Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Rework
The following a short outline of a potential change to make smuggling viable in high sec, with changes to border agents and giving a GCC when players are caught with contraband.

I believe this change is needed because as it smuggling in highsec is pretty much a joke

vustom agents
The first competent is a change to the custom agents to the effect that fixed groups of them (maybe a couple frigates and a cruiser each) will patrol between the gates in the sector, with stays of only about five minutes at each before heading to another random gate. There should however be fewer agents in a system than gates in a system. This has the intended effect of making smuggling a group effort requiring scouts to on each side of a gate to ensure it is clear of agents before the smuggler heads through.

Effect when detected
The next is what happens if a custom agent happens to be on the same grid as a smuggler. First the smuggler gains a GCC for carrying contraband. Next the custom agents, other npc police and gate guns would engage the player, with call going to the system police for reinforce. Lastly there should be an immediate faction standing hit with the owners of the space.

When scanned by other players
The last part is that other players should be able to scan potential smugglers and gain free rights to engage them if they do find them to be carrying contraband. With the smuggler once again getting a GCC if scanned by another player.

Thanks for responding,



It is my understanding of the current mechanics, that smuggling is completely nonviable. this should provide an option that a small team of pilots could use to move drugs to and from 0.0.
As for ease as long as you would have someone watching both sides of the gate and giving you a “all clear” signal it should be fairly simple and low risk.
As for your mention of cost I would hope that the requirement of a team and the other players scanning for smugglers would lower competition, while the value and utility of the goods would hopefully give a good payoff for the smugglers.

But then again other than what I read I don’t know much about the drug market, so all my ideas could be pointless.

First of all drug running in high sec is no problem if you know what your doing. You can haul all the drugs the market can handle in a single viator with zero risk. The biggest bottlenecks in drug production and distribution is not getting them to the market. Thats the easy part! The bottleneck is reacting the gas into the pure drugs that get used to build the actual pills that are consumed AND getting the blueprints. Once you have all the pos parts and reaction bps(hefty startup cost) the only thing you need to keep running is gas and the blueprints themselves. Gas is cheap and easily obtained from jita even at sell prices. The bps however are expensive and hard to acquire. Most of the time there isn't any on market and when there is you will pay thru the nose for them.

Anyone with a pos in wh and access to jita can make and sell drugs easily. The problem is the market for it is so small. 200 standard pills will take you months to offload. Can't say how long 20 strong pills would take.

I have no idea how to make smuggling entertaining and fit in with the world of eve. As it currently stands though anyone with a blockade runner or ship that has high agility can be a smuggler with no risk.

Drugs currently: High reward/Low volume/no risk

Fix:
Same reward as current(players currently make 100-200% profit selling in highsec after pos fuel costs)/Make penalties scale with quantity of drugs being carried. Make boosters easier to consume by increasing difficulty to transport large quantities of booster and reducing penalties for carrying 1-2 in your hold/make smuggling much more difficult

Smuggling mechanics are fine.

CCP just needs to balance the drugs and possibly introduce new contraband.