Zoner/Zoner Guard IDs

[Benjamin]

In regards to restricting RP, and how it's good that there are millions of zoners and we shouldn't scare them away:

This goes both ways. And there is that 'you can't have your cake and eat it too' thing.
For goes both ways: zoners accounting for the huge bulk of traders 'restricts' pirate RP, for one. It hurts the legitimacy of corporation RP. Both of these (which accounts for the huge bulk of all factions, obviously) are based around corporations being the huge economic might, and omnipresent, and factions living off pirating them, often one specifically.
Corporation traders are now novelties against the backdrop of zoners. Pirates have to invent weird excuses for why they want to pirate zoners.
Pirates are supposed to be frequenters of freeports, right? But if you pirate a zoner and then land on a freeport, everybody gets all pissy. But if you don't pirate zoners, you basically don't pirate anybody. Restricts your rp.

And yeah, there are a lot of zoners. If this change scared some of them away, where would they go? They wouldn't vanish, they'd become other characters. Every single other faction has more enemies than zoners, more opportunity for pirate/trader RP that isn't weird convoluted contrived rubbish. Would improve the general feel of the server a lot, I think. Hell, one of them might even join the KSP, because apparently at the moment no one cares if that faction lives or dies. (because they're too busy smuggling cardamine to manhattan in zoner whales, I can only assume).

And for have your cake and eat it too:

If you think about it, zoner neutrality would not and should not last with the situation as it is. With them making up such a large proportion of all legitimate, smuggling and corporation traffic, basically everyone would hate them. I've caught zoners hauling goods off Stuttgart to be sold wherever many times on my LWB. If this was followed through, zoners would have another enemy. Ditto for all the zoner smugglers the police catch, all the diamond smugglers the hessians catch, all the cardamine smugglers the hogosha catch. Hell, gaians shouldn't even like the alien organism smuggling.
Zoner neutrality exists because zoners provided a service that benefits people (freeports) and don't do anything to annoy anyone. Right now, the trader conduct annoys a whole lot of people, and having the neutrality basically enforced on everyone when this is going on, is nonsense.

The have your cake thing isn't just restricted to zoners, it's actually a common thing that doesn't get called up on a lot. Like Gaians allying with Kusari but having strong support with Bretonian citizens right up to the government level. How? Or the Mollies still wanting Dublin when they have their megasystem, or half a dozen other things. If you change one aspect of your factions RP, you have to make sure everything adapts with it to stay consistent. And right now, Zoners are not ingratiating themselves to all factions or generally doing much busy-body work to preserve their neutrality. The 'don't judge us by a small number' line doesn't do much good when the good people are the small number.
Some revision to Zoner trading abilities (this or some other) would hopefully tip the balance so that bad zoners were back solidly in the minority.

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