Contraband: Will It Ever Change?

[Croft]

I can barely imagine the code wizardy required to pull off something like that and get it to work. Trouble is it'd all be wasted effort unless smugglers could be convinced to forgo the established "good smugglers aren't seen" mentality and ride the lanes/gates. I think the coding would probably be the easiest part.

In the mean time I believe we can reach a reasonable balance by altering the smuggling routes between the buy and sell points, getting the smugglers seen would be the first step and cutting down the long flights between jumpholes would be an absolute god-send. What do you think Blodo, can the dev team get behind an idea like that?

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Jimmy The Rat | Croft's Feedback | The Rat Pack

[jammi]

Currently, optimal routes for Artifacts use gates and lanes from Cambridge all the way to Manhattan. For Cardamine, they use gates and lanes from Cortez onwards, having dodged a number of House systems by using the Barrier Pass.

Point is, if folks want to use the jump holes to avoid interaction, they are taking a colossal profit hit. Particularly if they want to use the holes to avoid TLAGSNET in Liberty.

If players want to do that, they're already penalizing themselves. There's nothing that devs can do to change that. It's a player mentality and players have to fix that themselves.

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The whole pricing of contraband has been discussed to death and far beyond the afterlife, just like everything else to do with smuggling, it's the proverbial dead horse.

What I'm interested in is whether or not smuggling is worth discussing or even worth while at all since every thread on the subject seems to simply sink to the bottom of the forum.
It's basically my last refuge since I don't find FL's combat all that interesting and to me the server seems to be slipping from fighting due to RP down to more or less fighting with a thin layer of RP to cover it.

More like simulated space trading and base building with a thin veneer of RP. I don't delude myself into thinking that endlessly hauling base supplies is somehow RP, even if I sometimes enjoy it.

It isn't often said here, but it's clear that the trading and PvP game mechanics have nearly nothing to do with RP: After all, the highest quality and most comprehensive RP is done on the forum.

If those distractions were done away with, though, we would find we have even less players than we currently do.

Credits and ship swag are basically a carrot on a stick, to convince players to RP.

[Croft]

Utterly offtopic rants aside.

Optimal routes are rarely used in my experience, due to two major factors. First is simply getting caught, no one wants to fly halfway across the sector to get blown up. The second is, it's easier to run Disco in a window and watch a film or a TV show between jumpholes. It doubles your flight time but ensures you get to your dropoff and your money.

That's why I'd like to shift the mindset of smuggling from credit farmer to a more fun, fast-talking, catch-me-if-you-can role. Something that can't be done if it's still viewed as an illegal trader who should never be seen. Sadly that kind of change will simply not happen if the easy option still exists.
Take jumptrading as an example, folks were told to stop doing it, which they did for a time but eventually human nature kicked in and the drive got nerfed in response. It's the same sort of deal with smuggling, if a role is not seen then it detracts from gameplay and the server suffers as a whole. In this case it's the police factions whose existence has been overwritten by the navy due soley to the lack of natural enemies, the ones the TLAG system is supposed to catch, smugglers.

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Jimmy The Rat | Croft's Feedback | The Rat Pack

[...]

Utterly offtopic rants aside.

Optimal routes are rarely used in my experience, due to two major factors. First is simply getting caught, no one wants to fly halfway across the sector to get blown up. The second is, it's easier to run Disco in a window and watch a film or a TV show between jumpholes. It doubles your flight time but ensures you get to your dropoff and your money.

That's why I'd like to shift the mindset of smuggling from credit farmer to a more fun, fast-talking, catch-me-if-you-can role. Something that can't be done if it's still viewed as an illegal trader who should never be seen. Sadly that kind of change will simply not happen if the easy option still exists.
Take jumptrading as an example, folks were told to stop doing it, which they did for a time but eventually human nature kicked in and the drive got nerfed in response. It's the same sort of deal with smuggling, if a role is not seen then it detracts from gameplay and the server suffers as a whole. In this case it's the police factions whose existence has been overwritten by the navy due soley to the lack of natural enemies, the ones the TLAG system is supposed to catch, smugglers.

I wasn't trying to be offtopic. You said that in-game PvP RP has become a thin veneer for pew pew against other players. I said trading was also a thin veneer (for credit farming) in lieu of RP. Considering your opinion on jumptrading and jumphole smuggling, we are in agreement.

Note: I'm not making a judgement on it (I trade too, obviously)... it's just an observation.

Sorry if I was being unclear or obtuse.

[jammi]

Utterly offtopic rants aside.

Optimal routes are rarely used in my experience, due to two major factors. First is simply getting caught, no one wants to fly halfway across the sector to get blown up. The second is, it's easier to run Disco in a window and watch a film or a TV show between jumpholes. It doubles your flight time but ensures you get to your dropoff and your money.

