Don't forget, simply becoming Wanted wouldn't mean an you pay for your rebuy.
Well, yes, that was my point. The typical functionally-invincible PvP ship would be able to carry on regardless of what charge would be paid in the hypothetical event of its destruction.
Note that the existing notoriety-based bounty multipliers make it relatively straightforward - since 3.0 - for a habitual killer to run up a permanent bounty that's larger than their ship costs, so effectively on death they would pay a 300% rather than a 5% rebuy. I've seen plenty of people (on the bounty boards) with >100 million bounties on medium ships as a result ... I suspect there are several multi-billion credit bounties out there. Insurance write-offs, indeed.
Has it made any significant difference? Well, we still get threads like this, so I guess not.
(With modern engineering and cash-gaining methods, it's not even that big a penalty for people to occasionally scrap and abandon a ship that's got that much of a bounty on it, either. But you're not going to be very popular suggesting that we should return to 2.0 engineering and cash levels to slow them down...)
And, if people are falling victim to station-ramming, leading to expensive rebuys, complain to FDev and maybe they'll pull their finger out and fix it.
In the real world it can take months for insurers - and sometimes the courts - to sort out liability in the case of a collision between two vehicles. There are real-world car-rammers who use loopholes in the default presumptions around collision liability to make substantial money off insurance fraud and it can take some time for the authorities and insurers to track them down and put a stop to it despite them having a very clear incentive to do so.
And you want Frontier to write an AI routine which can infallibly determine it instantly? With no loopholes? I do respect them as programmers, designers and developers but if they were
that good they'd be making billions from government and military contracts, not messing around with a game.
There's a very simple fix for station-ramming, which is "ensure the maximum number of players in an instance is one (1)", and Frontier have already enabled that as an option for all players. Anything else will just change the nature of the problem, not remove it -- as did the initial fix for station ramming, which certainly solved the "people in Cutters keep ramming Sidewinders to death with impunity" problem which was originally complained about.
Maybe the game needs some sort of mechanic whereby, if you're within a certain range of a wing-mate and they get interdicted, you automatically drop out of SC into their instance too?
This is exactly what the existing (since 1.2!) nav lock feature allows you to do. The "certain range" is extremely large, too. You need to time enabling it correctly, but you can be in the interdiction instance within seconds of its creation, just like an NPC.
(Hostile attacking players are well known to use this to get 4:1 odds shortly after interdiction, but it works equally well for defenders)
It seems to me the problem with Open is not "we need feature X" but "people need to be made aware feature X already exists".
