Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
I think it's very good that the team are looking at balancing and that they are aiming to do smaller incremental changes. But I would like to ask that you look at other areas rather than the ones that always get changed? Mining and Combat have had by far the most attention since release anyway. I would be very grateful if as part of this you could do a balance pass on Smuggling.
It has had only one change to it since the release of the game to my knowledge, and that was when Silent Running was changed to give it virtually no drawbacks at all because of the amount of time it takes to heat up your ship. One of the things you talk about wanting to get right is risk vs reward, I guess in this case it's not far off the mark because there is virtually no risk and so therefore there is virtually no reward, sometimes it's hard enough just to find somewhere you can make a profit.
I decided to do some back of a Buckyball Beermat maths and conduct and small sample survey (market images expand on clicking). I found a random station selling Imperial Slaves, Battle Weapons and Personal Weapons and brought 1 of each, and each would have got me a profit if I then sold it at the galactic average.
I then visited a bunch of random stations, trying to pick a mix of economies, and as you will see the figures for each place were all over the show and didn't make much sense. Just focusing on Personal Weapons, I brought at 3,513 which, according to eddb (which I do realise doesn't cover every station, but it's the easiest way to get figures for research) is only 83 credits above the lowest buy price possible, and would have got me ~1,180 profit at Galactic Average (in game and eddb figures pretty close to each other).
The first station I would have made a loss of 500 as they were buying at 3,006, which is over 500 credits less that the lowest buy price of any station!
For selling to stations, the galactic average means nothing. If I could make 1,180 profit selling at the Galactic Average, which we already know is ~4,700, and then according to Savinykh Dock I could make ~1,440 profit if I had brought at the galactic average, that means the sell price would be ~6,140. But actually it's 4,601, which is just over 1k profit, and less than the Galactic Average.
Narcotics are a similar story, even trying to sell them to tourism stations (which I thought should do a good trade in illegal narcotics ) only got me 351 profit. Again at one point I was offered a price ~1,200 lower than the lowest sell price.
Because you can't search black markets using the Commodities Market, or the filter in the Galaxy Map, you have no way of being able to work out what the prices are going to be before you get to a station. From my small sample set, state didn't seem to make a difference and demand didn't make the difference I would expect it to either. There is almost no reward in Smuggling!
But there's no risk either. I visited 6 stations for the first set and 3 stations for the Narcotics. When I dropped into each station instance, I didn't use silent running, I didn't even think about the fact I was carrying illicit cargo. I just flew towards the station, requested docking clearance, and casually flew into the station in my Cobra Mk.III. All were Medium or High security systems.
We know from when the Krait Mk.II was released that Sandro said there was a 'conspicuous' figure for the likelihood of being scanned by security for each ship, and the Krait Mk.II had the lowest figure. You can also engineer your ships for cold running. My smuggling Krait runs at 12% heat generation on full throttle, but I'm not really sure what the point of all that work was.
A bigger issue perhaps is the need to actually make some proper changes to the way security respond in different security systems, like the revamped C&P system was supposed to do. Make it more likely to be scanned in high security systems. Make Silent Running work more like it used to, so you actually had to do some heat management, rather than just flicking it on and sauntering towards the station with no risk of cooking your ship. Give powering off modules, or cold engineering some purpose.
Introduce some risk.
And as for the rewards, well they clearly need to be so much higher. At the moment there's no reason at all to do smuggling other than some rp. The return is far less than you can make from normal trading and given how much harder it is to find a reliable profit, it's more frustrating than anything else. If a commodity is illegal in a system, then the buyers should be paying at least the top end of the market for it (if not more), as they will be selling it on to their buyers at a far higher price due to the difficulty sourcing it.
There have been plenty of threads over the years about this, but I don't remember smuggling having been mentioned outside of that brief bit by Sandro. However this thread is more about hoping to make a start to the changes, by at least getting some decent reward for taking part. Smuggling is even the first of the core gameplay elements that is mentioned on the website
No they can't
Thanks for reading, and here's to hoping that something can and will be done.
