Quinn23

I plan on building a secret underground lair where I can plot the destruction of my enemies and mwhahaha to my hearts content.

I am yet undecided if I want to carve my face into a nearby mountain face

Not really, as picking up cargo and delivering it somewhere would still involve interacting with other players. 
 
Not to mention the crew necessary on a large ship. 
 
Nice try though. 

This will be the challenge. In order to mine enough resources for the game to be viable you will need to be able to go out into the big bad world and get back to the safe zone with your ore. Getting owned on the way home is why minecraft anarchy servers look dead with everyone hiding under ground. Not everyone can afford to hire an escort cruiser; though that is part of the end game logic of the games organisations. 
Camouflageable or stealth mining ships. Slower with less combat capacity but hard to see and easy to hide when landed.  Including the basic world textures as textures for voxels in buildings and craft so you can pretend to be a lump on the terrain. No one here but us asteroids.  Ensuring that a hidden craft can't simply be tab locked on at random by spamming tab in an area. IE. Planetside 2 times out such spamming, q key.  Those name tags need to toggled on and off at the owners end at least as they leave the safe zones.   Mock lootable inventories are also a possibility. IE the looting player gets generated loot (just as the miner gets ores from his ore seam ) but not the contents of your ship. They can hold you up and loot you without actually stealing your stuff or significantly damaging your ship. However is that really PvP or even really PvE?  Valuable debris (the s is silent in that word) Shooting a  PvE  ship blows off fake bits that are lootable, valuable and needs to be chased. The ship is damaged but not destroyed. It may go "stealth" for a while so it can get away. This may bust immersion. Subs in WW2 used the fake debris trick to play dead. It worked often.  Decoys. All ships are just meshes in a server why not pop a decoy on a low load server section? Now the hunter has two identical targets to chase. Both seem to take damage. Some decoys may be even able to fire back. Which do you chase? Giving mining vehicles the ability Warp or jump at a lower altitude in a gravity well than combat craft so they are not ambushed in orbit easily. This would need some interesting lore.  The miners may need remote transfer systems; like an ender chest. If you break the thing you loose access to the contents but you don't destroy the owners access to the contents. I would restrict the range of this but at least Continental or perhaps planetary. This may bust immersion. I'm sorry I can't write the software for these features, a dyslexic programmer is a bad idea, but once in game I could make some nice decoy craft. 

The beauty of an MMO is that you have the choice to do solo or group. Sometimes I get on and I am at an odd hour and the people I normally like to play with aren't around. I might have two or three groups, but they simply aren't available. Or, they might have already started something and be on the far side of the galaxy to where it would take me a half-hour to reach them. They might be running a battle and I'm not in the battle mood so I just decide to continue building the home base. Having the choice is definitely a positive.

I don’t actually know who JQ23 – Winston is, or was. He was dead when I found him, the victim of a mugging in the chaos of what was being left behind. People faced with the impending and yet still acting out of primitive greed, the reptilian emerging for last effort of fulfilling basic needs, but looting and murder are seldom basic.
 
Some people might consider it barbaric, but I noticed the identi-chip his predators overlooked, or left behind. Whichever it was, it was an opportunity. The blood was easy to come by. Winston was bleeding out on the pavement. The eye was a little more difficult. Several minutes went by, maybe half-an-hour before I could bring myself to excise it from the socket. But it was needed. Without the eye as a template, I couldn’t make the contacts, and it had to be before the eye clouded over. Some might call it luck that I found him there, fresh and still warm. There is no such thing as luck. Preparation and opportunity are deliberate.
 
Boarding had just passed the halfway point when I arrived in the throng, a sea of people escaping a sinking ship. I figured this was the best time, when the gate-keepers were most complacent, making cursory security checks but really looking for the end of the shift because everything had become routine. A scan of an embedded chip, a prick of a false thumb-pad, a scan of a well-crafted contact lens, and Winston was just another rat.
 
