Mac to some degree I would say yes, you are correct. But being a good dogfighter only keeps you busy and alive, it does not open up all the doors the game has for you to walk through.
Let me give you the scenario that was given to me, and I am paraphrasing, but this is basically how Brian Chambers addressed this with me at CitCon last year. I was fortunate enough to have a nice long chat with him before most of the conference got started up. I have summarized some of this before, and I know you and I talked about this at Citcon a bit as well. Brian and I talked about 3 things specifically: Subsumption, Character roles and progression, and Agile development. Now, to be fair the second one is not part of his domain per se, but he was able to speak on it a bit, along with Sean Tracey who stepped in toward the end of the conversation.
I mention their names only to say this is not the Gospel according to Simdor but info from people who would know much better than me. Anyway, here it is.
There will be multiple factions in the game. Every small group (I think he referred to them as “cells”) will have its own faction that is tracked for your character. Most will be at 0 because you have never encountered them, but as soon as you do your faction will change either positive or negative. Some factions could be negative even though you have never encountered them, but because of your positive faction with their enemy. Each faction will have some reward tied to them. It might be a rare mineral that they control the only active mining location in the region, or it might be some cooler they are able to produce, or whatever. Think of it as loot, but loot you can only get through this faction. You would have 2 options to obtain this loot.
First would be to have your org overtake the faction through business or conflict. Meaning you could become a better mining org and put them out of business or you could have a large enough and strong enough org to wipe them out. Again I am paraphrasing and likely embellishing a bit but he did mention that wiping out a faction would likely take multiple orgs working together over a very long period of time. A faction is not going to be all in one location, they will have outposts and stations over a region.
The second option would be to gain faction with the cell so that they are willing to trade or gift the items to you. Some might be rewards for missions where others might be stores that are locked behind a string of missions.
Then he said something I was not sure was accurate, he said that choosing option 1 would always make you an outlaw, but option 2 would not. I am assuming he meant if you were dealing with a legit faction within the UEE space. It would only make sense that taking out an outlaw cell would gain you faction with the UEE, but maybe they are not fond of vigilantes. Who knows.
So here is the kicker in the whole conversation. Some cells will only build faction for your character through certain professions. So you might have a mining group that is ONLY going to respect you if you are a top notch miner, and they will test you on it, ie missions. And some would be cross profession, like a cell that is a bunch of cargo haulers looking for someone to repair their ships. For most cells there would be at least 2 maybe 3 ways to gain faction, but some will be exclusive to certain professions or activities.
Now, let me stress that the conversation was much shorter than what I just typed and a lot of it was “we could do” and not “we will do” because we were off in what if land. But I left the chat with the feeling that this was the direction they want to take the game in the long run. Meaning there is no Alpha profession, such as dogfighter.
In fact (and this is something you and I talked about already but worth repeating here) dogfighting will NOT be the primary form of space combat. Since they introduced larger ships more and more in the game they are expecting the game to evolve into more naval battles and less dogfighting battles. That is not to say dogfighting wont have its place, but that it will not be the be all end all of space combat.
And the theory Brohawk is mentioning is a well known one. Game developers in recent years have tried to compensate for it in different ways. But it is specific to direct competition, or conflict. The idea that CIG started with, and they mention this in a few videos over the past 6 years, is that there is always 90% NPC to go beat up on if you are not getting any kills against players. CR mentions this at some point and goes into detail that you might be engaging pilots much better than you and get discouraged and you need a little bump to get you back in the game so you go to the PU and run a few missions and kill a bunch of NPC outlaws and you feel better.
They are not going to balance players vs player they are going to allow you an outlet when you can’t compete with players.
I know you were burned by Eve, Mac, but you have to remember, this is NOT Eve 2 and CR is not Russian