Admin Notice: Changes to server rule 4.1 and 4.3

[Karst]

@Occam Razor You mistunderstood all what I've written in my post. Trader can decide if they want to pay right away, try to impress pirate with negotiations or - what neither party wants - trader going boom. Credits can be earned very quickly, so paying up e.g. 2 million credits for cargo that gives you 17 million credits isn't a great loss. You also should remember that roleplay of unlawful ID is to pirate - to gain either credits OR cargo - so most of the guys aren't there to annoy you. They are doing the roleplay of the faction they represent.

And I say that both as a trader and as a pirate here.

P.S. If you see that pirate doesn't want to negotiate, just pay up without further questions. You should take into consideration that pirates seeing the trader prolongs the encounter may be caused by awaiting for e.g. local police/navy.

It's pretty obvious that despite claiming to speak for pirates and traders, you don't seem to be too familiar with either, because your argument is riddled with flaws.
First of all, pirate demands and their payment is completely irrelevant to this discussion. The main counterarguments are rooted in a transport's inability to destroy a pirate attacker regardless of how well they are doing in the fight, which is a basic principle of balance ("cannot destroy smaller, faster ship in larger, slower ship") completely unrelated to the specifics of roleplay in such an encounter.
Secondly, you are making the assumption that pirates will make reasonable demands. I guess you've never been asked to drop all cargo by a random cruiser. Even if the demand is reasonable, if it's a terrible RP encounter ("hello, give 5mil sir" "ok die"), there is a strong incentive not to pay anyway if you have a well-equipped transport in a location that would allow it to escape.
Thirdly, you make the assumption that the "trader going boom" as you put it is undesirable for the pirate. That is absurd, the trader exploding is in many cases the most desirable result for the pirate. Many people pirate entirely to get bluemessages, and for any such situation the pvp death but not actual death of the target would be the second most desirable outcome.

Finally, like everyone else, you don't address the obvious trolling potential, you don't address the very basic issue that this discourages pirate-trader interaction, you're just focusing on irrelevant specifics of these interactions that have literally nothing to do with the matter at hand.

Code:

[18:09:03] Haste: I can literally pirate an 8-transport IMG convoy in a heavy fighter or something now.
[18:09:13] Haste: And they'll have to either pay or accept that whichever ones I can keep CDed will be PvP dead for 2 hours.

This is what the rule comes down to, and it's silly. It makes infinitely more sense that that 8-ship convoy can provide more than enough cover for one another to flee to a base, dock up and win the encounter. Instead, they have to accept that at least one or two of their ships will inevitably be locked down / PvP dead since I can indefinitely dodge their fire while lobbing a CD once in a blue moon.

I remember how good the change to "Docking equals winning" seemed when it was first introduced. It's just a big step back for the server to revert that change.

The "negotiation" argument is extremely flawed, by the way. The pirate has no obligation to behave in a certain way. They can be as kind or unkind to a transport as they desire. I know my (old) pirating characters generally wouldn't care whether a transport pilot quickly complied with demands or wrote an entire novel. At the end of the day, they either comply or get shot. Just because your pirating characters apparently are very nice people or don't actually behave like pirates, doesn't mean that everyone has to play that way.

Come on, Haste, the other six can flee, log their fighters/missile_solaris GBs and eff you up.
Or are you planning to make a 8 CD launcher available?

<3

You're essentially saying that the pvp deaths of two transports in a well-prepared convoy to what can only be described as troll piracy is a good thing. You're also implying that Haste or other capable pvpers in snubs would be sufficiently deterred from following transports by solaris gunboats and mediocre fighters they can probably easily evade.
Any competent pvper can now pvpkill as many transports as they can CD, without putting any effort whatsoever into actually shooting them.

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