At the moment black markets only let you offload banned goods at the station. Black markets should also sell some or all of the goods that have been removed from market by the controlling power. If I'm at a military station with a Democracy Government. I should be able to grab a load of black market landmines. You're still encouraged to play the BGS and flip control to get reasonable prices but you wouldn't be completely locked out. Colonisation has created huge homogeneous regions of space where the main government is the same and many goods are restricted.
I liked the old way it worked in FE2/FFE for establishing "trust"
- black market contacts show up everywhere, though aren't always available
- about half of them are fakes
- you can tell which ones are fakes because they change their names regularly (after people get caught and mention it's a honeypot), whereas the real ones are more consistent
So if you know the area, you can find the real contacts easily enough. If you're new, you're going to have to either pay attention for a bit, or pick one and hope you get lucky.
- it would be weird for it to be the controlling faction, since black market trades normally hurt them
- there's no guarantee the system contains any Anarchy/Criminal factions (especially with colonisation where they're very vulnerable to being retreated)
- black market contacts show up everywhere, though aren't always available
- about half of them are fakes
- you can tell which ones are fakes because they change their names regularly (after people get caught and mention it's a honeypot), whereas the real ones are more consistent
So if you know the area, you can find the real contacts easily enough. If you're new, you're going to have to either pay attention for a bit, or pick one and hope you get lucky.
Reputation with who is the tricky bit.
- it would be weird for it to be the controlling faction, since black market trades normally hurt them
- there's no guarantee the system contains any Anarchy/Criminal factions (especially with colonisation where they're very vulnerable to being retreated)
Seems a bit odd that smuggling (which isn't even a bounty-level offence!) would require you to first commit a bunch of serious bounty-level offences. Those seem like the sort of things you'd do when the smuggling job went wrong.
No. Notoriety in this game means "the law" know about you. A competent criminal, let alone a smuggler, should strive to not be known. Also, "I need to murder some people so I can buy some shadey stuff from people that don't want attention brawn to them" is rather nonsensical.
A better option would be to have a propperly developed underworld where you can build your reputation. Though I will admit that I don't have enough of an idea in my head yet for how to do that in a way that would add to the game experience.
A fair point however consumers of black markets (BM) actually either face inferior quality (eg serious threat to health or faults to goods or services) or higher pricing (supply/demand due to degradation or crime), so if anyone in game was to buy them, there’s no true economic incentive, unless your happy to have equipment failing more often or being poisoned, from a game play perspective.
BMs are mostly run by of for organised crime gangs (OCG) so you finding illicit goods or pirating them and selling them on is actually just ‘fencing’.
OCGs use black markets to facilitate serious organised crime (SOC) which involves very nasty things indeed and are not sold on mass for profit, just to facilitate something else being laundered.
Law enforcement works predominantly in the detriment of proceeds of crime, hurting and dissuading an OCG from practice through significant loss of the commodity on mass that fuels those much larger concerns. Either by buying or seizing very large quantities of goods then just destroying it, in so much as cutting the pipeline of trade.
Much more could actually be done with black markets in game with the BGS, if FD actually put their minds to it, it’s a real missed opportunity.
BMs are mostly run by of for organised crime gangs (OCG) so you finding illicit goods or pirating them and selling them on is actually just ‘fencing’.
OCGs use black markets to facilitate serious organised crime (SOC) which involves very nasty things indeed and are not sold on mass for profit, just to facilitate something else being laundered.
Law enforcement works predominantly in the detriment of proceeds of crime, hurting and dissuading an OCG from practice through significant loss of the commodity on mass that fuels those much larger concerns. Either by buying or seizing very large quantities of goods then just destroying it, in so much as cutting the pipeline of trade.
Much more could actually be done with black markets in game with the BGS, if FD actually put their minds to it, it’s a real missed opportunity.
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Maybe an "infamy" stat that can be raised by gaining notoriety, only unlike notoriety, it doesn't decay. It wouldn't have authorities constantly hunting you, but would work as a kind of reputation used purely for criminal activities.
The problem is I can't really see these kind of changes happening outside of a major overhaul. I was just spitballing, but as well as being more immersive (you wouldn't lose your reputation in the underworld just because you've waited a while and paid off some bounties), it could also facilitate scaling rewards that would make criminal gameplay worthwhile doing in the first place. And while Fdev seem to be doing a feature overhaul a year, now is the time for people to express demand for it.
We get simple quality of life changes every now and then. I don't see any chance of us getting any major changes but I feel like adding a couple of items for sale at an elevated price might be a small enough task there's a chance it shows up some time.
Some complex system of reputation and access is unlikely.
Some complex system of reputation and access is unlikely.