadow of what it once was. I hated dying, but I also missed that adrenalin rush or that tentative moment when I met someone new in-game for the first time.
On the non PvP server the social aspects broke down. No one needed anyone else anymore to survive. It became a glorified chat room game where people would get filthy rich by resource gathering with no worry of losing anything. It was a server of all reward and zero risk.
On the old ruleset server the lands became deserted too. The game was never the same again the day the developers split the playerbase. I still read the old forums to this day, and nearly everyone agrees (PvEs and PvPs alike) that the game should never have had such a drastic change made to it like it did in the summer of 2000.
It was the consequences of mercilessly killing other players that needed to be better though out and implemented, not splitting the player base and having different rulesets that was the mistake with hindsight.
So how does this relate to Elite?...
As far as Elite Dangerous goes I can't help feeling some people are forgetting just how big this gameworld will be. Back in Ultima Online everyone was squeezed onto a relatively small world so encounters where inevitable. In ED it won't be like that.
If you don't want other players to attack you there must be a million systems you can play within where you won't ever see another living soul.
I don't know if Frontier Developments know how many players this game will attract but I highly doubt it'll be to a point where an individual high-sec Core system will have more than a handful of human players online at the same time within it. And even then each system is an almost unlimited size that interactions will be uncommon. There are no EvE-type choke points. No jump gates. And stations will be secure areas with police protection.
In a gameworld of this size and with limitless possibilities to avoid traffic, the only time interactions between humans will occur is if they purposely go looking for each other. So I don't buy the 'I only want to PvE' argument.
I don't think different rulesets or servers are the answer. And I don't think the number of players playing ED will warrant more than one gameworld. IMHO it should follow EvE Online's thinking in regards to that... 1 gameword for all. That gameworld will surely be big enough to allow all playstyles?
