Now I have done a bit of PKing in time, but I tend to follow some rules.
1: I never attack an opponent who has no chance of winning.
2: I never camp bases.
3: I never attack cargo ships unless the intention is to rob them. (BTW: It's never smart to blow up the freighter you want to rob first. In fact it's sheer stupidity)
4: I always give the player the chance to defend himself.
5: I always expeck some smack.
Now, I will releate to you people how NOT to attack people. That is... If you want friends.
Now I will relate to you the events of last weekend on one server called ELITE.
Me, I was running around the outer systems in a reletively empty Valkyre, just cleaning up Corsairs and collecting guns when a certain NEO fellow clobbers me from behind with a Sabre loaded up with Nomad guns. Not exactly a wrong thing, but since he had giving me no chance at defence, smack talk was in order.
So I dish it out, and instead of getting some back like I expected, I was treated to the most childish display of ego boosting I had ever seen.
Claims of, "I'm more experienced than you." I was one of the Freelancer Beta testing teams flowed across cyberspace at me, filling my crowded lan up with laughter and the poor sot who thought that beta testing one game could give him more experience at anything computers than an actuall developer.
So, to be fair, I offer him a challenge. My tiny Valkyre against his decked out Sabre. But apparantly this big NEO clansman couldn't even face up to that honestly. He had to call in 3 of his friends to base camp to ensure I had no chance. So here we are 3 lvl 10 ship against one Valkyre (lvl 8 ship) and these guys hadn't even had the guts to face me one on one in a fair fight.
Real tough guys, more like elementary school bullies if you ask me.
Now I was nice about it and didn't mention any exact names (I will if called apon to do it), but I will say this. If I were the master of the NEO clan, I would not want players like this in my clan. Clans were origonally created so players could play multiplayer games in a coordinated team fashion, not so players can behave as if they were in cyber street gangs.
Clans who behave like this DO NOT get recognized on the GSI clan list (and therefore cannot compete for money) and clans who have members who behave badly usually become pariahs very quickly.
Clans and their members should always be the best behaved people on a server.
Starsiege died and Dynamix went bankrupt because of the behavior of a clan called BDU. Mankind is dying because of clans (specifically chinese ones) doing mass killings of non clan players, thereby chasing paying customers out of the game. Want Freelancer to live? Then the clan players better shape up. Do you not realize that many NooBs look up to the clans? Do you also not realize that clan participation can make or break a game?
Want to take me on in a fair fashion, and I'll always be game. I WANT to battle PvP. Want to behave in the fashion as described above? Then bother someone else, I keep mulitple accounts on all the servers I play on and I just won't give you the satisfaction. It's less problem just to switch characters than to deal with cronic ****s.
The upshot of all this is that it's cool to go PvP, even in Liberty, but only if it's fun for both the attacker and victem, and unless your victem has a chance to win, all your doing is hurting the game by making Noobs not want to play it. And unless there is a certain amount of activity logged on the master server, Microsoft will eventually take it down, meaning no more MP in Freelancer.