by Sevenless » Wed Aug 24, 2022 3:18 pm 
As funny as "Hat or Die" is to some, I think the vast majority of players can agree this activity is a unique and unfortunate blemish on our game. Haven is the only place where I've ever heard of that has regular extortion of paid cosmetic items from vulnerable players to power players. Still, lets keep with "hate the game not the player" and try to figure out why hat or die exists in haven, and how we can prevent or make it much harder to do.
To start with there's an interesting question: why doesn't "Venmo me 5$ or die" exist? Why do we only rarely hear about "Give me hats or we siege your hermitage"? It's important to understand that hat or die is not a scam, it's a predatory high pressure sales pitch. Much like being overwhelmed and pushed into buying a vehicle you can't afford at a car dealership, hat or die is a high pressure "trade me X$ worth of hat to keep 60% of your LP/FEPs" that only works in a specific environment while forcing people to make quick decisions.
In the real world there are protections against predatory sales pitches that we can implement into haven without distorting gameplay or overly interfere with legitimate hat trading.
Giving players room to breath
Hat or die is a split second decision players are forced to make, and there's a simple way to remove them from that situation. Hats can no longer be transferred in game, only through a new ui (sorry loftar, I know this sucks) that can only be done if the account is at the login screen. This immediately removes the "split second decision" as your character can't be in danger (Outlaws make their own choices) when you're doing the hat transfer. I would also like to see an option to "login at hearth fire" to help players deal with being camped added to the login screen, since "I'll log to give you the hat" => "logging back in 1hr later without sending the hat to run into bored pvpers camping you" is easily avoidable with that feature.
Cooling off period
The other easily implemented protection would be making hat transfers take 24 hours to complete, with an easy/visible cancellation option available. Perhaps also a reminder that a hat is in the process of being transferred in the normal login screen as well. Legitimate hat trading will be slowed down, but otherwise it's no different since ultimately trust and asynchronous handing over of goods is how it works right now anyway.
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I'd really like to see this issue fixed, I've been mildly ashamed of haven ever since this started. I know this takes meaningful amount of devs hours to fix, but I personally think it's important.
' (because that's going to happen either way, though this is probably the most vicious form at the moment), but rather that the system currently 
