I don ' t know why you ' re been down voted you make a fair point here have an up vote . I basically agree with you . Where do we draw the line and what is the acceptable consequence for death is a very important aspect of a multiplayer experience . I think that risk and reward should be balance and dying needs to feel fair . I understand that a heavily engineered FDL should have the upper hand in combat against a trader , but a trader in a Type 9 with a cargo full of gold have little chance of surviving . The best solution is giving game mechanics to the trader to defend himself , the ability to go stealth , to hire an escort , good security in high security systems , or increasing the risk for the attacker , with a better bounty system . The not so good solution is reducing the cost of death drawing the line in that subjective place where the reward of playing in open equals the risk of playing there . I ' m not fond of this solution but it seems to me that this requires the least modifications to the game and probably is not that hard to implement at least I think it should be easier than the others ideas in this post . As for the mentality of the community I don ' t know . Personally I love hard games , I love complex combat simulation the DCS series and Falcon 4 . 0 are personal favorites of mine , I ' ve beaten every Souls games without summoning help , and I almost finished Battletoads in my childhood that final boss was impossible . I loved playing Everquest and Never Winter Nights online where dying was as hard as here in Elite , but in all those games dying felt fair but here , at least for me , it doesn ' t .