Jita Park Speakers Corner

I was reading the latest dev blog and reviewing the "reasonable things" list when I ran across this:



It doesn't really explain itself. So I have a few questions for the CSM members who upvoted this.

1. Does this mean courier contracts?
2. If so, will you be making courier contract contents viewable before accepting them? Or in some other way flagging them as containing contraband?

I'm hoping it is a reference to sale by contract (i.e., item exchange contracts), but without a more specific statement, it's difficult to tell.

As long as it isn't courier contracts, that's fine. If it includes courier contracts, it will be a disaster for couriers, as anyone who picks up a contract will become a valid target in hisec.

Click through on accepting would work.


For people that don't understand:

I get a giant freight container. I stick one unit of an illegal booster in it. I set up a courier contract with the collateral as a high value (say 1 billion, with Red Frog) Now I'm pretty much guaranteed to have the poor sap who accepted it defaulting on the contract. With next to no risk for me.

Heh. I'll be honest, I didn't think of courier contracts at all. I would be fine with having them prohibited from courier contracts to avoid that conflict.

In Minxy's blog 'Life in Low sec', there was a discussion on how to fix low-sec.

One of my suggestions was to have a 'black market'.

I came across this idea when I played a space game on my Macintosh in the 1990s. In this game, the Pirate outlaws had their own stations. You weren't allowed to dock there unless your security status was low enough. Once you did have a low enough security status, you were allowed to dock. Then, you had access to all kinds of illegal goodies such as pirate ships, security passes, etc. It was like a secret door opened up.

It doesn't make any logical sense to me that in high security Amarr, a theocratic Police state, you should be able to legally buy Blood raider Pirate faction ships in Emperor station and then safely undock and fly your ship around.

Wait a minute, aren't the Blood Raiders considered to be criminals and heretics? Wouldn't anyone who flies one of these ships in Amarrian high sec space get blown up immediately by the Amarrian Navy after undocking or at a gate? Isn't this a little like an Englishman who insists he wants to be able to fly the Messerschmidt he bought over the city of London in 1942? Or, maybe like a Galleon flying a jolly rogers flag sailing up the Thames river in 1600?

My suggestion was to remove illegal goods from high sec, and to move (duplicate) a few stations from Null sec into low-sec owned by NPC pirate corporations, like Blood Raiders, Guristas, etc., where pirate ships, towers, modules and so on were sold openly. If you want to fly a Blood raider battleship, well, you are going to have to go to the Blood Raider station in low sec Amamake to buy one. Why should that be a problem? Why would you want to fly a Pirate ship unless you wanted to be a pirate?

Illegal drugs would be sold in these stations, as well as contraband goods such as slaves, ectoplasm, etc. Now the low-sec pirates have a way to make more money, there are low-sec contraband trade hubs, and high-sec 'carebears' now have more of an incentive to come to low sec and/or break the law. Smuggling becomes a more viable profession.

There are already a few low-sec systems that are controlled by player pirates, why not just formalize that with an NPC pirate station?

The other suggestion I had was to have a 'black market' skill, which I understand once existed in the game but for some reason was removed.

The skill would work something like this, contraband items such as boosters (and I will include Pirate faction ships, pirate implants, and pirate modules as being 'contraband' here) wouldn't become visible to you in the high-sec marketplace until you trained up the Black Market skill.

Once you trained the skill however, these 'black market' illegal items would suddenly become visible to you on the market menu. I would suggest that the black market items be listed in red font on a black background, or with a skull next to them or something else to distinguish them as black market items. Maybe they could have their own separate pull down menu.

Training higher levels of the skill would allow you to access menu items with an increasing degree of illegality. So at level one of the black market skill, you could see the synth level booster listed but only at level five could you access the strong booster.

Note that using the Black market skill to see contraband would only be necessary in high sec. Illegal items would show clearly on the market menu without training the skill in low sec and null.

After all, it's not as though buying a gram of illegal drugs from behind the drug store in the real world is quite the same procedure as buying a bottle of legal Aspirins from inside the drug store, is it? There is a whole other world there, a different language to learn, circles of trust, a subculture, skills to learn, and so on, associated with black market activity. Aspirins and LSD are both drugs, and you can possibly find them both at the same address, but not at the same place nor using the same procedure. It's not like EVE, where the LSD would be sitting right next to the Aspirin, and the buyer only finds out at the cashier that LSD is illegal. Then once they leave the store, a Policeman scans their grocery bag from a distance, and it's an instant bust.

There might also be 'black market agents' which become accessible in each station but only after you train the black market skill. These might include not only Pirate agents, but also agents working for the opposite faction. You could call these 'grey agents', good men on the wrong side of the law.

Minmatar agents could be working in Amarr high sec space but secretly working for the underground railroad to free Minmatar slaves for example. Slaves are legal in Amarr high sec, but are contraband in other Empires such as Gallente space, so why shouldn't free(d) slaves (or escaped ones) be considered contraband in Amarr high sec? Amarr black market agents working in Minmatar high sec might want certain Minmatar to be re-captured/ kidnapped/ enslaved.