The Smuggling discussion thread

You lose rep if you are caught and that will eventually turn them hostile to you. Plus the more you mess up for a particular faction the less frequently the missions will show. Also the balance of non mission based smuggling of anything other than slaves has an awful payout, at least in 1.3.

Ouch, forgot about reputation. Ah well, guess I'm off to the Empire. :D
 
I've outfitted myself a Courier and I'm enjoying random-walking around following these missions - with an ADS and DSS to help me pass the light years.

After a while away, there's so much more money to be made these days.
 
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Just got back from the pub, has this been added now? long range missions weren't in as of yesterday... haven't seen any patch notes.
 
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Ben,

In one of your screenshot showing your cargo, I see you have a bunch of utopian dissidents. What do you do with them? Drop them in space? :)

They are corrupt politicians, smugglers, slavers and other naughty chaps who were foolish enough to get caught. I take them to Polevnic where the are legally processed.

One rule of smuggling - dont get caught and have a reputation as fine upstanding peer of the community (it helps gets you past security)
 
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Thx for the heads up Ben. It's good to see some more diversity and reward coming into the way missions work.

And thx - you're a regular contributor to these forums and always adding something, i think, positive or fun.
On occasion i can be more, somewhat, obstreperous...
 
They are corrupt politicians, smugglers, slavers and other naughty chaps who were foolish enough to get caught. I take them to Polevnic where the are legally processed.

One rule of smuggling - dont get caught and have a reputation as fine upstanding peer of the community (it helps gets you past security)

That's funny! +1 Rep!
 
Do Smuggling missions need a nerf?

I know im going to get beat up for this one but...

I remember back in the day if you wanted to make 1+ million delivering something you had to be a seasoned vet that put in 100's of hours and worked their way up to a Conda or T9. Delivering 400-500+ cargo in a trade route you had to develop. Well apparently not anymore...

Yesterday i decided to pick up a few smuggling missions. I got two right of the bat that were 650k each going to the same destination about 70ly away. When i got there I received another one for 850k. Then I flew back to the original destination and got one for 1.5m. This was all in the span of about 20mins. So thats about 10 million/hr using a Viper. I cant even make that in my Anaconda! Edit: (averaging closer to 25 mill/hr now and getting individual missions worth around 7 mill)

Ok Vultures descend on me XD

Edit--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just wanted to reply to everyone that keeps saying its fine and not broken:

I doubt anyone will argue that having a larger variety of missions and longer/more dangerous routes for a higher pay out is bad. The only real question here was, are the missions paying way too much? And the answer is yes. Especially when compared to any other activity you can do. I remember a game up until a week ago that took effort to earn credits.

The real problem is that most people wont have an issue with making money faster (and why i said at the beginning of the post "i know im going to get beat up for this one"). So the question is when is it too much? I bet if it was double of what it is so make 70mill in 2hrs people would still say oh "Smuggling's fine". How about if i could make 140million in 2hrs is that then too much? Its only a factor of 4 increase, so nobody should have an issue with that, just like they dont have an issue with the 10 fold increase from v1.3 to v1.4

ED is still dangerous and maybe more so and i like that, but i dont like the "easy" button thats been added. Hope they come out with multi billion dollar ships soon because i dont know what to do with all this money XD ... I'm sure FD will realize that in games like EVE you cant make enough in 1 day to buy the best ship in the game for a reason. I hope they pull the reigns back on this fairly quick before it ruins the game.

Edit------------------------------------------------------------------------------- bellow is the first reply to the post above (no its not broken at all..)


Originally posted by Skyrun
Just made 49 Mio in less than 3 hours.
Most mission I took were dealer or lower rank required.
I had really fun and e.g. got fined while trying to get into the hangar on an outpost.
I think a nerf is needed but please not too big so it is still nice earning compared to stupid bulk trading.
 
