One of the general problems with PvP is that there's always someone that will knowingly abuse it.
And sadly every time there's a fix certain regular individuals try to find a way around it to spread as much grief as possible once more (ie George Lucas rammers)
Am I saying piracy shouldn't exist? nope, but I am saying that pirates in a big ship should go after bigger targets, there is really no excuse for going after an easy target.
That they can run is something they should be able to do, its the pirates job to be quicker and more convincing so even bigger targets do not run, pirating is not meant to be easy.
Problems with that - there's no reason a pirate can't pick on weak prey. It actually seems like a very piratey thing to do. What criminal looks for a fair fight?
BUT, the incentive needs to be to also let that weak prey survive if they comply, and as things stand it's not working out that way - at least based on voiced complaints.
Part of the problem is the interdict and blow up crowd you mentioned later. People like them make it so anyone getting interdicted is going to assume it's a psycho killer first and flee first thing. Pirate, not wanting to lose cargo, has to open fire, hoping to spook them into dropping all cargo. Trader, being fired upon, feels justified in thinking the pirate is a psycho killer... viscous cycle. Things happen in seconds, and it's not enough time to take in information and adjust under a standard interdiction without some kind of help (text macros help).
Who's going to be affected by a combat logger? well sure the pirate and the combat logger, but that's really it, they shouldn't be doing it, but the impact is minimal, and they can cause themselves to get punished. But the pirate has other possible targets.
You're understating the impact there. Traders complain about piracy because of the lost time it results in for them during their trade runs - why can't pirates have the same complaint? All that work to interdict and suddenly "poof!" the target's gone? Have to wait 40 seconds for the FDS to spool and then start hunting again? Who knows how long till the next CMDR shows up in my instance... I'm no pirate, but that would tick me off for sure! The devs themselves talked about PvP being "rare and meaningful" but meaningful works both ways.
And of course logging also results in some pirates opening fire if they don't get a response right away. Silence is assumed to be preparing to log. Suspecting that, what frustrated pirate wouldn't want to try and take them out first? Again, viscous cycle.
One idea I posted elsewhere was that combat logging should result in automatic cargo drop. Sure it would look gamey to have a ship disappear and canisters appear, BUT it would mean that a combat logger doesn't get away with their action scott free. Maybe wreckage could be added in so you could assume in-game roleplay wise that the ship simply suffered some kind of catastrophic malfunction and imploded
This would encourage pirates not to immediately open fire, because they know that even if a silent player CLs there will be booty to be had. It's worth their time to take the chance. And said silent player now has more time to respond (maybe they are slow at typing and have no macros set up). It's worth their time not to panic.
I think it would help.
Downsides: what if it's an accidental internet drop? Well, for most the money lost isn't going to be insurmountable, probably far less than your ship's rebuy. So I don't see it being a problem most of the time. But of course there will be exceptions. If it was a legit drop and you were put in a painful economic bind because of it, you could contact FD the same way you would for a bug that resulted in a gamebreaking loss (heck, they've even replaced SRVs for explorers because it would take too dang long for them to travel back and buy a new one).
Also, the cargo drop would only happen in combat situations (ie any situation where you have the 15 second wait if you're trying to exit). So it's not like it would happen every time.
Someone mentioned that if this was implemented hackers would find a way to block your IP address, making you CL and take your loot. I don't know if that's actually possible (I heard elsewhere that kind of blocking is not possible), but even if it is, it's no different than any other kind of cheating. In fact, if they're already cheating they don't need to block you to steal your loot anyway. I see it as a non-issue. There are plenty of pirates here people are POed about because of how they take advantage of mechanics, but none of them would resort to cheating.
Another measure could be to limit how much cargo is lost in a CL drop. Up to a max of, say, 100 tons (which I think is the max allowed in deep space?). That way an Anaconda with a ship full of gold doesn't lose everything, but the pirates easily get more than enough to make them happy.
