My problem with the old system was lack of transparency. A character could dock somewhere and buy some equipment, then somebody would shoot them for it (or worse). Roleplay says if a character has good enough reputation to buy something from a vendor then they have good enough reputation to use it. The "other kind of roleplay" layering where nurp you need special permission from a guy who's never around or who gives some stupid threshold like kill 50 outcasts a month to use our LF turret, was and continues to be one of the things that makes this server hostile to new players.
Those of you who say switching to the transparent model has killed the server, lol sit down.
ps--If you are going to be revisiting the plugin then I will repost my suggestion to tie the nerf to actual reputation. Get rid of the separate technerf database altogether. For example, if somebody has 6 green bars of rep then they should only have 60% efficiency. If somebody has a rephack of .8 then they will never get less than 20% penalty. This also allows technerf percentages to be automatically reflected by SRP and such, if they have no rephack then then they have no penalty.
![[Image: smuggler-threat-0-1.jpg]](http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x57/UrsusMorologus/Freelancer%20Discovery/smuggler-threat-0-1.jpg)