And as far as "for fun", it's not really fun for those of us on the receiving end. Just sayin'...

Yea. It's fun for them, not you. That's what I said. In fact, they're reading this post and smiling right now.

If you are lower rank, just chat with a friend who is playing, synchronize your scan, and start bumping (if you don't already see any of the same people). As soon as you both see the same person, count down from 10 and open fire, see who gets the prize!

At higher ranks, I imagine it's a lot easier given the smaller pool of active players; you probably don't even need to sync scans.

Good times. If you're offline, you'd get disabled either way, and only one of the players gets the kill and badge, so I don't see it as being unfair. And once your disabled... well, people ice fish all the time, so that's not much different either

Is PVP intended to be fun for the targets?

They love it!

I try to tell them a joke as I am blasting the ship apart. Makes me feel better anyway.

I used to leave joke comms but I honestly got more rage responses from that than from no comm...

Disclaimer: I don't have any inside information so this is all conjecture from my experience watching the bt. (Surely someone else has spent more time studying this than me.)

Things that have been confirmed by Dan: The longer you have gone since you were last killed, the more likely you will show up on the bt. If you have less scan then their cloak you see them on your bt.

My hypothesis: The bt is one massive list ranked by your "bt-score" and what you see are the people with the highest bt-score that have lower cloak than your scan and are in your rank bracket. Attacking someone doesn't remove them just from your bt, but everyone's. Getting attacked could reduce, but not nullify your your bt-score or they could be pulled by chance with your bt-score increasing your likelihood of being chosen.

Why do I say this: It is common for me to click on people in the bt who are already dead or have their shields gone only a few seconds after I've refreshed. Also, on a weekly basis I wake up to find 3+ people have hacked me before I'm disabled (between 30 secs and 2 hours from fist hack to disable) and never after that. If I catch an attack while I'm online there's a pretty good chance I will be attacked in the next few minutes by an unrelated person. If you pay attention to names enough, eventually you start seeing the ssb ships hang around on your bt almost constantly, while the glass ships almost never pop up. You can also see that sometimes the bt doesn't change for almost an hour, then it will rapidly change once someone starts pvping.

Executive summary: The bt is shared, not personalized for everyone.

^ This pretty much explains the ' how ' you keep asking. For ships of a similar rank range the targets that appear on their bt at any given time are more or less the same, so if you're in a chat group with anyone in or outside of your legion and post the which ships you hit the others can then also pick up an yellow or blue without hitting a trap.

What I don't get is why this would at all be painful or annoying for anyone. Someone has already disabled your ship what on earth does it matter if several other ships then pick up badges? You can't seriously be worried about the loss of production points and the number of times you've been raided or hacked doesn't even get recorded anywhere?? It's literally a 'no loss to you at all' situation.

I can accept this as the "how". I just found it somewhat curious that I got disabled and raided by three members of different legions in the same BG within 1 minute 3 times in a 2 day period. Long odds, but I guess it can happen if everyone is out there PVPing.