Some bonus viewing, this was the video I always used to show to people around the start of Elite to get them excited by it.
Source: https://youtu.be/KbaLJTGHkj8?t=331
It has had only one change to it since the release of the game to my knowledge, and that was when Silent Running was changed to give it virtually no drawbacks at all because of the amount of time it takes to heat up your ship. One of the things you talk about wanting to get right is risk vs reward, I guess in this case it's not far off the mark because there is virtually no risk and so therefore there is virtually no reward, sometimes it's hard enough just to find somewhere you can make a profit.
I decided to do some back of a Buckyball Beermat maths and conduct and small sample survey (market images expand on clicking). I found a random station selling Imperial Slaves, Battle Weapons and Personal Weapons and brought 1 of each, and each would have got me a profit if I then sold it at the galactic average.
I then visited a bunch of random stations, trying to pick a mix of economies, and as you will see the figures for each place were all over the show and didn't make much sense. Just focusing on Personal Weapons, I brought at 3,513 which, according to eddb (which I do realise doesn't cover every station, but it's the easiest way to get figures for research) is only 83 credits above the lowest buy price possible, and would have got me ~1,180 profit at Galactic Average (in game and eddb figures pretty close to each other).
The first station I would have made a loss of 500 as they were buying at 3,006, which is over 500 credits less that the lowest buy price of any station!
For selling to stations, the galactic average means nothing. If I could make 1,180 profit selling at the Galactic Average, which we already know is ~4,700, and then according to Savinykh Dock I could make ~1,440 profit if I had brought at the galactic average, that means the sell price would be ~6,140. But actually it's 4,601, which is just over 1k profit, and less than the Galactic Average.
Narcotics are a similar story, even trying to sell them to tourism stations (which I thought should do a good trade in illegal narcotics ) only got me 351 profit. Again at one point I was offered a price ~1,200 lower than the lowest sell price.
Because you can't search black markets using the Commodities Market, or the filter in the Galaxy Map, you have no way of being able to work out what the prices are going to be before you get to a station. From my small sample set, state didn't seem to make a difference and demand didn't make the difference I would expect it to either. There is almost no reward in Smuggling!
But there's no risk either. I visited 6 stations for the first set and 3 stations for the Narcotics. When I dropped into each station instance, I didn't use silent running, I didn't even think about the fact I was carrying illicit cargo. I just flew towards the station, requested docking clearance, and casually flew into the station in my Cobra Mk.III. All were Medium or High security systems.
We know from when the Krait Mk.II was released that Sandro said there was a 'conspicuous' figure for the likelihood of being scanned by security for each ship, and the Krait Mk.II had the lowest figure. You can also engineer your ships for cold running. My smuggling Krait runs at 12% heat generation on full throttle, but I'm not really sure what the point of all that work was.
A bigger issue perhaps is the need to actually make some proper changes to the way security respond in different security systems, like the revamped C&P system was supposed to do. Make it more likely to be scanned in high security systems. Make Silent Running work more like it used to, so you actually had to do some heat management, rather than just flicking it on and sauntering towards the station with no risk of cooking your ship. Give powering off modules, or cold engineering some purpose.
Introduce some risk.
And as for the rewards, well they clearly need to be so much higher. At the moment there's no reason at all to do smuggling other than some rp. The return is far less than you can make from normal trading and given how much harder it is to find a reliable profit, it's more frustrating than anything else. If a commodity is illegal in a system, then the buyers should be paying at least the top end of the market for it (if not more), as they will be selling it on to their buyers at a far higher price due to the difficulty sourcing it.
There have been plenty of threads over the years about this, but I don't remember smuggling having been mentioned outside of that brief bit by Sandro. However this thread is more about hoping to make a start to the changes, by at least getting some decent reward for taking part. Smuggling is even the first of the core gameplay elements that is mentioned on the website
No they can't
Thanks for reading, and here's to hoping that something can and will be done.
Some bonus viewing, this was the video I always used to show to people around the start of Elite to get them excited by it.