I think some lower-cost alternative pvp interactions could be cool. Say you have a mining station/base(would have to have a openness requirement I guess? IDK, that's tricky), you can go down in a transport(higher chance of evading system/turret defenses, in addition to high speed and low cost) and fight on land(crew, and higher stats for vehicles perhaps? gotta be some reason to make non-ships) to sabatoge/destroy the installation. Could have some kind of blockade run mission if you give another player a reason to patrol an area, too.
Perhaps even a new player could attack fringe outposts of a faction.
*disclaimer: never been part of a faction, only played some online. game's just underdeveloped for me and requires too much time, IMO.*
Which brings me to...
Factions.
For one, I don't want to feel like I'm part of politics, or something with the potential for childish drama(redundancies ahoy).
IMO, I think there shouldn't be too much of a requirement for regular logins, for those less dedicated or with unknown schedules. So the faction point system may need some sort of thing to compensate for this, not penalizing too much for inactive members.
(perhaps depending on rank? then there'd have to be a gameplay tradeoff for said rank.)
Maybe even the potential for freelance PvP jobs? The only problem is a large faction hunting you down, war is kind of an all-or-nothing status.
I'd like to reiterate the following point:
it doesn't matter how fast you can travel. People who don't want to be bothered by greifing will always build 10 to 20 minutes away from spawn.
if there was a method to travel even faster, then people would just build further out.
Agreed. It should be very easy to travel across the haystacks, but difficult to find a needle in them.
