Back in the early days of MMOs it was all lawless, anything goes out in the open, with max/high level players, ganking newbies just starting out, and you could loot the corpses of the players you killed. This didn’t go over well for a lot of people, but companies stubbornly stuck with it, and MMOs were regarded as something just for a niche market. Then Blizzard comes along with their casual friendly MMO World of Warcraft, pulled in insane numbers of players, and made stupid amounts of money. MMOs, and other styles of online games have since become common place, with more being released each month, than used to exist in total. The old style of open world gank fest has gone well out of fashion, and is considered unprofitable compare to more casual friendly games. Just look at Black Desert, early on they were promising a hardcore open world PvP game, with no instances, no safe areas, looting of player corpses, and all that old school stuff. Some people were really psyched about that idea, but that concept lasted I think two closed beta versions before they announced that they determined that their market did not want that, so started putting in heavy restrictions, and penalties to the PvP. It was no different here, it just took them longer to make the change, and with this change made, I finally ponied up, and bought a rank 15 spacial scanner, and am looking at other stuff to buy again. That’s the kind of thing they’re looking for, they need more people in the game, and buying things, as they know they can’t survive off of just the whales, not with all the other space based games out, and coming out now.
Beyond that, people really into PvP always go on as if they are the majority, and that everyone feels the same way they do about some topic. Fact is, that if you objectively look around in-game, and ask players in general, you’d find a much larger silent majority that don’t really care for PvP, or at least not that kind of abusive PvP. If you want open space to be a “PvP” anywhere game mode, flag yourself for PvP (disable station protection) when you leave the station from the options menu, nothing is stopping you from doing that, and fighting others that have flagged themselves for PvP, even in protected zones. Complaining so bitterly about the removal of so many “PvP” zones, when nothing is stopping your from flagging yourself for PvP, and engaging in it anyhow with others that want that, just makes it sound like what you’re actually complaining about, is how you can’t as readily rack up a bunch of easy kills from players that weren’t in any position to put up a fight. If you actually get off on that sort of thing, I gotta ask, do you go to your local kennel to kick puppies, and kittens in your spare time, or how about punching babies in the maternity ward of your local hospital?