This right here is going to be a HUGE help with the "pirate" that will take your ore and sell it on the lawful bases. Miner ID'd transports (Pirate transports at that) won't be able to take your ore and sell it on the lawful bases.
What does this mean? The rise of the Freelancer-tagged, pirate id'd transport/gunship/bomber. These will then be the new whinge-fest du jour, and then the Pirate ID will be saddled with a restriction that it can't be used in conjunction with the Freelancer Tag. Then will be the rise (if it's not already there) of the untagged Pirate ID'd ship.
The good thing about these guys is that they have a Pirate ID. Escorts and scouts will know that they are PIRATES, and can act accordingly. The bad thing is that these "pirates" will still be able to dock on lawful bases to sell the ore.
Solution? Why, give unlawfuls a place to sell ore. This should be done at a smaller rate than lawfuls, but still a decent enough price to encourage unlawfuls to tag/id themselves accordingly and RP a pirate with pirate affiliations. Junker bases and/or Freeports would be great for this sort of thing.
Personally, the Grand Cooperative Mining Experiment has failed, and failed because of basic human greed. The over-inflated prices of ore has caused a very large inflationary trend in regular pirate behavior. A plain trader is now being asked for 5-10mil in a pirating scenario because it's expected. Wasn't there a long tryst when 4.85 first came out about how money is worth more? Well, with the GCME, the value of a credit has plummeted for miners, and pirates, and the rest of us are paying the price.
I'd like to see ore sell prices dropped to about 1/2 of what they currently are at the main dropoff points (BURN THE WITCH! HERETIC!). Bring online sell points to all Zoner Freeports and all Junker Bases in line with distance from main mining area, and let the vultures kill each other.
Edit: A buff in general lawful NPC strength isn't needed, nor would it do any good. With the current technology on the server, when server load gets to a certain point, it starts turning off NPCs. at a certain point, there are no NPCs to be found. What then?
A lot of the current system is broken. Quick name-changes and the rep-ninja, while both fantastically useful unto themselves, has utterly destroyed anything other than blanket bounties, which some people are calling for the eradication of. Most BHG have been relegated to the Omicrons because of fear of a sanction for killing someone w/o a bounty, even when completely within their ID limitations.