See title.
2.1 mission update saw the decline of Robigo and the rise of Sothis/Ceos among others.
Changes to mission distribution and smuggling penalties/interdictions while smuggling have effectively killed smuggling. Simple. These changes have had the following negative effects:
- the rise of incredibly high profit hauling, which requires zero skill and consequently results in very large quantities of new players cheesing their way to the biggest ship possible within a short a time scale as possible and focusing little on flight development or ship progression. This has a number of more global secondary effects, which I won't detail here to avoid encouraging off-topic discussion or flame wars. If you want to discuss this point, let's discuss below.
- the death of skillful, involved and exciting high-profit hauling.
Pre-2.1, Robigo was notoriously high profit but with the caveats that a) you had an outpost only to start with, restricting you to a smaller vessel, and b) you had to work against risk for your profit.
There was once a small plethora of threads discussing smuggling tactics. How to best approach the station unscanned, how to avoid interdictions in transit, best ship loadouts, whether SR made a benefit to avoiding scans etc. While as much a part of the economy as Sothis is, there was a level of satisfaction knowing that the highest paying activity in the game was illegal smuggling, and it was in its own right a profession - there was a necessary skillset in flight technique and necessary consideration to your loadout, and would fundamentally develop yourself as a pilot in addition to the profit side.
And the best bit? It had risk, which with the above required skill meant that smuggling was fun. Exciting, sometimes genuinely pulse-raising fun. To any serious smugglers, don't tell me you never had a few sighs of relief touching down in your first station after hearing "scan detected" prior to making it through the mail slot.
Newer long range hauling is a disaster in terms of effectively huge amounts of free money, and on a gameplay level being boring as hell. You are being paid 70 million credits a run to practise using your FSD button. If you DO pick up smuggling missions, there is minimal incentive now to keep such a low profile, and is only a concern when docking - the in transit interdictions seem to have entirely disappeared (I actually seem to get interdicted LESS than normal when I have smuggling missions!)
On a technical level, to be completely honest, I can't provide the answers. But on a conceptual level I would recommend the following (discussion points, not absolutes):
-decrease the payout of standard long-range hauling missions
-increase the "bonus penalty" for being scanned while smuggling (I would be happy to see scan=fail again but we're supposed to be encouraging smuggling here)
-increase the proportion of available smuggling missions considerably compared to standard long-range hauling
-increase the base pay of smuggling
-increase the interdiction rate slightly again for mission runners with smuggling missions
...
2.1 mission update saw the decline of Robigo and the rise of Sothis/Ceos among others.
Changes to mission distribution and smuggling penalties/interdictions while smuggling have effectively killed smuggling. Simple. These changes have had the following negative effects:
- the rise of incredibly high profit hauling, which requires zero skill and consequently results in very large quantities of new players cheesing their way to the biggest ship possible within a short a time scale as possible and focusing little on flight development or ship progression. This has a number of more global secondary effects, which I won't detail here to avoid encouraging off-topic discussion or flame wars. If you want to discuss this point, let's discuss below.
- the death of skillful, involved and exciting high-profit hauling.
Pre-2.1, Robigo was notoriously high profit but with the caveats that a) you had an outpost only to start with, restricting you to a smaller vessel, and b) you had to work against risk for your profit.
There was once a small plethora of threads discussing smuggling tactics. How to best approach the station unscanned, how to avoid interdictions in transit, best ship loadouts, whether SR made a benefit to avoiding scans etc. While as much a part of the economy as Sothis is, there was a level of satisfaction knowing that the highest paying activity in the game was illegal smuggling, and it was in its own right a profession - there was a necessary skillset in flight technique and necessary consideration to your loadout, and would fundamentally develop yourself as a pilot in addition to the profit side.
And the best bit? It had risk, which with the above required skill meant that smuggling was fun. Exciting, sometimes genuinely pulse-raising fun. To any serious smugglers, don't tell me you never had a few sighs of relief touching down in your first station after hearing "scan detected" prior to making it through the mail slot.
Newer long range hauling is a disaster in terms of effectively huge amounts of free money, and on a gameplay level being boring as hell. You are being paid 70 million credits a run to practise using your FSD button. If you DO pick up smuggling missions, there is minimal incentive now to keep such a low profile, and is only a concern when docking - the in transit interdictions seem to have entirely disappeared (I actually seem to get interdicted LESS than normal when I have smuggling missions!)
On a technical level, to be completely honest, I can't provide the answers. But on a conceptual level I would recommend the following (discussion points, not absolutes):
-decrease the payout of standard long-range hauling missions
-increase the "bonus penalty" for being scanned while smuggling (I would be happy to see scan=fail again but we're supposed to be encouraging smuggling here)
-increase the proportion of available smuggling missions considerably compared to standard long-range hauling
-increase the base pay of smuggling
-increase the interdiction rate slightly again for mission runners with smuggling missions
...
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