Taelessael

I understand the reasoning behind the "wipe" mentality, but going Thanos on the universe will drive off more players than the short-term rebalance will keep, we'd be killing the game in exchange for a short look at how things would have developed early on had the rules been like they are now back when beta went live.
 
If I recall correctly, the tax thing was more to both deal with people grabbing dozens or occasionally even hundreds of tiles they were never actually going to use and just sitting on them for whatever reason, and to add an unfortunately much needed money-sink to the game. They solved the first part, the second is a fair bit more fiddly to handle.
 
As for element loss, if I recall correctly anything that loses a life is no longer able to be sold on the market, and you cant bp a ship if any of the elements have lost a life. This makes it possible to get a ship mobile after combat and technically allows its operation to continue in full afterward, but pushes part replacement for builders and combat-players. Personally, now that CCS is a thing, I'd allow infinite lives for parts other than cores now with the stipulation that if the element was destroyed in combat, it permanently functions at half-power and is capped at half hp after being repaired, and cant be sold on market or bp'd (you can still replace it to get fun function again). As for crashing, it doesn't apply life loss because new players would lose everything way too quickly while still getting the hang of flight, and old players would get really ticked at how they need to replace a bunch of stuff every time someone left something parked somewhere that caused them to crash out of the game while they were trying to come in for a landing.
 
Finally. as hull-loss is concerned, ships taken in pvp tend to have their hulls scrapped (if they aren't used as trophies), while those damaged but kept get repaired. Damage or loss of hull in crashes causes more issue than would element loss, as while it is still repairable, the act of doing so is not as strait forward as it is for elements. 

I am not some master harvester in DU by any stretch, but in my experience outer-planets is a bit more of a bulk-thing. You cant just short-order ship the non-t1 ore to the nearest market on the same planet for bot-sales, and people are less likely to buy it for a decent price if they have to also ship it to where they need it afterwards, so you need to be able to keep paying without profit until you have enough to make it realistically worth shipping in bulk to Alioth, at which point you sell it all to get a lot of money to tide things over until your next bulk-shipping.
 
As for somehow losing money on all of 5 t1 and 2 t3, my guess is that all of his tiles are in one cluster on an outer planet (an actual planet, not a moon, my guess is Feli), so he doesn't have any decent t1 tiles, and he is probably keeping all of his MU constantly topped off so he doesn't have the calibration points to spare to pick up the slack of his low-end coal tiles with better tiles somewhere else.
 
I'd advise he pull out of his current coal-tiles and go find a good 3-set of 500s on a moon, toss 4 MU on his Sanctuary tile for the free t1 there, only calibrate any given MU no more than once every 4 days (as you still automatically bump it back to 100% calibration on day 4 even in a surrogate without trying), and let the petalite slowly build as it will until it is worth bulk-shipping while the rest of his tiles cover the costs of everything.

I am not some master harvester in DU by any stretch, but in my experience outer-planets is a bit more of a bulk-thing. You cant just short-order ship the non-t1 ore to the nearest market on the same planet for bot-sales, and people are less likely to buy it for a decent price if they have to also ship it to where they need it afterwards, so you need to be able to keep paying without profit until you have enough to make it realistically worth shipping in bulk to Alioth, at which point you sell it all to get a lot of money to tide things over until your next bulk-shipping.
 
As for somehow losing money on all of 5 t1 and 2 t3, my guess is that all of his tiles are in one cluster on an outer planet (an actual planet, not a moon, my guess is Feli), so he doesn't have any decent t1 tiles, and he is probably keeping all of his MU constantly topped off so he doesn't have the calibration points to spare to pick up the slack of his low-end coal tiles with better tiles somewhere else.
 
I'd advise he pull out of his current coal-tiles and go find a good 3-set of 500s on a moon, toss 4 MU on his Sanctuary tile for the free t1 there, only calibrate any given MU no more than once every 4 days (as you still automatically bump it back to 100% calibration on day 4 even in a surrogate without trying), and let the petalite slowly build as it will until it is worth bulk-shipping while the rest of his tiles cover the costs of everything.

