Information about upcoming Zoner changes

[Trogdor]

The logical question here is what are Zoners then? Because you just reinforced the same mentality you tried to remove a few years ago.

Give the Zoners something to do. Give them a reason to have those transports. Give them some sort of very valuable cargo that needs such a transport. Something that is bought for a LOT, say 10 000$ per unit and sold for twice as much. Give them a mining field. Give them something to do with these new goodies.

I've already brought this up a few times.

Don't we have enough mining and trading corporations? Wouldn't it be better for the Zoners to be more than that? I, too, would love to see the Zoners get some new cargo to haul - politically sensitive cargo. Pirates will want to steal it, police will want to confiscate or regulate it, and corporations will want to buy it.
My idea was to give the Zoners Cayman, or some new system, that had some kind of toxic swamp planet in it. Some chemical, either in the air or in the water or both, turned out to be valuable, and now the Zoners are harvesting it. Cryer wants it because it can be used to treat the effects of cardimine addiction. The Corsairs want to keep it out of the Outcasts' hands. Other groups want it because of its poisonous properties, or as engine cleaner, or whatever. It's a MacGuffin, a plot device to chase. For all intents and purposes the Zoners could be selling [Swag]. Make it lore that the other groups can't (or don't want to) pay what Cryer is willing to for it, and want this stuff badly enough to try and take it from the Zoners.
Various groups would want to raid these shipments for their cargo, and so defending the shipments and the system they come from would give Zoner escorts and caps something to do.

I mostly agreed with the nerf to the Zoner ID when it comes to trading... Not so much because 'it violated Zoner lore', because it really didn't. As much as the Zoners don't want to live under the rule of the existing houses, they need them. Rather, they need the stuff that is made in those houses. Otherwise, they would just tool off into dark space, never to be seen again. Instead, they build around the houses, expanding further outward one station at a time, always remaining within trading distance of the station that came before it.
However, this freedom made every other trading corporation irrelevant. And so in order to spread the playerbase out across the other trading factions, nerfs were necessary to make being a Zoner trader less appealing. I have squabbled over the details in the past, but on the whole, I agree that this balance decision was necessary.

But none of that has anything to do with the topic at hand. I don't think anyone is arguing that we should be nerfing Zoner caps because we want people to play different caps instead.

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