Many here on the forums complain endlessly about the best players in the game (at least in skill, aspects vary). It's lead to many things, such as the crossplay argument, the alienation of the majority of the PC community in Arena and as a whole in the community, and a drastic increase in toxicity from a surface perspective of the game. The reason for all of this is the top players, those who have long since completed just about everything there is to do in the game, and often have played since launch and played many other games for much of their time before then. These are the top 1%, if that, the elite players of the game. Currently, they occasionally fill an Arena lobby, while most other crews leave upon seeing them, and otherwise run around Adventure, stealing from other crews for amusement. Their skill has led to many players to accuse them of cheating at the game, which grew rapidly as a crutch for some players to fall onto when they lose to these elite players. This spread from accusing individual players to the PC section of the community as a whole, which represent roughly 30% of the game, rather than just the partial percent that is the elite players. The players (many of which are content creators, allowing others to see their requests), ask only for good fights. They don't care for treasure, often they take it out of boredom or incentive for the other player. They want to see enemies that can fight back at the level that they can. So, if that is their main (and only) request, and many other players would also like to see them in particular gone, then why not cater to both?
My proposal is an Arena-like mode, perhaps incorporated into the Arena, where the chests are not an objective, only combat is. There could be options for choosing skill, or the game could attempt to detect it (likely off of commendations or similar) that place similarly skilled players with each other, the only goal being good-spirited combat. Be it ship-to-ship or player-to-player, it would be a better fight for anyone involved, to not have opponents who put up no noteworthy fight and to not have opponents against which no noteworthy fight can be put up.
I believe this would solve many issues, such as outmatching and balance issues and possibly even the crossplay argument, if players were given this skill-based combat mode. Should a player not want to engage in PvP where the outcome is certain to be their loss, then they can simply not play this mode, and stick to standard Arena or Adventure, where PvP, while prevalent, is not the only way to play. Should one of the higher skill players want to play Adventure or standard Arena, nothing would segregate them from doing so.
