It would ruin your day... outside the game?
Yep. Which is why I will never allow it. I absolutely hate player conflict, never liked it, and I've grown more picky with age.
(Do keep in mind that fully consensual PvP isn't player conflict. Consensual PvP is more akin to a friendly sparring match, and I play PvP of that kind fairly often.)
Also why, nowadays, if in a game there is any chance of a player attacking me without my consent, no matter how small that chance, I either take all measures needed to make that chance effectively zero or else stop playing that game altogether. Or, more likely — because I never spend any money in a game without fully researching all about how PvP works in it — I don't even start playing.
I dont even know what to say. You would rather be banned -never play the game again- than run into a pirate?
I have another specific, and stronger, issue with piracy. I don't differentiate between stealing in the real world and in game. Well, I know the difference on an intellectual level, but the emotions it causes in me are the same, to the point I would need time to calm down in order to meet a player pirate face to face without punching him or her.
So, yeah, I would rather be banned than allow a player pirate to take anything from me. After all, when someone does manage to steal anything from me in a game, my usual response is to abandon that game and never return; happened a few times. Incidentally, it's why I was one of the players lobbying for the self-destruct option to also completely destroy the ship's cargo, back when the game was still being developed; it should offer me a way to prevent others from stealing from me even if everything else goes wrong.
Even in a worse-case scenario, you lose about two hours of ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶ gameplay right? You get the rebuy cost of your ship (if you try to run and fail) and the cargo you may have. So losing that amount of time you spent playing the game, to a pirate, would ruin your day IRL?
It's not the time and effort lost. It's the fact I would have been the target of a player that want a quick fix and doesn't care if he will ruin the game for someone else in pursuing that fix.
If the same situation happened, but with a NPC being the attacker, no harm no foul. As the NPC is a non-sentient being, it would just be a part of the game. But the attack being done by a player changes everything.
Also: worst case scenario, also known as not having enough credits for the buyback and being sent back to the free sidey, might mean losing months of gameplay.
And if so, the possiblity of being banned (thankfully not the case) forever to avoid it would be an acceptable outcome?
That seems... somewhat drastic?
When choosing between a situation that would make me quit the game in disgust (being robbed by a pirate), and another one that might allow me to keep playing (combat logging), well, the choice is clear for me.
Besides, you know the devs promised, from early on, that players would be freely able to choose who they would allow to meet them and who they would exclude, and would also be allowed to freely change that choice as often and as much as they wanted, right?
In other words, as long as the devs keep the early promises, meeting the kinds of player I won't play with shouldn't be an issue for me in ED. The game allows me to basically exclude any and everyone that would hinder my experience.