The Smuggling discussion thread

[Ben Ryder]

You're just being silly. Of course we know that ALL missions are timed, whether smuggling, charity or whatever. But that doesn't change the validity of what we're saying - that certain missions can result in a per-hour payout. Nobody wants to hear stories of "how I made 30M" without also hearing how long it took the person to earn it.

Originally Posted by Ben Ryder
These "an hour" folk don't take in to account the missions are timed so once you take it you are locked in to doing it. Fail or abandon a few and you wont see many more.



You're just being silly. Of course we know that ALL missions are timed, whether smuggling, charity or whatever. But that doesn't change the validity of what we're saying - that certain missions can result in a per-hour payout. Nobody wants to hear stories of "how I made 30M" without also hearing how long it took the person to earn it.

NO you're silly

You miss my point. My point is that you are locked in to the activity and there are repercussion for non completion.

For intance you can bounty hunt at a resource extraction and log off any time you like and come back to it days later.

The same for A to B trading.

Both without any penalty.

However, with the missions failure or simply abandoning them comes with penalties (loss of rep, less missions and so on) and an over simplistic X per hour does not compare. Further, the missions must be stacked to make big credits and as they are all time sensitive, you contract the amount of time you have to complete them in.

Simple enough?

 

[goemon]

Pre:
50 million per week undermining after a difficult slog reaching level 5 in the first place.
20 million per hour bounty hunting in HiRes with PP bonus and switching modes till you get a good spawn
Post:
20 - 30 million per hour after a difficult slog to get allied with a major and a minor faction for switching modes to get big bounty smuggling missions.

fixed it!

 

[Uncertain]

These "an hour" folk don't take in to account the missions are timed so once you take it you are locked in to doing it. Fail or abandon a few and you wont see many more.

I can't quite grasp this problem. I'm not sure that the timer has a great deal of impact on the situation, although I tend to play many hours per session, so maybe it's a problem I have no frame of reference for.

I use the "per hour" thing as a way to compare profits, because of course you can't really decide whether a billion-credit profit is worthwhile without knowing how much time it takes to make that billion. A full hold of smuggling missions could be taking as long as 3 hours to collect and complete on average, depending on more factors per player than I can think up, but the cr/hr is meant to indicate how much you might get at best per unit of time spent; you don't necessarily have to spend any particular length of time at it to make it useful.

The shortest mission timer I've seen thus far has been ~1.5 hours, so I might prioritise that one, but more often they're so forgiving that I can forget about them and just go about it at my own pace. Having 45 minutes to land at a place and click a button, especially when you're being chased there, does not seem very tight (assuming we spend 45 minutes waiting on more missions before departing).

Additionally, I've been caught smuggling the mission cargo probably 10ish times, and have had to abandon one that I misread. They don't seem to mind in the least, and I've ended up allied with 2/3 of the issuing factions and friendly with the rest in the process. I expect outright losing the cargo for 8 missions at once might set my standing with them back to square one, which seems to mean that they'd go back to giving me slightly fewer millions of credits.

Do tell me if I'm wrong, I feel like I'm misunderstanding the points made here.

Edit: I also want to re-mention the huge trader ships coming in 1.5. I expect 1.5 profits to dwarf the pre-1.4 profits in yet another way, so this all might be small potatoes.

 

[Wyrm]

Jeez Commander you can get 17 mil with an Asp per hour????? If that aint uber I dont know what is ...

I can make same 17 millions/h in HES or CNB with my Vulture. Even more in my FDL. And not been so stressful about that farming.
Yet ppl somehow complain only about smuggling

 

[Grenian]

Another issue to take into account is this 30+ second to go between systems lately. I almost fall asleep before I hit the next system.

 

[Wyrm]

You forgot the rank 2 bonus which is also given.

Is it? Last time i checked +100% bonus overridden initial rank-2 bonus.

