Policy on 1.0 'Ganking'

[Karst]

This makes absolutely no sense. A pirate is pretty much by definition always the aggressor, regardless of how the trader reacts to their demand. I see no reason why the specific instance of piracy should allow an attacker to use excessive force?

This also leads to the comical loophole of people looking for a fight "pirating" an enemy fleet, so they can gank them if they refuse, instead of simply attacking them and having to fight fairly.

Really stupid, this one.

Honestly you'd have been better off just treating blatantly unsporting fighting behavior under 1.0 case by case, without trying to articulate specific scenario subrules.

The issuing of a 'reasonable demand' is seen as the opportunity of an 'out' for avoiding a gank. We're just clarifying that in the usual pirate - trader interaction, if you refuse to pay the pirate, you are going to get what the pirate is threatening you with. If people are going through the trouble to organize doomstacks and going about extorting traders out of reasonable demands to avoid getting ganked, then the trader is getting pirated at a discount as what constitutes a 'reasonable demand' has not changed - and being pirated N separate times by smaller numbers of pirates rather than once by an entire group of players at once will be cheaper.

If we're talking about "pirating" an enemy fleet, that's not exactly what this policy is about - but before this clarification, the options were:
1. The larger group forces an engagement outright but fields an appropriate amount of units so as to avoid ganking - then either the smaller group dies to the fielded units, or the smaller group 'wins' and then gets engaged by another fair number of remaining enemy forces until one side is dead.
OR
2. The smaller group decides to attack anyway.

The addition of the ability for a smaller fleet to just pay to avoid interaction doesn't hurt the smaller group, and the larger group misses out on their ability to exercise option 1. Usually the smaller group is still disadvantaged in option 1 and will be trying to avoid shooting until they are more evenly matched anyway. Again, this is more of an edge case and we'll see how it goes. Keep in mind that all players are free to communicate with the players of opposing sides to arrange for balanced fights.

I don't think you understand the implications of this weird exception rule.
If you're being pirated, obviously you're defending yourself. You can han_shot_first the pirates and if a convoy is pirated by a smaller number of pirates, they don't have to hold back some of their numbers to fight the pirates. They're the ones under attack.
But apparently now, the pirates are also the defenders, and you've created a scenario that because the mechanic of piracy is used, all fairplay is off the table because both side are "facing aggro"?

Like imagine a group of I don't know, Outcasts v Sairs, and it's an uneven matchup. They're all doing their "We see enemy" "Prepare your weapons" etc, and when the fight breaks out, the participants have to use reasonable force.
However, the moment somebody says "u must leave system" and the other side presumably doesn't, that's out the window. The weaker side, expecting and ready for a fair fight, can either not have the fight at all, or get hammered into oblivion because the stronger side invoked the "piracy clause". Do you see how awkward that is?

But all the above aside, what I really don't understand is what the point of this is even supposed to be. Without this exception, you're still perfectly within your rights to use sufficient force to ensure a piracy target is destroyed. What possible scenario is there that just absolutely requires pirates to be permitted to obliterate rather than just kill a noncomplying target? What is the benefit of that supposed to be?

Please just leave it at the perfectly good rule 1.0. Any attempt at....whatever this is is just going to cause more trouble and loopholes than it prevents.

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