It's been nearly a year I've allowed myself to post opinion about the game. I escaped with the pretense of the situation and some strange-found duty, which has been a rocky journey, harder and bumpier than I soon expected to last. Everyone is fretting about pvp as before, now that asteroid mining is probably setting outside safe zone as it should. A player that brought me back to DU so fast was wondering today if he should post his strong opinion on pvp on the forums and I stole the chance to post.
I do agree on points in opening post. Make education worth, make it a real money sink, make it a real replenishing source of value and enlightenment to players. By this I mean, in regards to aopening post, instead of skipping conversations that explain different metas used and found out by players before, the game or players would somehow be able to update these 'metas' or 'warfare products' to sell in a peer-reviewed education system, so that it would be the value, in understanding to discover instead of merit or course to just skip fast and gain access to real value with. I see this is at place already in industry side of institutions for the and very neccessary basic levels of it.
Let players create black markets for each other by rapidly decreasing reputation of civilian freighter raids for pirate versus player gameplay, excluding them from public markets for long periods.
This way natural but unwanted pirates would get freighter "newbees" something to backslash with in the back of the blade of piracy even in a hopeless loss. Aphelia openly supporting piracy is in my view, just wrong, but what would you expect from an intrinsically blind AI. A workaround for multi-account players existing, still a little annoying.
On the other hand my fellow conversationalist openly wanted to safe zone all unarmed vessels everywhere, I think something like a reputation or an instant karma loss would be a fair middleground for pvp in this regards.
How does this tie to the institutions and learning skills in them?
My vision of course on combat (education) is both sides know the basics and even more at least of warfare and know the most common metas, how to try counter them effectively when spotted. where spreading of knowledge levels the playground enough to form enjoyable and enlightening information on the go and causality in actions from combat results. To have actual lessons instead of just repeating bad results in the losing side, and honing of skill to stay winner requirement on the winning side.
I wish from 'pvp' the 'metas' would evolve and revolve fast, so that you would not get bored/stuck on the same stuff working over and over effectively for and against you and that it would be dynamic/emergent, not just dev update driven. What I don't want to see personally, is an AI devil / angel tutorializing and moralizing live on my actions in the game as if it knew exactly what I did wrong in a complicated combat situation. I would welcome personally a learning path opening up from every loss I would have to pay play money to discover in a sanctified location of learning afterwards, or better still, before.
How was I defeated? Beam weapons. Give me a course on beam weapon metas I will gladly pay. No, I don't want just a talking head, I don't trust others' judgements either, I trust only my defeat to adversity, so show me the power. I see that it's cutting through carbon. It's cutting through iron. steel. Wait, I had only steel. I now know -- I will pay more to fix it...
NQ know best
Sidenote, I like the current trend in gaming, where devs are forgiven their past mistakes very easily, if the mistakes weren't just blatant and bad. The trend in which new features and attempts to fix the gameplay for a better deliverance is welcomed by the bulk revisiting the game, and re-evaluated on the spot fairly on merits and reflected on responses and often likes karma.