Player Features and Ideas Discussion

While you would not be a smuggler I think your other analysis is completely and utterly wrong in every assumption.

Smartbomb camps are easily evaded in any ship, and if there were a limited number of choke point gate camps would be completely avoidable.

Secondly there are multiple avenues of group play, Scouting through cargo ships, using a cloaked ship to do it solo, hiring other people to move your freight, pvp battles for control of gate camps, and using wormholes to move your goods.

The new price gaps that would form because everything isn't coming from Jita would be a massive opportunity for profit and it could easily be a full time profession, especially if my idea made the four empires equal in their market share.

Im not missing the point. I am trying to build on ideas that can be combined with other peoples ideas as well. The licenses or tags from places is a good idea I think. It could be something like forged documents even. Right now in game there is no reason for any pilots to have to smuggle anything except for the boosters. I just threw my two cents out there on an idea that would give a reason to actually want to be a smuggler. Or in turn somebody wanting to use a smuggler through contracts to haul their stuff somewhere.

Just know that making the taxes in the game does not make the profession it just gives there more of a reason for it in my eyes.

This is exactly how most combat boosters are traded now.

Player to play, negotiating and delivering.


A cool thing to add to highsec would be if your faction or corp standings (when hgih enough) might let you "bribe" or "sweet talk" a customs agent if caught.


IE, i jump into amarr space with drugs but i'v got 7.0 standings. They scan and catch me on the gate (easy to avoid tbh) and due to my high standing I can chose to "bribe" the guard for a small price. But with a chance to fail and be attacked. Higher standing = better success rate.

Just spitballing here.

fly the opposite direction to the battleship smartbombing.... tried that? works a charm.

your problem is you're jumping gate to gate without bouncing safes etc. The smartbomb ships are aligned perfectly to apply maximum damage to you as you come out of warp.

Yeah, the way they're traded now is cool. Lots of contacts and shady deals that all go on behind the regular gameplay. Used to be part of a corp that ran a big operation. The problem is that that could never be a pillar profession the way it is. The idea of the thread that we seem to be running with so far is to make a Han Solo -esque profession that would rival missioning/mining/exploring in the amount of players it could handle and its appeal. Trying to do that with the current booster system would flood the market in one way or another and ruin the profession.

Actually the smartbombing I'm talking about is when you jump into systems. A situation where safes won't help you much. And I'm talking about in the general hauling ships like cloaky haulers and frigs that can't take the brunt of a full rack of BS smartbombs. Which means flying away wouldn't help much either.

This is, of course, with the exception of the huge spawn radius of regional gates

The hardest part here is encouraging hisec dwellers to use boosters. The materials are already out there, and booster production is already being done. The rest is just adding some flavour to the smuggling profession.

Then new items can be introduced, or old items can be labelled as contraband. What if players could build implants, but doing so required trading in illegally obtained human parts? That's another popular item for smugglers to be hauling.

I think you perhaps misunderstood? It was asked why making faction mods/ammo taxed would be bad.

Let's see ... a couple points that are new ... market visibility of illegal items, boosters primarily.

This stuff should absolutely be on the market. It may not make 100% "role play" sense but until there is some fat bastard of an NPC surrounded by body guards in some dank comer of a station for us to walk around in, we're kinda screwed.

"Hey yo, you want some bostahs?"
"Yeah, got some?"
"You got some money, punk?"
"fugetabotit"
*pew*pew*pew*

CCP isn't going to spend time on a feature that people will not use, smuggling has to be profitable enough for a lot of players to want to do it. The market interface makes this possible by making things very visible to lots of players.

Boosters should be common enough for everyday use, should be common enough that it is worth the extra few thousand or few hundred ISK when going to save that damsel chick ... again. That's not to say that all boosters are just the meh variety, rarity and risk/reward need to be in that mix too. But to make smuggling boosters more common, and a feature that CCP will spend time on, availability and visibility will need to increase.

Heck get rid of learning implants and replace it with boosters.

Anyway ... this low sec between empires ...

LOL

Not with these travel mechanics. Maybe someday if CCP were to ever be brave enough to have a more realistic and open environment, then perhaps that would work.

Ya can't have ridge runners when there are no ridges.

If you read my thread you would know I do not suggest having bottlenecks, I want a very large area.
I suggested adding new space to make the new areas as bottleneck free as possible.

My suggestion would be more in line with the sandbox as it would be player directed and service more players than just people interested in smuggling..