What you are asking for isn't a challenge because someone just gets blown up with no skill/luck involved. 
 
It isn't balanced because it is a single weapon that 1-hit kills anything while any other weapons typically take dozens of shots at minimum to just wear down an equivalently sized shield. 
 
PvP players like a fight, but this will remove that fight for the pirates. Someone will fire a shot, someone will trigger an ssd, and it will all be done. 
 
The issue with the ssd idea as you have explained it is that you just want an ill conceived method of guaranteed punishment for pvp players that shoot at you when you chose to make yourself a valid pvp target.
 
There are currently already more than enough ways to easily avoid having to deal with pirates at all with almost no effort, risk, or investment, you don't need a device who's only purpose is to make the game less fun for other people because you don't feel like using anything you already have.

What you are asking for isn't a challenge because someone just gets blown up with no skill/luck involved. 
 
It isn't balanced because it is a single weapon that 1-hit kills anything while any other weapons typically take dozens of shots at minimum to just wear down an equivalently sized shield. 
 
PvP players like a fight, but this will remove that fight for the pirates. Someone will fire a shot, someone will trigger an ssd, and it will all be done. 
 
The issue with the ssd idea as you have explained it is that you just want an ill conceived method of guaranteed punishment for pvp players that shoot at you when you chose to make yourself a valid pvp target.
 
There are currently already more than enough ways to easily avoid having to deal with pirates at all with almost no effort, risk, or investment, you don't need a device who's only purpose is to make the game less fun for other people because you don't feel like using anything you already have.

Those two scenarios were the bad ones, and they were obvious from the start, but it occurred to me that you may not have realized so I elected to point them out to you.
 
-If you leave loot, the pirates will just use disposable element-ships to either blow up and kill you, or get you to kill yourself. This invalidates all existing weapons in piracy as anything more than a trigger for the ssd, as well as any reason to design a ship for piracy that isn't just a disjointed bundle of floating elements that constitute the bare minimum needed to run your slow hauler down and start shooting at it.
 
-If you don't leave loot, you'll still be shot and/or blown up by people in disposable element-ships, but instead of people actually doing it for the fun of pirating or the prospect of loot (as you will be entirely invalidating the option of playing as a pirate with this, because the vast majority of anyone hauling will just bring an ssd instead of guns), you will be losing your stuff because they think its funny to ruin your day by destroying your stuff and/or because they have decided that a location is theirs and you aren't allowed to be in it.
 
If you were just asking to blow yourself to bits, and your wreck was still loot-able then this would be a passable idea, the pirates would still have their fun chasing you, and they'd still have their reward for all of the time and materials invested in trying to catch you. As is though you are quite plainly just asking for a super-weapon to vengefully destroy their ships, and the amount of thought you seem to have put in to it looks as though it amounts to "I don't like people who shoot at me, therefore I should be allowed to destroy their ship(s) immediately if I am going to lose my ship." 

Those two scenarios were the bad ones, and they were obvious from the start, but it occurred to me that you may not have realized so I elected to point them out to you.
 
-If you leave loot, the pirates will just use disposable element-ships to either blow up and kill you, or get you to kill yourself. This invalidates all existing weapons in piracy as anything more than a trigger for the ssd, as well as any reason to design a ship for piracy that isn't just a disjointed bundle of floating elements that constitute the bare minimum needed to run your slow hauler down and start shooting at it.
 
-If you don't leave loot, you'll still be shot and/or blown up by people in disposable element-ships, but instead of people actually doing it for the fun of pirating or the prospect of loot (as you will be entirely invalidating the option of playing as a pirate with this, because the vast majority of anyone hauling will just bring an ssd instead of guns), you will be losing your stuff because they think its funny to ruin your day by destroying your stuff and/or because they have decided that a location is theirs and you aren't allowed to be in it.
 
