Quiet the contrary where I'm concerned - even though I'll hardly participate out of lack of time! They'll have to let go of their baby and let the players do the walking, because all they can do, really, to inhale some life into the galaxy, is spin a limited narration around alien contacts, manually spawn some events, manipulate NPC conversations to give hints about it and some such.
Eve is not just jackasses preventing people from entering their stations. It's also players driving and creating content. E.g. imagine a guild "controlling" their station with a limited shipyard. Give that guild opportunity to upgrade the shipyard in order to build bigger ships or restock sold out ships by having them both, truck resources to the station, as well as buy resources from other players, potentially by having control of the station's prices for wares. And in order to prevent players from being unchecked jackasses, leave ingame jurisdiction to the game. E.g. if a player of the controlling faction of the station gains a bounty, the station will attack that player just as it would any other while still granting access to any player of an opposing faction, as long as they don't have a bounty.
What you would end up with, is a strong incentive for guilds to maintain and upgrade their stations, as well as a mechanic that promotes actually trucking wares around for a higher purpose.
That leaves a whole lot of issues to be decided. How would station control be gained and how would it be changed? But those are the issues Frontier has to tackle in order to turn Elite from a nice space game with a lifeless background sim into something that lives. They ought to give player the tools for emergent content, otherwise the most emergent things that'll happen are fuel rats saving explorers and jackasses seal clubbing n00bs in sidewinders or randomly kill any community goal supporters.
I'm also immensely happy that there is a mention of guilds coming. Thank to however caused that paradigm shift. People who cling to the notion that others shouldn't have the formal opportunity to form groups/guilds/clans in an online game, have imo no business making and selling an online game. Braben sometimes very much sounded like he was afraid to introduce such features out of fear of the implications. But that's like Nintendo clinging to friend codes. People having experienced better online features aren't exactly going to be impressed.
Now, how long until all of that is reality? Two years or three? Maybe four?
