My self and many of the pirates in VO are a mix of both, we make our money mostly from taking money from traders and offering them safe passage. Or for those who do not pay we kill them and take their cargo. Keep in mind it is vary hard to make any money as a pirate so it helps to have some thing of a plan, mine was some thing like this.
* <strong>Never pirate a trader more then once in one log in</strong>. This helps those greedy traders from feeling like you are taking all their money and helps make sure they pay you next time.* <strong>Make a funny hail massage</strong>. This just helps make you stand out from the n00b in a bus over there with an eye patch and a bird who has a funny dye job.* <strong>Never charge more then the ship and or cargo is worth: </strong>. I used to have mutiple hail messages for differnt ships my policy was to make my price around 5k less then what the ship was worth so for like a centa (Centaur) I would charge around 25k, where as a hog (Warthog) would be around 15k. Just get a feel for it if more then 1 out of every 10 people you see are running rather then paying you may want to think about lowering your price.* <strong>Never go back on a deal</strong>. Your telling people who already think you are scum that if they give you money you will let them live. They have no garentee you will so you need to build up a rep, so if they ask all their little trader buddies (Traders are cliquy and due to them being so rich they have many "friends") if you are good for your word they will get a yes back.*<strong>Find a way to make your name stand out</strong>. Now you have some pirate who do this by killing every thing, kicking dogs, and biting flowers. These guys are often hated and almost never make any money. (Though there is some thing to be said for being able to log in and kill any thing you want and then make the people you killed cry by peeing on their cats.) Then you have pirates that are kinda nice, these guys are often thought of with a warm fuzzy feeling and people like to thank them for making the game fun. Then you got guys like me who are known for doing any thing for money. Which end up leading me away from piracy and into other fields of work.
What ever you deiced decide to do make sure you have fun with it and remember it's just a game. Don't you ever forget with out pirates there will never be a need for human traders as any robotics man can make a bot who will haul cargo from point A to point B. But only a human will dare try to take on a pirate. So remember your doing it to help humans keep their jobs.
-Borb Ex-pirate BLAK council member.