A few months back when I was still in the states, I rarely had a problem with taking out traders who refused to pay the tax on my NovaPG character. Infact, I chased one that refused to pay the tax across half of Honshu, and that person was in a 4500 cargo hold freighter and they had an armor upgrade...oh, did I mention I didn't have any missles or torpedos? So I chased them, litterally, from one end of Honshu until the other, until they blew up.
The entire way the person kept engaging cruise and trying to get away, and everytime I would hit them with a cruise disruptor and burrow back into their hull with weapons fire, all the while they were blasting away at my Talon while I dodged fire.
The lesson here, is if you add money to death, dogfights and fun things like this won't happen. People will be more cautious to attack others and in the end, PvP will cease to exist. I know what you're going to say "this is an RP server though." True, but take a look at Dieter Schprokets avatar for a second. While PvP and RP are ying and yang, totally different ends of the chain, they both are requires to make the entire gaming experence whole and fun.
I've seen servers that add this in, and PvP is almost non-existant because people are far too careful. While I do agree with you in the sense of traders saying "lol kil me ten, I have lot of monies" is really OORP and doesn't make any sense whatsoever why a person in RP would willingly let themselves float in a lifepod in the vaccum of space, but hey, you have to take the idiots with the intelligent, that's the way of the world.
it's apparent that you want this change enacted mostly for smugglers/traders.
Take this into mind: Almost every major trade route players use here requires them to invest between 500,000 and 1.5 million credits in cargo.
When you kill a trader/smuggler, he loses his cargo, ammunition, shield batteries, nanobots, and often has some kind of hull damage to repair, especially if you used mines/missiles.
They arent getting away 'free' when you kill them, they're losing a lot of time and money already. Depending on the trade route he's on, a smuggler/trader can lose up to 3 or 4 million credits, and upwards of a half an hour of time, if he dies.
The problem is that he is losing less from death, than from paying a fine.
Especially when you add the time loss - if they die, they are teleported back to where they came from, lose cargo, ammo, cm:s, bats and bots.
If they pay the fine, they lose their cargo, the money for the fine, and they have to go empty to begin a new route.
The result is that there is NOTHING to gain from giving in to lawfuls when smuggling. Zilch. So, only really dedicated rp:ers will do that, and I ain't seen many. Blown up a whole lot of smugglers, and not even one has yielded. That just feels wrong.
And yes, I have yielded a couple to times back when Seb used to do some smuggling... but not until my shields were down and I was out of bats. Bats and bots still give us the possibility to fight, and yield before death.
John Johnson - Master of Synth.Foods-Convoy|049
Hans Adler - Synth Foods escort wing
' Wrote:I meet smugglers every day that all rather die than pay a fine (and die they do). Pirates meet traders that rather die than pay.
Deal and live with this. It's their problem. But the another is that the pirates/police (but rather those first) call ridiculous and unreasonable sums and I'm truly not surprised that they often just refuse once they got pirated 2nd time on the same route and they hear another '2mln or perish'...
' Wrote:So, I was thinking... what if 10% of player credits was deducted on death?
In my experience on one server, the "death tax" is not a good idea in the long haul.
I understand how a non-rping trader / smuggler can be frustrating, but a credit penalty for death will open the windows and doors to more complaints, ill will and abuse.