If you were just asking to blow yourself to bits, and your wreck was still loot-able then this would be a passable idea, the pirates would still have their fun chasing you, and they'd still have their reward for all of the time and materials invested in trying to catch you. As is though you are quite plainly just asking for a super-weapon to vengefully destroy their ships, and the amount of thought you seem to have put in to it looks as though it amounts to "I don't like people who shoot at me, therefore I should be allowed to destroy their ship(s) immediately if I am going to lose my ship." 

Those two scenarios were the bad ones, and they were obvious from the start, but it occurred to me that you may not have realized so I elected to point them out to you.
 
-If you leave loot, the pirates will just use disposable element-ships to either blow up and kill you, or get you to kill yourself. This invalidates all existing weapons in piracy as anything more than a trigger for the ssd, as well as any reason to design a ship for piracy that isn't just a disjointed bundle of floating elements that constitute the bare minimum needed to run your slow hauler down and start shooting at it.
 
-If you don't leave loot, you'll still be shot and/or blown up by people in disposable element-ships, but instead of people actually doing it for the fun of pirating or the prospect of loot (as you will be entirely invalidating the option of playing as a pirate with this, because the vast majority of anyone hauling will just bring an ssd instead of guns), you will be losing your stuff because they think its funny to ruin your day by destroying your stuff and/or because they have decided that a location is theirs and you aren't allowed to be in it.
 
If you were just asking to blow yourself to bits, and your wreck was still loot-able then this would be a passable idea, the pirates would still have their fun chasing you, and they'd still have their reward for all of the time and materials invested in trying to catch you. As is though you are quite plainly just asking for a super-weapon to vengefully destroy their ships, and the amount of thought you seem to have put in to it looks as though it amounts to "I don't like people who shoot at me, therefore I should be allowed to destroy their ship(s) immediately if I am going to lose my ship." 

That much is obvious, and that NQ has disallowed build mode during pvp (presumably to prevent bugs/exploits and keep people from entirely deleting their ships during combat so as to deny pirates any loot) implies that they wont allow this idea either. But, I don't think he's willing to leave the last post to a detractor of the idea (hence the insults he likes to throw when people disagree). Also I want to see what absurdity he comes up with next to try and justify a weapon that functionally invalidates all other weapons and nearly every pvp-related play style.
 
Oh, and Hirnsausen...
 
Scenario A (collateral): Two pirate ships appear on your radar, the first shoots the second, the second triggers the self-destruct you are talking about adding and blows your ship up with those two, then a 3rd moves in from its position a safe distance away to loot everything and deploy new ships if your mechanic leaves any wrecks to loot, and the 3 of them just taunt you in chat for flying so carelessly if it doesn't, because the only people that will be left regularly doing pvp in the way you are trying to make unplayable if your bomb was included will be either pirates (if there is loot), or those who's only goal is to just wreck your stuff and then laugh at you (if there isn't loot). 
 
Scenario B (no collateral): Two pirate ships appear on your radar, one shoots you, you self-destruct, the second moves in and loots the wrecks (if there are any) and deploys a new ship for the guy that shot you, then they move in to loot everything if your mechanic leaves any wrecks to loot, and the 2 of them just taunt you in chat for flying so carelessly if it doesn't, because the only people that will be left regularly doing pvp in the way you are trying to make unplayable if your bomb was included will be either pirates (if there is loot), or those who's only goal is to just wreck your stuff and then laugh at you (if there isn't loot). 
 
Any actual logical counter? Or will it just be another attempt at appealing to emotion in the hopes that nobody thinks too hard about it, along with one or more insults to myself (a mission runner btw) and/or pvp players?

Your mental gymnastics need work dude, way too easy to follow. 
 
Also, claiming to be strongly opposed to violence and weapons while simultaneously asking for a giant bomb to violently blow all the players you don't like to bits is an amusing argument, but a rather poor one.

