Civilian ID Revival.

[Warhawk]

It's actively deterring players from making the attempt to create new, official factions, new companies, competitors, when one could expect far more from such roleplayers in-server and on the forum than silent, powertrading megacorp IFFs. You can call me biased, but as a new/restarting player who didn't take advantage of the "veteran package," I ran into it within a few days of play.

I don't expect anything to change at all, but it's yet another insight into inconsistent applications of principles that punish good behavior while doing next to nothing to discourage bad behavior. If the fear was "overpowered Freelancer powertraders docking at all ports with 5kers" then the ship sailed: Now you have "overpowered IC powertraders docking at all the ports that matter with 5kers." And even when they aren't IC and co, instead this just pushes players out into the border and edgeworlds as Zoners, removing more players from the core systems that you'd expect to have the most player activity.

All that these rules succeeded in doing was changing the IFFs of some silent players, and not even that worked. I noticed two different 5k Freelancer IDs, in the middle of house space, in the past week alone, and in a server with such a small population that's very telling. Not only do new players find the requirement ridiculous enough to ignore, but it looks like nobody's bothering to enforce it anyway. And why would they? Who benefits from punishing them? Far from "griefing" the non-existent economy, at least those people are actually on the server, in what should be regularly traveled tradelanes, and giving pirates something to halt and shoot at, and police something to serve and protect. This place exchanged "10mil or die" pirates every five rings for eerie silence, and I'm not sure which is worse anymore.

I'll keep flying my meta-restricted 3k train because it's the only option that's been left to me as a civilian-run, non-megacorp business in house space. Pirate trains are out of character and mostly banned from legitimate civilian space. Getting one licensed in Liberty costs more than a 5ker and the other houses won't respect it anyway. Going directly for a 3.6k ship instead of a thematically appropriate one just looks desperate and contrived, like everyone flocking to 5kers in the first place. All the while I'm flying a ship that's clearly a modular train but I'm not allowed to slap two more cars in the back. Actually, I can't even carry passengers onboard because nobody invented passenger cars in this universe, but that's another matter. It's stupid, which makes me feel awfully stupid for trying. When others ask why I'm not in a 5k, IC tagged, or think I'm some noob because I haven't done so, or are amazed when I'm not rolling in credits when I turn down their billion-credit offers, what else should I feel?

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