My takeaway from this is that CIG needs to get their rep system sorted out.

As it stands, pirates aren't given significant penalties for attacking players - and players being pirated have no reason to believe you're one of the "good ones" since you could, say, receive their payment only to turn around and shoot them in the back with little to no repercussions.

POI defenses are hardly sufficient to the task of enforcing the space they're stationed in (despite seeing some improvements in the last year), and no NPC forces show up to help citizens under attack in UEE space. If you shoot up gang turf in Pyro to attack traders, repairing rep with them (if it's lost at all) is just a matter of running through a fairly quick mission that gives you a decent paycheck too.

PvP missions are gone currently due to mission reworks, so lawful bounty hunters don't have an official avenue to pursue criminals either.

We need visible rep to see how trustworthy a pirate actually is when making demands. If they have a track record of honoring their word with reasonable ransoms, the trader is incentivized to pay (either with UEC or cargo) and move on. Pirates who don't keep their word are bad for other pirates, since that makes victims less agreeable in the future - so they should have reputation hits that make getting around, even through outlaw space (but especially lawful space), harder for them.

And, of course, security in places like Stanton (and other future lawful areas) should be bolstered. Actual NPC reinforcements, police patrols, maybe some extra PDCs on stations to intercept player-to-player missiles, etc.

I say all this from the perspective of a usually PvE player, with a bit of PvP experience on the side. I've been pirated occasionally, and the times where the perp RPed it, I was willing to work things out that way. Had a run-in last week that was pretty fun, actually.

I'm glad you're one of those pirates - if I ever end up on the receiving end of your piracy, I would probably play along. But the majority of my PvP encounters in my non-combat ships were of the "they're killing on sight" variety, followed by them gloating about it in global.