That much is obvious, and that NQ has disallowed build mode during pvp (presumably to prevent bugs/exploits and keep people from entirely deleting their ships during combat so as to deny pirates any loot) implies that they wont allow this idea either. But, I don't think he's willing to leave the last post to a detractor of the idea (hence the insults he likes to throw when people disagree). Also I want to see what absurdity he comes up with next to try and justify a weapon that functionally invalidates all other weapons and nearly every pvp-related play style.
 
Oh, and Hirnsausen...
 
Scenario A (collateral): Two pirate ships appear on your radar, the first shoots the second, the second triggers the self-destruct you are talking about adding and blows your ship up with those two, then a 3rd moves in from its position a safe distance away to loot everything and deploy new ships if your mechanic leaves any wrecks to loot, and the 3 of them just taunt you in chat for flying so carelessly if it doesn't, because the only people that will be left regularly doing pvp in the way you are trying to make unplayable if your bomb was included will be either pirates (if there is loot), or those who's only goal is to just wreck your stuff and then laugh at you (if there isn't loot). 
 
Scenario B (no collateral): Two pirate ships appear on your radar, one shoots you, you self-destruct, the second moves in and loots the wrecks (if there are any) and deploys a new ship for the guy that shot you, then they move in to loot everything if your mechanic leaves any wrecks to loot, and the 2 of them just taunt you in chat for flying so carelessly if it doesn't, because the only people that will be left regularly doing pvp in the way you are trying to make unplayable if your bomb was included will be either pirates (if there is loot), or those who's only goal is to just wreck your stuff and then laugh at you (if there isn't loot). 
 
Any actual logical counter? Or will it just be another attempt at appealing to emotion in the hopes that nobody thinks too hard about it, along with one or more insults to myself (a mission runner btw) and/or pvp players?

Your mental gymnastics need work dude, way too easy to follow. 
 
Also, claiming to be strongly opposed to violence and weapons while simultaneously asking for a giant bomb to violently blow all the players you don't like to bits is an amusing argument, but a rather poor one.

Faction stuff is fine as is. DU's issues stem from non-faction stuff, such as:
 
-Power miners didn't want auto-miner only planetary mining (though several others did).
-PvP players want more variety (combat is too simple, so all the top orgs are more or less flying identical ships because of meta-math).
-Power builders don't like the rumors of impending complexity limits because they like having filigree on their filigree (regardless of how hard that is for everyone to load).
-Market tycoons don't like that the new mining system has disrupted the value of their ore stocks (even though they still can throw around enough money to substantially manipulate prices).
-Manufacturers don't like that industry takes a lot of money to really get in to (because if it didn't there'd be mega-factories everywhere that would lag).
-People don't like taxes (without regard as to their necessity).
-The map is hard to read because the system image is out of date (if it was ever accurate) and NQ keeps making the info-colors on the planet map ever more transparent.
-Asteroids all respawn at once and in relatively limited numbers and only once a week and are visible to the entire universe, so if you are unavailable to play at that exact time you have a much harder time finding good ones to mine (NQ still needs to work on this).
-There is only so much exploring to be done on the few planets the game does have (we need more solar-systems with more interesting planets and moons).
-There is no pve combat for players to serve as pvp-lite or to try and cut their teeth on before facing the savagery of other players.
-There is no atmospheric combat so if someone makes a major nuisance of themselves planet-side without breaking any game-rules players cant do anything about it.
-RDMS is a fantastically complicated thing to wrap one's head around for how simple it is (so it causes a lot of "stupid user errors" that annoy people).
-The game is buggy because it is still in development (but getting better).
-The game has not hit the point in its development where system optimization becomes the dev's primary focus, so it is hard to run for some comps and is prone to lag under certain situations (last I heard it is on NQ's to do list, just ahead of full launch).
-The game has several settings that either can't be altered, revert to standard after every log in, or should be there to be adjustable but aren't, so players have a hard time adjusting things to suit their personal preferences.
-The game is still being developed, meaning what works well now has a fair chance of not working as well or at all later when things get updated (even if things get better when updated, people don't like change).
-The game is not in full release and is not well advertised, so it doesn't have a huge player-base yet.
-The game is focused on the sandbox-space-sim/builder niche, so even with relatively few competitors it has only a small portion of "gamers" it is competing for.
-The game had (and still occasionally has) loopholes that some people abused heavily and did not later suffer consequence or even have what they gained taken from them (so people feel cheated because they have a hard time competing with the resources the abusers gained).
-The people that get irritated with anything in game sit in chat and try to get others to be irritated with them (because misery loves company).
-The people that play one way may often argue with people that play another over "how things should be" and it usually ultimately just irritates both sides (because that is how people are and there is nothing that can be done about it).
-Trolls see the relatively low cost of getting in to the game and hop on to just sit in chat and irritate/demoralize people because they think its funny to ruin everyone else's fun.
-And finally the flippin' trees on Alioth are still a pain in the rear to load. 
 
