@lordqulex yeah, good point, but the problem with people not wanting any loot is that no matter how much incentive you give them to take loot, it will inevitably boils down to:
- people still not caring because they a) completed the required commendations; b) don't have interest in getting the whatever reward
- people cheesing the supposed high risk PvP reward by using forgiving game mechanics, like rolling Reaper's chests in sunked ships that NOBODY will try to contest or going as far as creating alliance servers.
To put it another way, there simultaneously are people who:
- Don't care about any risks at all simply because of how much they've played the game
- Will do anything to avoid the slightest risks.
That kind of situation will apply to any kind of approach you try to solve that issue in open world PvP. If you put a 50k fee (f/e) for whenever you want to start a figh, some people will pay it and won't care at all, while others will not touch related activity at all because they can't allow themselves to lose 50k over nothing.
You can't really make PvPers want something that is not "sink enemy for the sake of the fight" because the nature of this game doesn't have actual vertical progression. The reason why Rust or EFT are working well in that matter is because no matter how good you are, you still want to actually take the stuff away from other players, because your success largely depends on how much of said stuff you've taken. In Rust, you still want to take resources to get blueprints for better weapons and than stack a lot of supplies to maintain your base and equipment and in Tarkov you have to get a lot of money to afford equipment that will give you much higher chances of survival and victory. In both of these games playing risk-free is making you completely inefficient. You are running without weapons, heals and armour against people who have it all, so even though you aren't risking anything, you are not posing any significant threat to others. And even so, that kind of gameplay in at least of these games (EFT) is highly despised and discourages by the community and developers.
From that PoV, SoT players would want to take supplies from each other and sure they do that a lot, however the way it works, it's simply not significant enough. Supplies are not limited enough to be something to be afraid of losing, however they are significant enough to be a high priority.
The entire game is balanced around the idea that EVERYBODY is EQUAL. You have the identical weapons, ships and you can't buy some kind of powerups or boosts by playing the game for a while in long run. Every time you begin a new session, you start with the same tools at your disposal and only your SKILL defines how successful you're going to be. Of course there are some exceptions to this rule like Captained ships that give you an access to shipwright resource shop, but generally you aren't any different to a newbie who just joined. So this formula creates the issues we have now. It doesn't help that Rare introduced gamemodes that allow to consistently get PvP experience against crews who are actually WILLING to participate in it, thus often giving a decent PvP experience that sharpens your abilities in contrast to people who simply play adventure and occasionally have to fight with other pirates.
You can't have any long-term or short-term risk, because it doesn't affect your overall progress. You can't possibly lose anything in this game except the supplies and the loot you've earned in this session, the first being lost the moment you end said session. If we continue the comparison with Rust or EFT, changing that would essentially mean that you'd have some kind of a "treasure hoard" outside of your regular session that you have to put treasure in and then take it in the sessions and KEEP it in your possession in order to increase your ship's power. Obviously, that sounds like BS in SoT context and won't work. Maybe, making resources a sellable treasure would work, but it's already a thing and, well, it's not working well.
That's another addition to my point about the designing dissonance of this game, because no matter what kind of solution you implement, it'll either be utterly useless due to polar mindsets of two conflicting groups or it will change SoT on fundamental level and it won't be good. There's no going back and no way of addressing this issue without breaking the integrity of the very core design of the game. At least, I don't see how that can be realistically done. Maybe kicking people off the server if they got sunk in the fight? Then again, back to square one - bad players would lose a chance to try again, while better players would steal loot even more efficiently.
