Its moving papers around on the desk and calling that an accomplishment. If you kill the trader, and another one respawns, why bother? For a simulation? There are 50 supportive tickets from this task you don't see because you aren't a game designer. This could set us back 6 months. Just to humor you I'll post a few:
*Removing land claim allows players to stay at traders on horde night
*Having a destroyable trader fort means players will box him in or land claim him themselves, destroy the stairs, dig a hole under him so he's at bedrock then pour concrete on his head.
*Giving trader defense systems adds more cpu to trader areas, auto turrets, traps, etc all add expense. He might need henchmen, so even more expense and slower FPS.
*If he respawns how does he reach the trader area if its destroyed or new base built there?
*Trader dies and quests are broken, assigning quests to a new ref has to be done.
*Trader kills player, they want to get their stuff back and are in a death loop because auto fire guys is on.
*Someone accidentally fires a gun, they are marked for death
I could go on and make 50-100 foreseeable issues and then we'd get 100's of bugs, all for a pointless simulation here because at the end of the day there is still a trader standing there selling stuff and giving out quests after all that work.
NO thanks, we'll stick to making games not simulations and random ideas that don't really add any value and take 1000's of man hours to pull off and get shippable. BTW, this requires good bandits anyway or "human combat AI", so it would have to wait until then for sure, but I can say we're never going to do it with 99% certainty. We're still a pretty small company so we have to pick our battles very carefully, and we like features that actually add value. This one is a ton of work for very little return other than immersion.