Me and the rest of the WMD crew managed to get a good afternoon and evening's worth of runs in before the event was disabled. Here's our feedback:
1. It's way too easy to make way too much money. The route is short, quick and lacks significant danger, for 15k profit per unit baseline. 20k per unit if you're shipping into Gallia, but then you're coming back empty.
2. It's much more profitable to run this than it is to interdict it. Along the way we picked up someone in BAF Command who all but told us that all the BPA players were logged into transports running the route instead of trying to stop us. A pirate could charge twenty million dollar fees per encounter and a 3.5k transport would still be making profit.
3. Legality needs work. If there's some way to flag the items as contraband for the NPC patrols, this would be good, in addition to boosting the NPC patrols along the route. In addition, the items need to be contraband on both the outbound and inbound legs - as-is, they're only contraband on the outbound runs which means that only 50% of encountered traffic for police is actually running contraband. Smugglers ought to be worried about running into Police, not waving at them. As-is, we didn't run into anyone because the police players and pirate players were in the same goddamn convoy with us
4. Routes need work. The optimal Bretonian point was not New London, rather the Luxury Liner Shetland, which was just a short cruise away from a jumphole into Tau-31. The Honshu secondary point at Wall Street Station is a good model - Farther away, but buys and sells for the same prices and can be used if you can't dock with the Kusari Police planet. For the Bretonian secondary, I'd suggest somewhere in Cambridge, or possibly Manchester, to match the Honshu node's positioning on the other side of Kusari relative to Bretonia. Likewise, the secondary points (Shetland & Wall Street) both bought and sold the goods on the same base, for the same price as the primary - there ought to be a price difference there favoring the house capitals (ie high-risk high-reward && less-risk less-reward), and the buy and sell points ought to be different bases (ideally in different systems) to add complexity to the route and activity to the rest of the house systems.
5. Profit. 15k per unit is nuts. Absolutely nuts. Consider that the optimal Cardamine route nets you 5k per-unit per-leg for about a 20m leg, while the previous Business/Refugees route (which most people thought was excessive) netted 7k and 9k per unit, respectively, with a 13m run. With 15k profit per unit either way, on ~10 minute legs, and with six hours to myself, I made a billion credits. One 5k'er running one full loop of this makes 150M in 20 minutes. Goodbye, economy, hello inflation. Might as well rename 'Credits' to 'Poker Chips'.
6. Concept. Everyone we talked to agrees - This is goddamn brilliant. Here we have three factions, all of which don't have a whole lot going on, involved in the same event, which is decidely unlawful. In addition, the style of the event means that everything that happens is inherently player-driven; like, this is Eve-style stuff right here. Cram a bunch of Spacemen into a room, give one of them a fat wad of cash, give another a knife, give a third a gun, and see what happens. Once you get the flaws ironed out, this is gonna be great.
Howard Williams - CEO, Williams-Mordhauser Distributing - "Just try and stop us"
Caroline Convair - General Secretary, Williams-Mordhauser Distributing - "Please excuse the CEO"