I'm ftp

There is ONE player who can defeat me more than 90% of the time in the server.

There are 1-2 player who can defeat me ~20-30% of the time in other groups

Ergo I CAN plunder, and I DO need the coupon.

I don't plunder because:

It's immoral

It is out of character from an RPG standpoint.

I don't want my server to die and then have to beg for mergers.

I think plunder is probably the 3rd biggest cause of player quitting, after people getting bored overtime and the occasional game breaking bug that cause a sudden wave of rage quit. I'd rank Xserver sage higher before, but 3.0 kinda fixed it with the extended rewarding ranks so it's not much a problem now.

There is one free one for top 50 ranked players

Any more you need to use a ticket or ingot. (i.e. first one for non-top-50 and 2nd/3rd for everyone)

It's a consumable item that allow you to do an extra SS, there is one type for plunder and another for convoy.

They are permanent and you c*e two in the same day (for 3 SS plunders)

You earn them in events and it can drop as a result of S convoy/plunder

S12, come and take a look.

It's an old server, and therefore reasonably active--we still get 20+ in fox at times, and GNW usually have 40+ people across 3 groups, so we don't need a merger much(many player dislike the prospect of merge because all our neighbors have more ptw, which would be bad for us). We are just lucky that we don't have any huge ptws. There were more ptp before, but they quit over time. And others I beat out by far more dedication. (well, some of those can be argued to be ptw as opposed to be ptp, because in their hayday they were unstoppable, but.... they died off overtime)

it's true that it's more ideal for a ftp than most, but that only affect the matter of whether a person CAN plunder. The choice of can but do not applies to all player who can plunder, ptw or ftp, equally.

On a side note, I'm about 50-50 with a groupmate of mine, who is also ftp. As it were, my group is pretty much the ftp group, with only a few tiny spender that are far weaker than me and that mate of mine is. All the top ftp are in my group except one (one of the ones who can beat me 20-30% of the time).

You grievously underestimate the amount of damage a single plunderer can do, especially on server that already have a meh population.

First, you need to understand that for most players, the game looses its luster after a few month of game play. Progression after 70k is very slow. At this point, many players are holding up because they have friends in the game.

Given that, if one person gets caught by the plunderer a number of days in a row, they might rage quit. Which might cause some of his/her friend to quit as well. This can quickly lead to the death of a group. Which then removes competition from the server and make the game more boring, which might prompt players from the dominating group to quit as a result of boredom which will lead to a dead server.

Now, this is a bit extreme. It's a chain reaction that can be stopped at any step (i.e. maybe the one guy quitting don't cause the group to die, and perhaps the dominating group just enjoy the * and don't get bored) but it CAN happen.

Also, to be fair, plunder is not the ONLY reason players quit. As mentioned above, much of the problem is due to the server already being lower activity, the game have lost luster after long play period and slow progression. However, plunder does tend to be the straw that breaks the camel's back, because it is one of the more personal "offense" a player can suffer. This makes it much more likely to trigger rage quit, which then have the risk of causing the above described chain reaction.

And even if a server survives the first such incident (chain reaction stopped), if plunder continues, it might get started again and it may or may not survive that one and so on. This is what makes plunder dangerous to server health.

Now, this isn't a particular problem on more populous server. For one, there are more plunder target as well as plunderer, so while a player might get plundered daily still, it's unlikely to be by the same person, which makes it much less personal and less rage inducing. Also, there are likely more player per group, thus more friends to keep one in, thus making rage quit less likely to happen. At the same time, a single player quitting won't be as catastrophic because there are more "replacements". And certainly, one group dying won't mean competition disappearing, as there would be other groups. But unfortunately, this relative safety might only exist in maybe a dozen server or so. Most servers do not have sufficient population to have this assured resilience.