Oh. One mission at a time, of course. You are at notoriety 1, you get a rather simple redemption mission. If you are at 9, the mission you get is much more elaborate. And it's the only one you get. When you completed the mission your notoriety is reduced by one and you get the next mission. Potentially with a delay in between. The higher your notoriety, the longer it takes for the next redemption mission to be presented to you.
The other thought would be do these missions expire (say you stopped playing for a while?)
Nah. I don't think we need a bias towards criminality. What we currently need is to get rid of the indifference towards criminality. Minor actions are severely punished, while punishment doesn't really scale up for bigger crimes. It merely adds a counter, but does not much else.
Balance has to be maintained, if something is actually added for the criminal side, something adequate has to be available on the legal side, too. (If anything, the criminal side might be more risky, while the legal side might be a bit more time consuming. ) That way both sides of the coin would be supported. Everybody, no matter if legal or criminal, would gain something from it. But pushing people to crime would be a very bad idea in game like ED.
Coming from Powerplay and a BGS background I can see that the game always settles too easily into a stable state (too much +ve actions, not enough -ve)- which leads to stasis. Whats a problem is that legal activities pay billions (such as mining) and that piracy does not. ED would need to reverse that to provide temptation to keep people wanting to break the law to get rich.
Hmm. My line of thought unfortunately here is that it won't make much of a difference. I mean, i generally don't do BGS things and don't tough massacre missions. But if i'd want to kill plenty of ships of one faction, i'd actually go to a HAZres. No police or anything like that. Also, at least for me, whenever i get scanned, it's a cargo scan. Always followed by an NPC asking how i make my living and that his kids will starve tonight.
It might not be the fastest way to do that mission, but it would, at least according to my experience, completely avoid the KWS scan. So while i see what you're aiming for, i also right away see a way to work around it.
Unlawful killing (in BGS terms) does not work like that. What I'm suggesting is that hardened unlawful killers to whom notoriety is meaningless have to watch for KWS sec scans by any ship. Since notoriety follows you, so does the threat.
Example: When I BGS kill for influence in a medium sec system I kill 8 and get the ATR incoming buzzer. I jump out, and then back and carry on. I can do this repeatedly and never see ATR.
With my suggestion, anyone who kills randomly (BGS killers, griefers etc) and has a sustained notoriety of 10 will have to evade all security scans or KWS scans whereever they go otherwise ATR pop up. This is far more tricky to escape, because you have to then be constantly aware of bounty hunters, security or other lawful BH players. Anyone with a KWS then becomes an issue for you- so you either keep a low profile (go to an anarchy system / place with few scans) and dip below 10 (and remain below 10) or you evade via silent running or kill the scanner. What the suggestion really is doing is replicating the NPCs reactions to being scanned (i.e. in ages past they'd tell you to stop or else).