Additional rare goods mechanic

The current rare goods mechanic of a limited tonnage of a rare good being available at each visit is fine as a starting point.
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It would be nice, to add some additional rare good mechanics for variety. That is to say some rare goods are available as per now but others have a different availability criteria.
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Here are two suggestions.
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Timed availability

Like in the real world, some goods, particularly those with an agricultural/biological basis are only available at "harvest time". These goods would only be available at certain times e.g. Xenonian Christmas brandy would only be available in December each year or "GarlicFace", a narcotic plant bulb, would only be available during months with an "R" in them. Naturally these goods would be extra valuable, both to buy and to sell. The time dependent nature of these good would add to the background fiction of the universe with GalNet reports of ships gathering in the relevant system for the "harvest".
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Availability tied to faction reputation

The rare goods would be offered in varying amounts linked to the CMDRs standing with the controlling faction. The friendlier you are to the faction, the greater your allocation. The promise of increased standing (and hence increased rare goods allocation) could be used as a mission reward. Of course, if you are not in good standing with the current controlling faction, you could always support a revolution to put in place a new controlling faction, who would be very generous to their supporters :).
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If you combined the two you could also get an interesting mechanic of deciding to "cultivate" a faction reputation so that come harvest time you can get your hands on the rare good. Alternatively you could try to topple the current faction so your favoured faction are in power come harvest time.
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What do people think?
 
Interesting ideas.
And if I magazine a load of GarlicFace in a secret storage at Freeport, and then sell it all in June, I'll of course earn an enormous load of money :D
 
These sound good to me. I've also thought about the availability being greater depending on reputation, or maybe you could get better quality product the more you trade in one (you're known, you aren't going to settle for the low grade stuff) - this could affect the sale price by 10-20%. My route for trading rares is fairly static, it would be good if there was a reputation system for the goods themselves.
 
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.... My route for trading rarest is fairly static, it would be good if there was a reputation system for the goods themselves.

That's what got me thinking. My friend and i have a mice little route between two rare systems, netting about 250k per leg in a hauler for a 10k outlay and a potential 10k insurance cost. So we get a 10x return on our risk.
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To be fair, the risk is high, we have no weapons, only point defence turrets (strangely zero mass, a bug?). Since 1.05 we've started seeing more CMDRs, at one point the re were at least 5 other CMDRs in the instance (that was a head down, boost like mad for the no fire zone and keep your eyes on stalks!).
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But back on subject, I thought a little more "work" for our rare goods to prevent the endless cycling back and forth.
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Maybe even the "basic" (i.e. current random within limits setup) rares could slowly decline (i.e. the max upper limit offered slowly reduces) on each visit unless you keep your rep up by doing missions, either general ones or maybe specific ones aimed at rare traders e.g. "Bubba Garlicface want you to do him a favour. He's got a craving for Lavian chocolate, bring him a ton and he'll see your looked after...".
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You could even chain up the rare goods missions/ allocations.
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Do missions for the Lavian Quakers, to get a 5t allocation of Lavian chocolate.
Fly to Bubba Garlicface's pirate station, drop off a ton for free, to get your allocation of 10t of Garlicface, but you have to wait 24h before pickup.
Fly another 100 ly to maximise your Lavian Chocolate sales
Pick up some normal missions to work ypur way back to Bubba's station
Pick up your Garlicface
Smuggle across galaxy as it's illegal everywhere.
Etc.
 
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