Pirate Affiliation or Unlawfull Affiliation

[Karst]

This has been discussed many times, with various opinions.

Personally, I'm against it for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it would be entirely pointless unless Pirate ID'd ships are forced to use it.
Otherwise, I'm sure most would simply continue to use freelancer IFF (or an unlawful faction IFF).
And forcing generic ID'd ships to display a certain IFF seems to go against the concept - that generics choose their affiliation.

Secondly, it's not realistic inrp - after all, Pirate ID'd ships are freelancers. The Pirate ID is separate from the Freelancer ID simply due to balance reasons, as an ID that could pirate at will while remaining neutral to lawful factions would be horribly overpowered.
In vanilla, you did not have this distinction (obviously).
This is really the very core of the entire game - that the eponymous Freelancers have a non-fixed affiliation that may change over time - including from lawful to unlawful.

Finally, about SRP ships: We already have a generic affiliation that's rephacked hostile to lawfuls - it's called Fugitive.

actually the only reason you see a lot of freelancer affiliated pirates is so that they can confuse lawful factions and so that people cant use the target next / closest enemy button / hotkey

Not true in the slightest. Some people just want to have pirates that are not affiliated with any particular faction - thus, freelancer IFF.

Aside from that, there are massive amounts of situations in which you might be forced to fight someone that's not red - a freelancer being pirated, being attacked by a mercenary, or simply some unlawful or semi-lawful faction your ID isn't rephacked hostile to (or the other way around).
Edit: Not to mention ships that display no IFF at all.

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