Ahh the good ol' days of 4.85. I remember them well. I had a Recycler with Corsair shieldbuster turrets. Half of the other players around me had some similar outlandish tech combo. We were all so special.
However it wasn't pure bliss, there'd be people spamming me with // messages about how my combination was wrong, while they themselves flew LN ID'd Kraken Katanas. It was hard for me to understand that I couldn't when they could, and only later did I realize how it was done (i.e. write some bs story about your parents/siblings/pets leaving you stuff and getting an "ok" from a small group of other players). I stuck to puretech, but now it was my turn to spam noobs with // messages about how their tech was wrong.
Or put differently: It bloody sucked.
---------
On another note, the premise of this thread is both false and misleading. You STILL have to roleplay your tech-requests, I've only had one ship in 4.86 with non-faction guns, and I roleplayed to get those.
It is totally up to the factions and us as players if we want people to roleplay tech-requests or just steal it. An informer/bounty system could be established, tech-theft could be roleplayed and so on and so forth, rather than us leaning back, folding our hands and letting nostalgia take over.
---------
4.85 WAS better, but for totally different reasons. There were more players, people weren't as entrenched and that widened the scope of possibilites, there were some very charismatic and good roleplayers that were also able to look beyond the interests of themselves and their group. There was less nostalgia, and less of a defeatist attitude.
