4.88.6 (4.88 Final) - Fall Update: Bretonia and Liberty Cleanup

[Shaggy]

I forgot to write about this in the original post, my apologies.

The "Baffin Highway" route which bypassed both Kusari and Bretonia House space by letting ships go directly from the Taus to Liberty (& associated borderworlds) was deemed harmful a long time ago by the development team, but a direct fix proved difficult. It is "bad" especially for KSP and BPA (but also House pirates) because the shortcut offers a way to navigate around/between those two Houses, allowing smugglers and even regular traders to avoid a lot of interaction. As a result, our solution moved the Cortez JH to Planet Baja to make that route potentially less desirable than the new route to Manchester (the JH of which is roughly where the Cortez point used to be) for a somewhat brief jaunt through Bretonia territory. This increases the chance for interaction with Bretonian factions if you choose that route, Crayter if you fly through Coronado, or Kusari factions if you go around the other way.

The problem is there is not a lot of smugglers those days and will be even less now. I'd expect development team to make smuggling more attractive, because currently it's all about the lwaful ore trading. Ore profits and smuggling not being good is the exact problems of less work for lawfuls in Kusari/Bretonia, not the Baffin "highway". Weird, but okay /shrug.

That is where you are wrong, there are alot of smugglers around and that has been proven with the latest Tau event which was Unlikely Friends. We found outself over 20 different smugglers within it self. The Baffin Highway was just a very fast and quick route for people to smuggler and with Barrier Gate station within 15k of both Cortez JH and Baffin JH it was almost impossible to stop smugglers without them docking on BGS. I like this update as it gives a chance for alot more RP for people within Coronado and also Bretonian Lawful and Kusari Lawful having to fly through those spaces now. Good job to the dev team on this one.

And? Your words only prove my words. Of course there were, because the event commodity was almost x2 times more profitable than regular smuggling (and were close to the ore profits, but you did not have to mine and was not depend on PoBs). People came to trade this event and will be gone after it. You know well, that most of those ships were FL Serenities, who normally doing something else (trading ore) and smuggling. Many people got Serenity just for this event, because you was able to buy off full ship price in one run.

You might be right here but that does not change the fact Coronado was updated for a better coronado giving it the Manchester route also and not only that placing the Coronado jh in the "inactive" JH in the further distance. Not only this but the smuggle problem could be fixed with buffs to the commodity and not just ONE system