I couldn’t help but think of him lying there on the pavement, a victim of the mindlessness that accompanies the end of the world. Maybe he was the lucky one. A quick death. It might have been painful. He might have been frightened. But it was quick. At least he wouldn’t have to wait, watching death approach from a million miles away, and then a hundred-thousand. No one would ever see it actually hit the Earth, by then gravity would have probably been distorted and the planet would have started to break up, or not. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know these things. But I do know no one would still be alive, and definitely not Winston.

I didn’t have anyone to program into the computer to greet me when I woke up. It was supposed to be a luxury, something to ease us back into life after our deep freeze, a friendly voice. From the faces I saw, it was anything but. There were more tears and anger than anything else. The few popsicles who were able to freeze with someone they loved, or at least someone they knew, they had it better. For me, the metallic computer voice was a luxury. I didn’t have to think about anything left behind, not that I had anything or anyone to leave behind.
 
It was pure luck I got on the ship. They were calling them arks, I remember there being some kind of uproar about naming the ships after a specific religious foundation. Some thought it insensitive considering how many different religions there were. But they were wrong. Most people didn’t know what an ark was, a temporary river boat. Something to get from here to there and then to throw away. That’s what these were, temporary river boats. Only the river was space and here was our planet, Earth, about to be destroyed. There was God who knows where. And who the hell knew how long it would take us to get there. Would we even know? Would the computer tell us? Did it matter?
 
It’s funny how people find religion when they are faced with extinction. I was never a religious man. Not that I didn’t believe in something. I just didn’t know what I believed in. I heard more than one person thanking Allah, others Yahweh, and a multitude of other gods. I didn’t know who to thank.
 
My freezer was marked JQ23 – Winston. That was someone from the past. It wasn’t the future. It sure as hell wasn’t me. None of the people here would know Winston, nor would they know me. I didn’t want to know either. But I'd take my name from the freezer marker, my one acknowledgement of the events that lead to this fortunate point. A new planet. A new chance. A new life. I’d call myself Q23. 

I definitely like a more complex system. If everything is just skill-based and arm-cannon, then I have less of a reason to explore (there are other reasons to explore, but this reduces by one) or to find a good location near multiple resources to establish a temporary post. Most of the systems are very similar. Eve's system (before the latest couple of streamlines that did not overly thrill me) is similar to Asheron's Call from 1999. Production and crafting systems are all pretty much the same resource > refinement > production > end product. The only major differences are: 1) scarcity of resource; 2) steps in the chain; and 3) number of components.
 
One of the things I liked about Asheron's was that in the beginning there was some trial and error to find the right formula to create a particular item and there might be more than one, and often, a product of one process became the material for one or more other processes or could be used by itself as a final product.  

I didn’t have anyone to program into the computer to greet me when I woke up. It was supposed to be a luxury, something to ease us back into life after our deep freeze, a friendly voice. From the faces I saw, it was anything but. There were more tears and anger than anything else. The few popsicles who were able to freeze with someone they loved, or at least someone they knew, they had it better. For me, the metallic computer voice was a luxury. I didn’t have to think about anything left behind, not that I had anything or anyone to leave behind.
 
It was pure luck I got on the ship. They were calling them arks, I remember there being some kind of uproar about naming the ships after a specific religious foundation. Some thought it insensitive considering how many different religions there were. But they were wrong. Most people didn’t know what an ark was, a temporary river boat. Something to get from here to there and then to throw away. That’s what these were, temporary river boats. Only the river was space and here was our planet, Earth, about to be destroyed. There was God who knows where. And who the hell knew how long it would take us to get there. Would we even know? Would the computer tell us? Did it matter?
 
It’s funny how people find religion when they are faced with extinction. I was never a religious man. Not that I didn’t believe in something. I just didn’t know what I believed in. I heard more than one person thanking Allah, others Yahweh, and a multitude of other gods. I didn’t know who to thank.
 
My freezer was marked JQ23 – Winston. That was someone from the past. It wasn’t the future. It sure as hell wasn’t me. None of the people here would know Winston, nor would they know me. I didn’t want to know either. But I'd take my name from the freezer marker, my one acknowledgement of the events that lead to this fortunate point. A new planet. A new chance. A new life. I’d call myself Q23.