Negative consequences of moving best premium scrap selling points to Gallia

[Laura C.]

Hi everybody, I would like to open discussion about topic in title and mainly about moving best premium scrap selling points back to Omicrons. I will speak here about RFP experience, but I would like to know experience of others and also their opinions about mentioned return of selling points back to Omicrons, because it both involves many factions (Rheinland and maybe partially also Kusari lawfuls, Junkers, GMG, Outcasts, Corsairs) and their indies. Maybe if we will share same view, it will be input for devs/admins to execute this change.

So, why I want best selling points back to Omicrons? It turned out that this change has very negative impact on smuggling in Rheinland. Before, we had lot of it, mainly consisting of indie junkers and freelancers, which were trading premium scrap mainly to Omicron Alpha (rarely also to Gamma), and on the way back to Liberty they smuggled cardamine (or artifacts in case of Gamma). This was one of the main activity sources for RFP, but other lawfuls had benefit from it too, as well as GMG patrols in Sigmas (and I would say also Kusari lawfuls, because of people didn´t want to go through Rheinland for this or that reason, they had to travel through their systems).

After two best selling points were moved to Gallia, this almost completely stopped. For example in October (before server crash), I spent total of around 10 hours logged during like three or four days, and there appeared ONE smuggler for whole time. And other members of RFP have quite similar experience. I even went to closely monitor lane traffic on untagged char to see if people just don´t avoid the place when they see RFP tagged ship there, and result after lot of hours was that currently you are lucky if you meet one smuggler per hour, usually it takes even more time to see one.

This was not so obvious for some time because we had lot of smugglers with sorted artifacts from cargo buff event, which admins overlooked and let continue for much longer time than planned. But after its end, consequences of the change appeared in full effect and have negative impact on lawful factions.

I don´t know what was reason to move those selling points to Gallia, but I suspect to bring more life there. If this was the case, it didn´t work (none of any Gallic systems is in top 20 popular systems anyway, according to server stats, and generally you barely see anyone playing there) and only noticeable effect is making Rheinland even more dead (also GMG paramilitary is negatively affected I would say). I write even more because when you combine this with lack of full scale war which was discussed several times in other threads, result is that Rheinland playerbase is shrinking because - to quote some of them - "there is nothing to do".

Anyway, here is my proposal and arguments, let the discussion and poll voting begin.

Addition: Just for information, current prices and selling points of premium scrap (according to mining guide):
$14,000 at Maintenon Shipyard, Orleanais.
$11,000 at Chalons-et-Champagne Station, Champagne.
$9,999 at Tripoli Shipyard, Omicron Gamma.
$9,000 at Yokohama Shipyard, New Tokyo.
$9,000 at Fujisawa Mining Facility, Okinawa.

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On a ragebreak. Or ragequit. Time will tell.