With this model you have described, do you not feel that the player base might be too spread out to make the official servers enjoyable?
Dave and his school mates, might just rent there own server, hack in all the best ships and gear and just play silly buggers. While no impact on the official server, it takes away players from the official world?
I can understand their decision, but i can't help feel they should have just left Single Player + Multiplayer dog fight modes separate from the MMO, so the private servers don't eat into the official MMO servers player base.
But who knows, I'm sure we'll see soon enough.
Well, we'll always be in the minority to NPCs anyway, you're more likely to encounter an NPC going about his business, whatever that might be, than you are another person. So if they're expecting say 1,000 people online at any given time, then there will be 10,000 NPCs, whether theres 1 person or 1,000 people online, is how i'd imagine it'd be (i dont expect 10 people to log in and the game add 100 NPCs to balance that).
The unofficial servers might be good fun, but i dont think a significant proportion of people would spend the majority of their SC time in them, they'd have to be suitably awesome, like if people made Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica mods and people wanted to go play in those for a bit. But they'll be smaller universes, simply to support modding for people who want these things, without it unbalancing their universe.
The other thing, which kinda plays into what you're saying, is that there will be a PVP slider. I dont fully understand how it can work, but the idea behind it is if you'd rather play in the PU like its more of a single player/co-op game, then if you cross paths with another player they'll appear as an NPC ship. Exactly how this works, i dont know, cos what does the other person see? Nothing, an NPC too, even if they wanted PVP? So im not entirely sure how it'd work tbh.
The other thing you'd miss is the storytelling. The game should see regular micro-updates, so week by week things would change slightly, you could see news reports of Alien races coming into UEE controlled space, next week diplomatic attempts to calm things fail, and both sides start moving in preparation for combat, which leaves previously strong UEE guarded zones being thin on patrols and pirates causing trouble in previously safe space.
They've said they want to be dungeon masters, interacting with what the players do, and responding to stuff, weaving a storyline into the world, rather than it being static and completely player dominated.
IMO that constantly evolving universe will be a lot more interesting than a server which has been modified to allow extremes, and general tomfoolery. Im sure a decent cut of the community will try private servers, but for a lark, rather than spending serious time in there.
See if we can all EVA and stand on one ship etc!
