Layering emotion and motives you can’t known onto the basic game design isn’t especially helpful.
You are wrong. The basic game design specifically has no safe space. Highsec is just the highest level of security, not complete safety as that is just for stations. No, this is not just semantics, this is one of the key core premises of the game - the whole universe is the battle arena. From a game design perspective this has many benefits - it makes player choices matter for one so that how you fit and fly your ship have a meaningful impact on your success in the game. A true safe space (from PKers), would lack actual gameplay, especially back in 2003 when CCP lacked the ability to add meaningful risk to highsec from NPCs.
Players love free safety, so it makes sense that much of the player activity would congregate here, especially if you allow transport of goods back from more dangerous places for trading. And it therefore follows that player pirates would be active in this area. No, those pirates aren’t hiding from “real PvP” whatever that is, but rather they are preying on other players who fail to protect themselves in the safer section of the battle arena.
Honestly, at least from a safety perspective CCP has done a reasonably good job at making a space where you are mostly safe, most of the time, and you have to take a risk or make a mistake to be viable target for pirates. The ships most at risk are yield/bling fit mining and missioning ships, and overloaded transport ships, but almost everyone else is left alone. But there are still choices to be made there and consequences for choices.
Of course balance isn’t perfect. Like everywhere in this game, changes in the game and the game balance are possible to better target hostile actions on those with the most power/assets/experience. But the basic idea works just fine. Choices matter. Fits matter. And death is a serious matter! It’s all working as intended and designed, and this is a key part of the recipe that grew Eve as an IP, as a game and as a brand, whereas so many other MMOs faded into obscurity and irrelevance with their WoW clones.
More importantly, it isn’t going to fundamentally change. Not now, not this late in the life cycle of the game. They could make a real “safe space” with appropriate safeguards on resource spawning to protect the larger economy, say like how Albion Online tweaked to the general Eve recipe when they cloned it, but unless that happens as part of a new, safe NPE zone I see zero chance of CCP finding the resources to change fundamentally how highsec works now. It would be a huge amount of work for very little gain.
That means players have to accept the original design of the game, or not. No amount of forum wailing is going to change these leopard’s spots. Especially not when every time CCP has spent effort on making highsec safer, they have been rewarded with less players and less activity. With all the other low-hanging fruit that would be more likely to increase activity, re-imagining highsec mechanics must be bottom of their priority list.
Which is a bit of a shame. I have to believe there is a better system for enabling risk and player-driven consequences to players in highsec that might be more fun for both sides. Classic suicide ganking is rather one-dimensional, brutal, and not a great driver of escalation and prolonged interaction. But such is the reality as I see it.
Everyone knows non-consensual PvP drives some people away from Eve. But you aren’t looking at both sides of the balance sheet. Risk, loss, and destruction also bring people to Eve - in fact probably are the biggest defining feature of the game. If you ask people why they play Eve instead of another MMO, the answer is inevitably going to be related to the meaningfulness of their actions or the effect they can have on the universe, either through direct space ship violence, or participating in the economy that is driven by this space ship violence. That is possible because the game universe is both persistent and we are all vulnerable to each other.
I think Eve could do a better job at communicating that you are always at risk to new players, and this would probably help set expectations, especially of those coming from other games where you can’t really lose anything, and maybe improve retention a small amount. But as you say, for any veteran Eve player suicide ganking is a non-issue. Highsec is very safe and really only puts the most wealthy at risk to direct piracy, and even those risks can be mitigated by playing the game, and countering the limited avenues of attack available to pirates in highsec.
Non-consensual PvP everywhere is here to stay in Eve, for better or worse. Putting it in a game clearly does come with costs and makes balancing the ecosystem a high priority for that game, but it also comes with benefits that are hard to bring about any other way. However, I don’t think anyone can seriously claim that “too much” non-consensual PvP is high on the list of problems with Eve right now, nor, to bring it back to the OP, do I think anyone who honestly looks at the situation would think a new, PvE-only Eve server would be viable in the slightest.
I get it - some people don’t like non-consensual PvP. They don’t like the risk of losing virtual items. Good for them, but some people do. Eve was always a place for that latter group. Eve is what it is, and all of us have to take what we like about it with what we don’t, and then make a decision whether we want to play. That’s at least the adult thing to do, instead of acting like an entitled brat like some people do on these forums with their tantrums demanding the world change to suit their wants.