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I had read somewhere else that you are more likely to be scanned now and not being able to evade it by getting full speed into the station. When that happens, you apparently lose reputation with whatever faction gave you the mission. However, I got 2 long range missions yesterday to deliver narcotics about 87Ly away. They were both for the same system and same station. I netted over 2.4M Cr for about 30 minutes of travel. I was not scanned. That's much better than my regular trading runs where I would make 5 or 6 stops in various systems and would net about 2M Cr in about one hour, using etn.io .
 
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I know im going to get beat up for this one but...

I remember back in the day if you wanted to make 1+ million delivering something you had to be a seasoned vet that put in 100's of hours and worked their way up to a Conda or T9. Delivering 400-500+ cargo in a trade route you had to develop. Well apparently not anymore...

Yesterday i decided to pick up a few smuggling missions. I got two right of the bat that were 650k each going to the same destination about 70ly away. When i got there I received another one for 850k. Then I flew back to the original destination and got one for 1.5m. This was all in the span of about 20mins. So thats about 10 million/hr using a Viper. I cant even make that in my Anaconda!

Ok Vultures descend on me XD

Then don't take them. For a year smugglers and players that did missions got the shaft while traders got a broken market that didn't react to them flogging non sensical routes that never reacted and demand wouldn't dwindle. If you want to grind, it should be rewarding enough for you that you figure out your own way to do it.
 
They just need a serious counterbalancing risk IMO.

This.

Smuggling should have always been more profitable than trading. that's the only reason why smuggling exists at all.

But the danger of smuggling needs serious buffs. If caught smuggling you should become wanted. And the station should never let you dock.
 
I don't see a problem with it. For one thing, it allows people to do something else than chain-trading to earn money, which is a good thing. If I can make money with soemthing else than carrying my anaconda in a 2 jump route that never changes I'm all for it. I actually like smuggling but quit because iof the low payouts.

Smuggling should have always been more profitable than trading. that's the only reason why smuggling exists at all.

TBH smuggling never was that profitable, hence why it was a fringe occupation. the main downside to smuggling is that you are kept to low scale ops, you can't really have a smuggling equivalent of Fedex/UPS...
 
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You should see the fine you get if you get caught mate! Out of interest, what rank are you, as the more juicy smuggling missions are locked to higher levels.
 
Smuggling must be super profitable, but at the same time it must be either super hard to accomplish, or the associated risk must way outbalance the potential profit if you aren't at least semi competent at it.
At the moment, there is virtually no risk involved in smuggling, barely any skill needed, and getting caught doesn't bear any consequences because of the utterly toothless justice system.
 
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a return(?) to smuggling...

I've been playing since beta. I've smuggled a couple times over that time back when I had a Cobra... since then its been a mix of trade,bounty hunting and exploration for me. Smuggling just didn't percolate to the top of my to-do's. I'm quite a stickler with faction/rep and mainly avoided smuggling as I just didn't want to muck up rep, I didn't want to harm my preferred faction by making a stupid mistake. Overcautious I guess. Maybe I need to behave more like he who my CMDR is named for.. haha

Well.. yesterday I decided to give smuggling another go.

Yes, I had a blast. Profits were certainly very good... which makes sense due to the risk. I also thought it hilarious seeing my large Clipper zip through the mailslot in silent running mode to plop down on a pad. I kept thinking "shhhhh! be vewy vewy qwuiet, I'm smuggwin", while imagining myself riding an elephant.. all be it, a damn fast elephant.

I didn't plan to change out the Clipper for quite a long time... but I'm now eyeing a Python. Just seems more suited for smuggling. Medium pads/outposts. Smuggling. Yes. Anyway, for now.. the Clipper do perfectly well.

Oh, did I say smuggling? I mean to say I deal in fine handwoven Imperial carpets, woven from the most luxurious nosehairs plucked from the Achenarian Yak-beast. I also am a purveyor of holiday timeshares, located in such exquisite locales as the sandy shores of the sea of tranquility, or beach front property on titan where you can soak your (space suited) feet in a sea of hydrocarbons. No smoking please. Taxes and fees extra. Results may vary.
 
Smuggling gives ships like the Adder and Hauler a role. You're being scanned/interdicted a lot now, so much that I'm going to move to the empire today. Cant risk the reputation hit.
 
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