...you know, just to name a few issues...
 
DU is generally improving, but it still has a good ways to go. In general I'd have to say factions are probably the one area that NQ should avoid tinkering with for the moment, they have enough actual problems to solve without trying to drastically change a relatively clean, concise, and more or less fully functional part of the game in to a massive monstrosity of a gameplay component that would require reworking almost the entire game around it to properly accommodate. 

We went over this yesterday, it works fine.
 
 
 
By all appearances, I'd say bright colors, little to no risk of substantial loss, and obvious reward/advancement no matter how little time is put in (even if it is only a very small advancement) are the most popular. All of these are possible in a sci-fi setting, but are more easily achieved in fantasy. But if we are being honest here there's a whole lot of science that has already been done to determine this so as to best direct game development companies on how to make the most money they can. None of those is a faction system.
 
 
 
This statement is wrong in almost every way.
 
-A flying horse that you can spawn from your pack to move more quickly and that despawns harmlessly when you are attacked so that you can respawn it again after your fight is not a ship that you need to invest substantial resources in to have repaired or entirely replaced after you get in to a fight.
-Dying in a fantasy world such that you either need to wait the 10 secs for a friend to cast resurrection, or run the two minutes from the graveyard back to where you were to pick up right back where you left off (assuming the graveyard isn't closer to your goal than you were when you died) with no risk of losing your gear or inventory is not getting blown up and losing both a ship and several hours/days/weeks worth of resources you had been slowly collecting.
-Having to avoid riding a horse in to walls so that you don't look like you may have DC'd is not the same as having to dodge half-loaded space elevators so you don't get killed.
-Having to periodically watch your abilities because you whacked enough boars in the forest to gain a level and are now better at everything is not having to work out the minutia of what an SStO starship needs so you can carry more ore between planets in a ship that handles almost entirely differently from your old one.
 
 
 
Several very large alliances of small factions disagree with you, mine included. We operate as small groups when we feel like it, and large ones when we feel like it, and accomplish quite a bit. 
 
 
 
This isn't WoW, and there are actual substantial consequences to your actions. This is also not a faction-mechanic, and requires its own thread for discussion.
 
 
 
We've been over this already too, your understanding of taxation and collective/governmental usage and resource requirement/expenditure is severely lacking. Please stop trying to argue it, it will never work the way you are trying to explain it as working without a wildly impractical amount of accountability-enforcement carried out by NQ on the player-base.

Could it please be made such that a tile colored for informational reasons in the map can have that color altered or its transparency/intensity changed. As is those of us with poor vision have been having a harder and harder time telling when a hex is highlighted for any reason (seriously folks, almost totally transparent yellow is the wrong color for anything, I need to play with the graphical settings so much as to make it near impossible to see anything outside the map just to see it at all).

