Negative consequences of moving best premium scrap selling points to Gallia

[Laura C.]

I'd suggest doing something like allowing smugglers a chance to talk their way out of trouble, tell your members (this goes for all lawful factions) to RP your scans as rough guides not 100% accurate magic eye beams that can detect exactly what is in every single cargo crate. Reward those who provide good fun and explain to the more difficult players why they're not getting off so easy.
If you do catch someone out in a bad lie, don't make their entire trip worthless by removing their entire cargo, only take a quarter or issue a fine but not both. After all you want these folks to come back time and again.

This is exactly what I meant when I talked about having hard times to find optimal balance between what makes sense inRP (or at least don´t look silly) and what is "smuggling friendly",

Unfoturtunately I would find very silly to tell smuggler as a cop "give me quarter (or half or basically anything other than all) of those slaves/artifacts/that cardamine and feel free to continue to finish the delivery". At this point we would be leaving RP environment completely and end in "we are playing computer game, lets be nice as players to each other". In such case, playing cop and chasing smugglers would no longer be fun for me because RP immersion would be completely gone. That´s over the line for me (and I believe other cop/lawful players too).

When comes to explanations and stories of smugglers to let them go, again, it´s not that simple. I´m sure everyone let someone go few times, be it because of heartouching stories or very smart ones. What is hard to set - what story should I believe? Thing is, if you play long enough, your character will several times see excuses like "I was forced" or "I did it just once, please let me go" or the most common "I didn´t know it is illegal, I will never trade it again, I promise", just to meet same ships with contraband the other day(s) again. How should such character believe anyone with this experience?

The more tolerant cop will become, the more the player will start to feel he is RPing a stupid cop (what isn´t role majority of people would enjoy), if will be enough for every smuggler to type some crappy story and cop will always believe it because "hey, the player tried and RPed, he will feel disappointed if I won´t believe it). Suddenly, you will start losing the fun from chases if you let go majority of smugglers because they just type something.

Btw, just for the record, I repeat that I let several smugglers go even despite Carsten is incorruptible strict cop. They just had to be smart and avoid making holes in their story. And another note - I smuggle too from time to time, because it can be great fun. But I´m the type of smuggler who play for fun, so I want to chase with cops, provoke them and give them chance to catch me, and this is minority when it comes to smuggler players. My experience unfortunately is that majority of smuggler players play for credits and would like to see only cops which are either corruptible or will believe almost every excuse. If you RP incorruptible cop with which you must be really smart with your excuse, very soon you will get labels of person which "is not willing to RP", "is obsessed with issuing fines", "is compensating personal issues and thus loves to bully others", "likes destroying other people RP" or "is just after easy blue message". Then you start to feel wrong, lose fun and reduce/stop playing cop, despite you don´t do fouls like hard metagaming (yes guys, I see many of you even when you fly out of lanes and gates, I just feel wrong to camp on the other side of the jumphole where I know you are heading), bullying, dirttalking, law bending and such.

Been there personally already and I´m not the only one...

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On a ragebreak. Or ragequit. Time will tell.