Correct. And this is what will kill this game. There's already EVE, ED doesn't need to and even shouldn't be EVE. ED doesn't have the required notability to attract a sufficiently sized PvP-centric community. If only PvP is what remains, a large part of the game (the non-combat part) will become obsolete or, worse, unplayable bar in solo and PG.
The PvE crowd needs a safe space to congregate other than PGs because most won't even be aware of PGs.
To prevent seal clubbing, Frontier introduced the PF district, a region exclusively reserved for new players and harsh against CMDR on CMDR actions (you get banned out of that region if you intentionally kill a fellow CMDR after a first warning). It didn't solve that problem. There are still seal clubbers and there are still griefers preying on graduates at the edge systems of that small bubble.
If FDev wants to keep the notability of the game up and the usability of everything that is non-combat viable in an open environment in the long term, an unlimited population PvE mode must exist.
I'd debate the mode must exist...rather, C&P just needs a significant overhaul such that ganking is either outright heavily punished or forced to make strategic considerations.
As an example:
Notoriety prevents
all services
everywhere but anarchy systems. Bounties accrued by murder
cannot be scrubbed, forcing the destruction of modules and ships. Ships destroyed when piloted by a commander with notoriety
forfeit insurance rebuy. You get your ship back...at 100% value cost.
If you want to balance it a little, rebuy cost penalty scales with notoriety. "Oops, I killed Jim" Notoriety Level 1 is a penalty of 10% rebuy, for example, but mass murderer level 10 is at 100% rebuy...scale between the two. This puts a scaling cost on outright murder (ganking) while still enabling it. This can still be circumvened: it doesn't take a lot to outfit a Viper Mk. III with rails and eat most players alive. It mostly forces high-end ships to think twice before ganking.
Those are pretty stiff, but still have holes. That
isn't bad. FDev obviously supports ganking so keep in mind a solution likely has to enable it, even with a cost.
Notoriety is tied
exclusively to murder - NPCs or Real Players - relegating RPers, Pirates, and actual gankers to think twice about their career and where they live. Especially since the bounties cannot be scrubbed and will eventually attract nonstop NPC aggressive (and possibly players, too).
But what about organized PvP?
Combat zones, Powerplay, and CQC all three offer organized PvP. Given CQC is a joke, I know that's only two real options. In conflict zones, murder only applies for friendly fire or neutral fire. If you pick a side, and shoot the other side, you're all good. Gankers don't get a free pass here, in other words. For Powerplay, it's grand organized PvP that just needs
other balance passes (
@Rubbernuke, that's your spotlight, go for it). Powerplay is an
excellent place for PvP if it were redesigned to better support it.
That just leaves pirates, because piracy
should be a supported career in the game...even against players. Remember how notoriety is based on
murder? That means giving into a pirate has a higher chance of making sense to a victim: they know the pirate prefers getting cargo to just killing you. You might run the table to see if the fella is a cold, hard killer (they probably are), and they can choose whether to build themselves a reputation (and a bounty list) or let the fishy go this time.
Finally, what happens to that
mountain of never-expiring bounty debt? Anarchy systems have an underground Factors system: you pay it off
10 to 1 on the value. Want a clean record? Get to mining. Or whatever your grind is. By the time you've done that a few times, most gankers will either A) quit the game, seeing that ganking isn't all that fun in Elite (See: Too much trouble) or B) work out a schedule that allows them to keep up their shenanigans at an enjoyable pace.
What this means is you don't
stop ganking, but rather create a balancing sink and faucet for it. It can still happen, but your truly egregious trolls will largely drift away to some other title. You'll have some left, but only
some, allowing Open mode to flourish more. The final bit is balancing bounty payouts such that you can't just wrack them up and then have your friends collect on them, a problem EVE online has had many times. One easy way to do this is to have the bounties only payout about 50% of the value of the destroyed ship, guaranteeing no net-profit on the illicit activity.
Longwinded series of ideas for 'balancing' ganking while still preserving it, but it can totally be done and
has been done.
FDev just has to decide to pull the trigger. The vast majority of the consensual PvP crowd should have no qualms balancing C&P.
Your non-consensual crowd is either gankers or
consensual gankers - i.e., PvPers that target lesser ships but only within environments where PvP is expected. No excuse for, "But I didn't know!" in other words, such as anarchy systems.
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