Kind of curious what you mean here.
What exact changes have been made since release are you referring to?
To my knowledge the game is still being policed by other players... No?
Maybe I misinterpreted what you were saying?
Degradation of consequence comes from the repeated reduction in NPC threats (early in the game it was possible to stumble into NPCs that could quickly take apart the unwary in short order...say a gold trap with eight Vultures in it) to the point that affirmative consent is required to face anything vaguely threatening (Spec Ops, wing assassination targets, thargoids); massive inflation of ship capabilities via Engineering and synthesis (which have made crossing the galaxy a relatively fast and virtually risk free endeavour); and exponentially increasing money supply, with fixed, or even reduced, mandatory expenditures.
The game shouldn't need, and should not allow, players to interpret rules for, or enforce them upon, other players. If someone is violating the ToS or other conduct policies, Frontier should handle it, promptly, with as little bias and collateral damage as possible. However, mechanisms like blocking (which has been repeatedly strengthened, from not working at all prior to mid-2015, to being strong enough to break wings today, dramatically increasing the scope of the effect to far beyond those actually being blocked) allow them to ignore all but the most egregious violations by putting the onus on players to impose their own instancing filters, based on whatever arbitrary criteria they choose, wherever they take their characters. Early on in the game, if I reported harassment or behavior that seemed to violate actual policy, players seemed to actually face consequences on occasion. The last few times I did so, I got canned responses essentially telling me to block people. The only rules violations that appear to catch attention now are blatant hacking, using slurs in chat, or threatening/doxxing. Other forms of cheating and harassment feel like they are being ignored, because why bother when there is block.
I was not referring to contextual in-game/in-character policing, which is generally not viable, because of both of the above, and many other, factors. This kind of thing was always a bit sketchy and rapidly became a farce, because all risk is optional and anyone who doesn't play precisely the way one wants them to play can be excluded.
that is highly dependant on the player, if a player do not care about combat, and have very low combat rating, then this is true, but if the very same player, decides to go for the the triple elite status, then when they increase their combat rank,Some NPC's will scale up with them, most notably delivery missions that spawns NPC's going after the player, will eventually spawn dangerous+ Anacondas, going after the player, and if a player have very limited combat experience, it does not take much skill to get Elite combat rank, just enough time to kill enough targets of suitable combat level.,And when do this, they fly a ship that outfitted for NPC combat, so when they encounter NPC's that is scaled based on their combat rank, in a trader, outfitted for what have worked sofar, then they are going to get a huge surprise when they discover that mission spawned NPC's, can now be Dangerous or higher level, flying Anacondas, that will destroy their typical Type-9 with a shields in a very short time. And before they decided to try to rank up combat rank, this was never a problem...
Part of the problem is that the game allows one to scale ranks without proficiency. Earning renown as a combatant should rationally result in increased attention, as well as increased competency of the opponents willing to engage one's CMDR.
Regardless, even being Elite in combat doesn't generate random NPC encounters that are meaningful threats. An Elite anaconda or FDL bounty hunter or pirate spawning in supercruise still has to interdict someone, and even a T-9, flown by someone inexperienced in the interdiction game, should find evading these interdictions easy. I can count the number of interdictions I've had my CMDR initiate on my fingers (I consider the interdictor a superfluous waste of a slot that would be better spent on armor on combat vessels). I also quickly learned to submit to every CMDR interdiction, because I'm bad enough to fail 95%+ of the one's I fight. Yet, I have never lost an interdiction to an NPC except via colliding with an exclusion zone...and they've continually made these even easier/faster to win.
Outside of interdictions, if one is not deliberately looking for trouble, RES are the only areas one is likey to encounter more than easily evaded one-off NPCs and even here the potential risk is implied by knowledge that pirates exist and explicit in the label on the RES.
Strange that all
