To translate the above post: "Screw you. Your job is to provide me credits."

I swear, every time we get into these "hail/pay/negotiate/etc" discussions, it turns into "well, you guys don't do x, so I won't do y, and it'll be that way until you show me that you'll start doing x, which is impossible because I won't do y".

It's really pretty entertaining to watch.

Atice: the appropriate translation is actually "I can kill you, you can't do anything to stop me, and there are zero repercussions for my doing so--and my cargo scanner tells me that I'll make a lot of money off your corpse. However, because it makes the game more fun to just chase people about, get paid, and say YARR! a lot, I'll let you live if you'll pay me about 1/4 to 1/3 of what I'd otherwise make off your death--and you get to keep the other 2/3-3/4s of the money you'd otherwise lose. And after you pay once, I'll probably let ya go for hours on end! Killer deal, right?! Ok, ok, I'll just shoot you, you boring bastard."

Though seriously, you're not too far off. A trader's job could be summed up as "Screw you: your job is to take a small portion of what you'd otherwise get out of our encounter, and then leave me alone to make lots and lots more money."

Inco said: 2) Risking your life and drawing your .357 Magnum really quickly you will shoot that bastard.
You want to put your life in risk just to be a local hero. Dumb but OK, this is RP too.

Well, I think that in VO, most of the traders really think that they MIGHT be able to kill you, notwithstanding the typically large variance in skill, ship weaponry, speed, and general combat-worthiness... and since death means nothing, as long as they can log off and come back 3 hours later and try again, there is a much higher possibility of the fight back/run away option.

Granted, it makes more commercial sense to PAY, but then again, in any sane universe, you can't respawn indefinitely and local governments would have hunted down and killed all the pirates by now. Or forced them into hiding like OBL. So, there HAS to be some suspension of disbelief.

local governments would have hunted down and killed all the pirates by now

Right, because we've already Mozambiqued every Somali who's plying the coast.

An even more accurate analogy is the late 1700's, when civilized governments simply didn't have the resources to keep pirates in check.

I leave it to [VPR] and [TGFT] to explain why ladron just picked a very poor time period for a citation to pirate supremacy.

ladron, even more interestingly, they hired pirvateers to hamper the enemy's trade.

Real world analogies (sadly) do not work well with the piracy in VO. And I have deep-seated doubts about their likelihood to ever work.