Great points, great ideas, I agree in principle that the punishments are too small and insignificant in many ways - basically, the deterrent is not a deterrent at all. In the past week I've been killed twice by players who are camped at a space station. One time I was just leaving in a T6 and was ambushed by an FDL. The other time I was docking and inside the space station trying to get on the pad! I actually have no idea what ship my killer was in that time. I don't believe that in either case the station or local security responded at all. This wasn't piracy, it was murder for s and giggles, and seriously me off. I carried on playing in Solo - it's lonely but much less frustrating.
In neither of these cases was the deterrent sufficient, these people do this all the time - one of them has a proud line in his signature about being a player killer and the other posts videos of him doing this on youtube, I'm just waiting for my 5 minutes of fame!
In my opinion anyone with a bounty for murder should be hounded by local and interstellar security forces and bounty hunters equal or greater in fighting ability to themselves. They should not be able to even call up the galactic map when not docked for fear of being attacked. The bounty for murder should be hundreds of ks of credits, not 6k. Other costs relative to the value of ship and cargo destroyed should also be included in the fine that the player has to pay when they claim their insurance.
Finally, since I'm on a roll of a rant right now, fines should not become dormant when a player is killed or expire after a period of time. They should stay live until they are paid, and if the authority that issued the fine wants to place a bounty then those bounties should also stay live until claimed - i.e. if a player is killed then the killer gets the right to claim all their bounties, but the player has obviously come back to life in the meantime and they should still have every bounty on their head until their first killer claims each bounty. This way it's a race to get paid for the bounty and would remove the easy way out of players getting their friends to kill them in sidewinder.
Many of you may have already written the same things or disagreed with what I've written, please excuse me for repeating anything, I don't have the luxury of time to read everything on these forums as there're so many posts and threads.
PS - My frustration is not directed against people who play PvP "right" - I don't mind people interdicting me, or shouting "blockade" and giving me the warning and chance to run away. In the cases I write above the first thing I knew was that my shields were gone, a second later I was dead. Cowards.
