I’m going to take a stab at guessing the “Why” of this change, and then propose an alternative pathway towards achieving that why.
This post consists of the “Smartass Intellectual Bit”, “An Alternative Strategy”, and “A concrete proposal.” Skipping to the end is recommended for most readers.
Smartass Speculative Bit
If I was an MMO designer who was up to date on design theory, then I’d be thinking about Bartle’s Taxonomy, and the fact that if a game is too cooperative, then you won’t have any Killers in the community. And an MMO needs Killers if it’s going to have a vibrant community. Therefore, the devs are interested in making sure that the Killers have something to do.
What is a Killer? A Killer is a player type who gets their satisfaction from acting on other players in a way that demonstrates their personal superiority over the other player. Most people who have the Killer mentality demonstrate their superiority by killing other players (or blowing up their ships). And so, if you want to make sure your killers are well cared for, the default game design accommodates this by giving people the opportunity to blow up people’s stuff.
Factional conflict was added to EVE Online and people loved it. And it was added to Elite Dangerous and people loved it. Therefore, space games with an emphasis on logistics should have a factional conflict system, because people love them… right?
There’s a lot of former EVE players who play Prun. I’m one of them. If I wanted to play EVE, I’d play EVE. Prun gives me most of what I enjoyed from EVE, without the assholes. The lack of assholes is a critical component of what makes Prun special. Creating an opportunity for backstabbing and taking other people’s stuff would turn this from “EVE without assholes” into “EVE with worse graphics.” That’s not an improvement.
An Alternative Strategy
The way forward is if you read Richard Bartle’s original article and study the fine print. Killers often demonstrate their superiority by killing people. The other way to do it is by helping them.
Consider the effort that goes into guide writing, tool making, and charitable works. These are the covert killers who are getting their kicks by proving to other players that they have the means and the understanding that others don’t have.
So, now we know what we’re looking for: a game system that has a political flavor to it, that creates opportunities for players to inconvenience each other, but that preserves the ‘helping’ tone that sets Prun apart from the competition.
What you want is not to go bigger and grander, but more intimate. You’re looking for niches, not sprawling battlefields.
A concrete proposal
Create a system forum that has the power to raise taxes from planets via a percentage of population taxes and a (separately specific) percentage of gateway fees. Let it direct funds to player corporations, to infrastructure projects, to planets, and to social celebrations.
A social celebration is something that delivers a percentage efficiency buff to a social class throughout the system: it’s either a buff to pioneers, settlers, technicians, engineers, or scientists. Many systems will have an easy time with this, and they’ll buff pioneers. But there’s going to be some interesting conversations if there’s a planet with scientists on. As a system gets more developed, there’ll be an impetus to start celebrating higher-tier populations. But then who’s going to grow the food and make the overalls?
(Make the choice of a class to celebrate a choice that lasts until changed via motion, and make it easy to pay maintenance. Maybe decrease the maintenance load associated with the COGC while you’re at it.)
In addition to going bigger, also go smaller. The Planetary Technology Bureau is a planetary infrastructure building that provides a planet-wide bonus to the production of one material only. So now you have the population of Berthier arguing over whether the bonus should be applied to ALO or to AL. It’s an interesting and meaningful conflict, but it’s about “Which benefit do we want?” as opposed to “Who are we going to hurt?”