Alternatively could we get an optional toggle-able setting in the map that hides the terrain features and just shows the hex-lines and other markers over a featureless black sphere? it would make it a lot easier to see things.

Faction stuff is fine as is. DU's issues stem from non-faction stuff, such as:
 
-Power miners didn't want auto-miner only planetary mining (though several others did).
-PvP players want more variety (combat is too simple, so all the top orgs are more or less flying identical ships because of meta-math).
-Power builders don't like the rumors of impending complexity limits because they like having filigree on their filigree (regardless of how hard that is for everyone to load).
-Market tycoons don't like that the new mining system has disrupted the value of their ore stocks (even though they still can throw around enough money to substantially manipulate prices).
-Manufacturers don't like that industry takes a lot of money to really get in to (because if it didn't there'd be mega-factories everywhere that would lag).
-People don't like taxes (without regard as to their necessity).
-The map is hard to read because the system image is out of date (if it was ever accurate) and NQ keeps making the info-colors on the planet map ever more transparent.
-Asteroids all respawn at once and in relatively limited numbers and only once a week and are visible to the entire universe, so if you are unavailable to play at that exact time you have a much harder time finding good ones to mine (NQ still needs to work on this).
-There is only so much exploring to be done on the few planets the game does have (we need more solar-systems with more interesting planets and moons).
-There is no pve combat for players to serve as pvp-lite or to try and cut their teeth on before facing the savagery of other players.
-There is no atmospheric combat so if someone makes a major nuisance of themselves planet-side without breaking any game-rules players cant do anything about it.
-RDMS is a fantastically complicated thing to wrap one's head around for how simple it is (so it causes a lot of "stupid user errors" that annoy people).
-The game is buggy because it is still in development (but getting better).
-The game has not hit the point in its development where system optimization becomes the dev's primary focus, so it is hard to run for some comps and is prone to lag under certain situations (last I heard it is on NQ's to do list, just ahead of full launch).
-The game has several settings that either can't be altered, revert to standard after every log in, or should be there to be adjustable but aren't, so players have a hard time adjusting things to suit their personal preferences.
-The game is still being developed, meaning what works well now has a fair chance of not working as well or at all later when things get updated (even if things get better when updated, people don't like change).
-The game is not in full release and is not well advertised, so it doesn't have a huge player-base yet.
-The game is focused on the sandbox-space-sim/builder niche, so even with relatively few competitors it has only a small portion of "gamers" it is competing for.
-The game had (and still occasionally has) loopholes that some people abused heavily and did not later suffer consequence or even have what they gained taken from them (so people feel cheated because they have a hard time competing with the resources the abusers gained).
-The people that get irritated with anything in game sit in chat and try to get others to be irritated with them (because misery loves company).
-The people that play one way may often argue with people that play another over "how things should be" and it usually ultimately just irritates both sides (because that is how people are and there is nothing that can be done about it).
-Trolls see the relatively low cost of getting in to the game and hop on to just sit in chat and irritate/demoralize people because they think its funny to ruin everyone else's fun.
-And finally the flippin' trees on Alioth are still a pain in the rear to load. 
 
...you know, just to name a few issues...
 
DU is generally improving, but it still has a good ways to go. In general I'd have to say factions are probably the one area that NQ should avoid tinkering with for the moment, they have enough actual problems to solve without trying to drastically change a relatively clean, concise, and more or less fully functional part of the game in to a massive monstrosity of a gameplay component that would require reworking almost the entire game around it to properly accommodate. 

...Your argument seems to have gone from "players wont cooperate on a large scale without the devs forcing them to" to "its too hard to cooperate on a large scale without the devs forcing us to"...
 
I suppose I should point out that the argument of "these games in an entirely different genre with entirely different game mechanics were more popular" works better as an argument for buying someone a different game for x-mas than it does for trying to change a single mechanic in DU.