That's why I'd like to shift the mindset of smuggling from credit farmer to a more fun, fast-talking, catch-me-if-you-can role. Something that can't be done if it's still viewed as an illegal trader who should never be seen. Sadly that kind of change will simply not happen if the easy option still exists.
Take jumptrading as an example, folks were told to stop doing it, which they did for a time but eventually human nature kicked in and the drive got nerfed in response. It's the same sort of deal with smuggling, if a role is not seen then it detracts from gameplay and the server suffers as a whole. In this case it's the police factions whose existence has been overwritten by the navy due soley to the lack of natural enemies, the ones the TLAG system is supposed to catch, smugglers.

Yeah, I'm not sure what you expect to be done in that case. Routes are already balanced to only really be worthwhile if you use the lanes and gates, forcing you into potential interactions. If you want to stop people from being able to AFK cruise between jump holes, you'd need to like, delete jump holes or something. That's not a workable solution for obvious reasons.

So what do you actually suggest is done to fix this? I mean, you're holding a slightly contradictory stance in any case - these people only want money, so they go to extreme lengths to avoid interaction. But they don't care about money because they do so in a way that sabotages their profits so intensely that it doesn't even compare to sub-optimal regular trade runs.

So what's the fix? That kind of mentality simply cannot be addressed via game mechanics or dev work.

[Croft]

@...
I wouldn't say trading has little RP to cover its credit making since making money is the role of a trader, same with mining, there is very little wiggle room for creativity in that respect. Though the quality of RP is not the topic of the thread it was an explanation for my desire to change smuggling.

@jammi
My stance has always been for change. You need only read the replies to this thread to see how folks view smuggling, only a single post that doesn't mention price changes and I would wager you'd find the same if you looked through previous discussions on the topic, that is what I meant by credit focused.

As for how to get smugglers on the lanes, the jumpholes don't need deleting just changing so only small ships can use them freely. That would allow pirates to happily fly around without disruption, grant use to freighters as something other than stepping stones, make jumpdrives slightly more useful and actually give TLAGS a purpose.
In theory it would be a small handful of jumpholes that would recieve the changes, either ones leading into a House or those leading into a Capital system (I'd personally vote for JH's in the outer systems to prevent gate camping.)
This idea is simply to get smugglers seen, there is still the issue with the length of routes and an absolute tangle when it comes to smuggler v lawful meetings (stubborness on both sides is a major factor.)

As for mentality, that is something created out of circumstance (in this case the "don't be seen" rule) we tweak the circumstance and eventually the mindset will adapt, at least in theory.

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Jimmy The Rat | Croft's Feedback | The Rat Pack

[Hawk]

Why are we talking like smugglers avoiding interaction is a bad thing? That exactly what smugglers are supposed to do. The police are supposed to find ways to catch them in spite of this. When I was a faction leader, I disciplined people for using the lanes while smuggling. Its irresponsible.

[Laura C.]

Why are we talking like smugglers avoiding interaction is a bad thing? That exactly what smugglers are supposed to do. The police are supposed to find ways to catch them in spite of this. When I was a faction leader, I disciplined people for using the lanes while smuggling. Its irresponsible.

Because multiplayer server is focused on interaction?

Anyway, there is always the smuggling dilema which can never be solved - either be a good smuggler, flying in open space 20k from the plane, so very likely no one will ever catch me (maybe except selling point), what brings nothing to multiplayer environment and it´s not much different from simple powertrading. Or I will create interaction by giving the police chance to hunt me and catch me by at least partially using gates/lanes, but in this case I will be bad smuggler and get criminal record pretty fast.

Also, how is police supposed to catch smuggler without hard metagaming when he doesn´t use lanes and gates all the time? Should we sit for hours on jumpholes (which, by the way, many people argue that are unknown to us inRP) just for very low chance someone will jump in or what? What is, by the way, kind of problem on tagged police chars due to amount of metagaming showed ingame. How many times I was in New Berlin and smuggler who usually take lanes when no RFP is around suddenly started to fly all the way around through neighboring systems just to bypass me (and got caught when he again started to use lanes after I logged my untagged police indie). Not to mention that smugglers often use battleship scanners and thus I have no chance to see him before he will see me in open space.

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On a ragebreak. Or ragequit. Time will tell.

[nOmnomnOm]

Why are we talking like smugglers avoiding interaction is a bad thing? That exactly what smugglers are supposed to do. The police are supposed to find ways to catch them in spite of this. When I was a faction leader, I disciplined people for using the lanes while smuggling. Its irresponsible.

lame. I reward those that do it successfuly.