please fix smuggling / contrabandon a

[sswam]

Contraband is not the same as stolen goods.

1. Stolen goods sell for a MUCH LOWER price on the black market, compared to selling them on the regular market.
2. Contraband goods SHOULD sell for a MUCH HIGHER price on the black market, compared to selling them on the regular market (at a station where they are is legal).
3. Stolen / salvaged contraband should fetch the same price as normal contraband - keep it simple.

I know this is what you intended, Frontier, please fix it soon, so that point to point smuggling makes profits rather than losses!

e.g. Narcotics and slaves should sell for a MUCH HIGHER price in a federation democracy black market, compared to an Anarchy commodities market (assuming there is demand).

 

[JimSpitfire]

Yup, we had a big thread pre release on the bad state of smuggling right now including the points you make as well as some others.

I don't think we ever got an official response so we are at the point of just hoping smuggling gets some much needed attention soon.

 

[Ben Ryder]

A fix is needed to make smuggling rewarding as the risk is too much to make it worthwhile

 

[Rearden]

Oh look, I know these faces from the "fix smuggling" threads

Yeah... we have no idea when they'll look at it. This topic comes up once or twice a week but we never get any staff comments on them so we have no clue what the future holds.

 

[Phier]

Smuggling is the one thing I'm really disappointed in. All risk, no reward (same for piracy).

 

[Rearden]

Smuggling is the one thing I'm really disappointed in. All risk, no reward (same for piracy).

IMO everything is relatively broken when it comes to risk / reward. Just look at trading to see what risk free profits one can make (not counting station walls as risk here).

 

[Iskariot]

A fix is needed to make smuggling rewarding as the risk is too much to make it worthwhile

I sure hope they will give it some love, but I see no risk in smuggling at all to be honest.
I have been doing it since the first day I started playing and have never been caught. Not once.

- Line up with the station entrance 7 km away.
- Ask docking permission.
- Full energy to engines and press boost twice.
- Activate cold running.
- If someone starts scanning (never happened to me) use chaff to disrupt the process.

Never enter a USS when carrying illegal good. You might end up near a few cops with no change of getting away in time. In this case chaff is your friend.
If you get interdicted... chaff is your friend.

 

[Zenicetus]

Just adding another voice here in hopes that FD will do something soon to make smuggling more attractive. Especially since the tweaks mentioned by the OP would be so easy to do; just bump a few parameters in the code.

For a game that feels like a Han Solo simulator in every other respect, it's disappointing that we can't role-play that guy and make a decent living at it.

 

[EtherDragon]

Currently smuggling is limited to Bulletin Board Missions, really. You occasionally get missions to find and bring in illegal goods - that is pretty much the sum total of "smuggling" as it were.

The main reason that Black Market prices are so low is to act as a deterrent to PvP piracy. If you raise the price on stolen goods, you raise the ease of profitability for pirates. So keep in mind your suggestion doesn't exist in a bubble, it impacts the balance of the various career paths people take.

 

[Rearden]

Currently smuggling is limited to Bulletin Board Missions, really. You occasionally get missions to find and bring in illegal goods - that is pretty much the sum total of "smuggling" as it were.

The main reason that Black Market prices are so low is to act as a deterrent to PvP piracy. If you raise the price on stolen goods, you raise the ease of profitability for pirates. So keep in mind your suggestion doesn't exist in a bubble, it impacts the balance of the various career paths people take.

Stolen items are 50% off already when compared to illegal items (but not stolen) so yes, relative to what you are saying smuggles is kind of its own bubble.

Also, unrelated but with all that scooping pirates have to do even without the 50% discount they would have problems matching what a trader makes.

 

[Zenicetus]

The main reason that Black Market prices are so low is to act as a deterrent to PvP piracy. If you raise the price on stolen goods, you raise the ease of profitability for pirates. So keep in mind your suggestion doesn't exist in a bubble, it impacts the balance of the various career paths people take.

The link between smuggling and piracy is probably why the devs haven't done anything, I agree. They may just be keeping an eye on things to see what needs tweaking.

However, I feel that a boost to smuggling income could actually help encourage "legit" piracy. As long as all cargo is lost when a ship is killed, and even small amounts of looted cargo have decent value on the black market, then that places a strong incentive on not killing player ships. There will still be players who PK just for the hell of it, but legit piracy could use a boost in this game too, since the operating costs (including interdiction damage repair) are fairly high.

 

[Quineloe]

I sure hope they will give it some love, but I see no risk in smuggling at all to be honest.
I have been doing it since the first day I started playing and have never been caught. Not once.

- Line up with the station entrance 7 km away.
- Ask docking permission.
- Full energy to engines and press boost twice.
- Activate cold running.
- If someone starts scanning (never happened to me) use chaff to disrupt the process.

Never enter a USS when carrying illegal good. You might end up near a few cops with no change of getting away in time. In this case chaff is your friend.
If you get interdicted... chaff is your friend.

Doesn't exactly help the problem that carrying legal goods is almost always more profitable than smuggling illegal goods.

The best thing you can do so far is just find an outpost with a black market and sell stolen goods there. I am combining that with bounty hunting at an anarchy system so I don't get scanned by police all the time.

 

[Iskariot]

Doesn't exactly help the problem that carrying legal goods is almost always more profitable than smuggling illegal goods.

I was not addressing that. Ben Rider thought smuggling is risky, but it really is not. It is virtually risk free if you know what to do. Just wanted to help him out.

It is indeed not of much use to smuggle low or medium profit goods for someone who is a medium or high volume trader.
Selling stolen food cartridges to the black market is not a smart way to spend your time and energy. But there are some commodities that provide a nice bonus when sold on the black market. I am currently specializing in bounty hunting. When I liberate eight tonnes of gold or battle weapons from a criminal I consider it a welcome bonus and scooping that loot is time well spend.

 

[Quineloe]

I was not addressing that. Ben Rider thought smuggling is risky, but it really is not. It is virtually risk free if you know what to do. Just wanted to help him out.

It is indeed not of much use to smuggle low or medium profit goods for someone who is a medium or high volume trader.
Selling stolen food cartridges to the black market is not a smart way to spend your time and energy. But there are some commodities that provide a nice bonus when sold on the black market. I am currently specializing in bounty hunting. When I liberate eight tonnes of gold or battle weapons from a criminal I consider it a welcome bonus and scooping that loot is time well spend.

Let's get one thing straight: Stolen and illegal are two completely different things.

Stolen cargo is always half price, but since you didn't pay for it, that is half the value as pure profit. That's why I'm scooping up everything that is worth more than 1k per ton (after halving the price), when bounty hunting. Best I did so far was 117k with one full 32t hold on top of the bounties. As do you. They just have two disadvantages
- it is rather time consuming to obtain and scoop up large quantities
- you can't just click them into your hold like at the commodities market

But we are talking about Illegal goods, not stolen ones.
Illegal goods were purchased legit at a port where they are not illegal. They are paid for at full price. Then they are smuggled to a black market where these goods are illegal.
Here is the issue that even very high price goods, such as Tobacco I think, has a very bad profit margin compared to just selling Gold, Auto-Fabricators or Resonating separators. FE2 had a solution here, illegal goods sold on the black market flat out had double prices. I don't understand why ED does not have anything like that, the black market simply is a second commodities board.

All they have in common is that if you get scanned, you get rekt, and you can only sell them at a black market.