EVE is a good point of reference, and partially what DU wants to be/replace, but it has also had 20 years to get to that point while DU is not yet even in full release, it still needs time to develop. I use EVE as a point of reference when I say it didn't meaningfully push factions and did fine. DU can do the same. People don't play EVE because they want to join the Minmatar Republic, trust in the rust, and fight the Amarr Empire, they play because they want to command cool space-ships while being a pirate/pirate hunter/naval officer/miner/business magnate/ect... 
 
They didn't need major factions forced on them, and indeed often ignored them entirely. I know I did, just like I did here until I felt like joining a larger group. The faction I am in now has its own factories, its own bases, its own small cities, its people are organized in to a governmental structure of sufficient complexity to manage everything. We operate collectively to take advantage of the economics of scale, we work together to design ships and structures and run operations, and we participate in fleet battles when we desire. We didn't need an npc faction for any of that, and neither did any of the other major factions already doing exactly the same as we are. So, why do we need to be forced in to someone else's idea of a faction if all of the supposed benefits of doing so are what we already have in the current system? 
 
The faction system is fine as is, go join a better faction if you don't like your current one.
 
As for "end-game content", that is a different topic entirely and needs its own thread.

EVE was a huge space-game with massive player owned factions and alliances, as well as what I'd assume was a substantially greater risk to pvp than was in most mmo. They didn't form these factions to avoid getting killed by Starvation, or blown up by random space-lightning, or even running out of fuel like you can in DU. They also didn't form quickly. Goonswarm is a massive alliance with tens of thousands of members in EVE, they didn't start a major faction because the game made them join one that was always there, they started their own after the game was already going because they were a bunch of guys in cheap ships that got together and thought "let's just go use overwhelming numbers to win in pvp". If the game keeps going, and gets enough players, it will get there.
 
Also, seriously? An org doesn't need to have a planet with dev-made cities and governmental structures to be a faction, an org with 2 or more people in it is a faction (albeit a very small one). People are in fact capable of organizing themselves, and building constructs to operate these organizations out of as they see fit. It happens all the time, I've taken part in such on more than one occasion.
 
 
 
... Please stop talking about taxes, not only is it a new system that has yet to stabilize properly, but it is readily apparent that you don't understand any more than "they need to be paid" and "the government irl uses the money for stuff". 
 
Having an NQ enforced tax to pay for other players to do something is seriously just asking to see some clown try to find out if he can pile enough abandoned wrecks to climb to space because they can do it on someone else's dollar. Players hold each other accountable, they observe and determine trustworthiness, this game wont make enough money to pay NQ to employ enough GMs to reasonably do the same.
 
 

Right... my apologies if I over simplify any of your points, your post seemed to me to be a lot of "stream of consciousness" and it was hard for me to follow without trying to boil it down and sort it first.
 
 
I admit, I am not familiar with Everquest. Did it have a "You permanently lose all your gear on death" kind of mechanic? Games that do tend to have much more paranoid player-bases as far as pvp stuff goes. Such paranoia does not however permanently prevent large groups from ever forming, it just makes it take longer.

 
 
You say that like you think he tried to claim he was an experienced game dev and came up with all that stuff first. The game is far from perfect, the devs are obviously borrowing basic concepts from other games and learning as they go, and this was obvious back at the start of beta. People do that, nobody has experience their first time around, nobody writes a book or program without errors and good enough to make them rich on their first draft, and almost nobody comes up with a totally new idea. 
 
If ya don't like it, nobody is keeping you here, but if you stay, then you can always help try and improve it.
 
 
 
-EVE Online proves that enough people can trust that much in spite of the paranoia of losing all their stuff given sufficient time and size of player-base.

-Cost is relative, economics of scale require consideration, and while you wont be often seeing people spamming general chat for enough new-joins to hold all their guns, faction-scale pvp still happens whether or not your a org can produce combat ships at a speed it is comfortable with. We may not have whole planets worth of resources going in to 1000-ship battles any time soon, but the game is still young. 
 
-Again... EVE... all those news-worthy major battles between players, those weren't fights between the NPC factions players were forced in to, they were wars between player-made orgs and alliances.

So, what do you all think of the idea of having a heat-management system? Not EVE's "periodically emergency over-clocking your elements until they melt" mechanic, but just actually having elements give off heat when used that then needs to be either dissipated via radiator, or stored in some manner of thermal-battery/capacitor?
 
I'd figure it wouldn't be like power, where things probably just wont function if you can't power them, but perhaps the ship itself can start taking damage in some way if it cant adequately store or dissipate the heat and you keep generating more of it.
 
Any thoughts?

Could it please be made such that a tile colored for informational reasons in the map can have that color altered or its transparency/intensity changed. As is those of us with poor vision have been having a harder and harder time telling when a hex is highlighted for any reason (seriously folks, almost totally transparent yellow is the wrong color for anything, I need to play with the graphical settings so much as to make it near impossible to see anything outside the map just to see it at all).

Alternatively could we get an optional toggle-able setting in the map that hides the terrain features and just shows the hex-lines and other markers over a featureless black sphere? it would make it a lot easier to see things.

1) I don't recall self-destruct in eve being anything more than a way to pod yourself with an in-universe explanation as to how.

2) Any pvp player with the capacity for forethought knows that taking a ship in to pvp means they may lose that ship, so please don't sit there and insult the pirates with the suggestion that they are afraid to lose their ships, it just makes you look disrespectful and not worth listening to.

3) An AOE that does not require target-lock does not work well with a system that needs target lock due to client-side operations.

4) An AOE that does not require target lock may as well be useable anywhere without restriction, as "unarmed and being shot at" takes no effort to achieve with all of two people, and could depending on how it works potentially be managed with just one. (a lot of folks may be dumber than bricks, but there are a lot of smart folk out there too who's first thought is always "how do I break this to win").

5) An AOE that requires target lock but still has the capacity to significantly cause harm over and above all other weapons will still be a horribly imbalanced weapon that will get abused to no end.

6) If you want to hurt the pirates back, try bringing friends and fitting weapons like most pirates do. 
---If your counter argument is any form of "I'm a solo player but still should be able to win against teams because balance" then it is automatically wrong for incentivizing solo-play in an mmo, and because if it did work that way then instead of a team working against you, you'd just be facing a bunch of solo-players that all happen to share a discord and have decided to gang up on you.

Have you then considered hiring guards? Or scouts? Or just bribing the pvp players to leave you alone? Have you considered out-flying the pvp players? Or out-smarting them? It isn't exactly hard.
 
As for balance, you fail to understand the concept.

A pvp player risks perma-losing their stuff, a pve player does not, there for a pvp player gets better rewards.
A pve player willing to risk the perma-loss of their stuff should get the same rewards as the pvp player if they meet the same conditions- in this case not gaining the loot of a wreck because they didn't kill it, not losing their ship, perhaps making off with some pvp space-ore if they find it, or getting the pay for a mission through pvp space if they complete it.
 
This is balance.
 
A pve player asking for a weapon of mass destruction to use against pvp players isn't a pve player, they are just a pvp player that wants an "I'm not going to win, there for nobody else should be allowed to" option. This isn't balance, it is just being a sore loser.

The lack of NPC means that the police are in fact real players someone is probably paying to play as space-cops. If you want defenders, trying hiring some.
 
Additionally, a benefit to players that get attacked a lot without shooting back will immediately benefit the allies of the pvp players, as the people with guns would simply call all their non-pvp allies and non-pvp alts out where they could fire off a shot at their allies and then disengage, then immediately do it again, allowing their non-pvp friends and alts to rack up the non-pvp bonus faster than actual regular pve players.

If you don't like getting shot at, but you still want the rewards equivalent to someone who actually risks perma-loss of their stuff, try out-smarting the pvp players instead of just lobbying to get bonuses for not being one of them.