 

[goemon]

I can't quite grasp this problem. I'm not sure that the timer has a great deal of impact on the situation, although I tend to play many hours per session, so maybe it's a problem I have no frame of reference for.

i think this is the main thing. i, at least, can only play many hours a session once in a while. so for me that's a weekend activity... and 50 mio in 3 hours meets my experience more, than 17 Mio/h. trading runs i can do in between, i have an hour here or there.

doing the sothis-longrange-smuggling run was a saturday's project, an great session, like going to the cinema...

i hope, i can do another session next weekend.

on sunday, due to family life and work i wasn't able to do it, because mission timer would have been run out, when i would have time to deliver. on the other hand collecting missions in the evening and than deliver would have taken to long...

 

[Daffan]

They can fix it by doing one simple thing imo. Prevent the ability to refresh the bulletin board to get only premium missions by logging in and out.

It would also fix the exploit of logging in and out and spamming charity missions to rank up.

Agreed, but goodluck them ever doing that.

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

You miss my point. My point is that you are locked in to the activity and there are repercussion for non completion.

Boo hoo? This goes with any mission you accept. The fact is there is very little risk for smuggling. I want it to be lucrative, but it should also have its risks. Having several hours to complete a 100ly journey is not a risk.

 

[Wyrm]

I think the 50 million weekly salary is too much too.
The incentive to partake in PowerPlay should lie in compelling gameplay, not in these ridiculous amounts of salary.
Can you imagine any leader paying his/her soldiers 50 million a week?
It is downright absurd.

Are wars fought by millionaires and billionaires in the future?

With several trillions population under their controlled/exploited systems? Not so absurd IMO

 

[Grenian]

Here's what I don't understand. People are complaining about this smuggling missions paying too much. When hasn't smuggling something illegal been worth the effort though? Here's a for instance, I can do assassination missions and get a 5k bounty for the kill and make like 500k on the mission right? These smuggling missions have me putting all this illegal cargo in my hold, at one point I had 10 tobacco left and got a 70k fine. So the moral of this story is you get a slap on the hand for murder but you better not be bootlegging cigarettes? Throughout history (in real life) smugglers have always weighed risk/reward and made a buck off it, but because not everyone wants to sit in a hazres site all day in a vulture it's suddenly OP? kay

 

[Uncertain]

i, at least, can only play many hours a session once in a while. so for me that's a weekend activity... and 50 mio in 3 hours meets my experience more, than 17 Mio/h. trading runs i can do in between, i have an hour here or there.

doing the sothis-longrange-smuggling run was a saturday's project, an great session, like going to the cinema...

on sunday, due to family life and work i wasn't able to do it, because mission timer would have been run out, when i would have time to deliver. on the other hand collecting missions in the evening and than deliver would have taken to long...

Ah, so you mean it's not possible to successfully do a whole run of these in a single sitting? I'd normally think of 50m in 3 hours as 16.5m/h so that it's comparable to other profits, but I wouldn't expect to actually finish the run in an hour.

I tend to take my time and derive my own cr/hr from how much I make, and would use someone else's claim of 20m/hr as a rough guide; I'd probably assume from that that I could make 12-15m/hr fairly reliably, over the course of a 2-3 hour run. If I didn't have time for a full cargo load with 8-10 stops, I'd probably take only a small handful of missions before setting out to shorten the timespan of the run, but would on average be making the same amount of money per minute spent.

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

Here's what I don't understand. People are complaining about this smuggling missions paying too much. When hasn't smuggling something illegal been worth the effort though? Here's a for instance, I can do assassination missions and get a 5k bounty for the kill and make like 500k on the mission right? These smuggling missions have me putting all this illegal cargo in my hold, at one point I had 10 tobacco left and got a 70k fine. So the moral of this story is you get a slap on the hand for murder but you better not be bootlegging cigarettes? Throughout history (in real life) smugglers have always weighed risk/reward and made a buck off it, but because not everyone wants to sit in a hazres site all day in a vulture it's suddenly OP? kay

Are you saying 70k FINE for smuggling is anything more than a slap on the hand? Especially when you're making 10x that?

 

[goemon]

Ah, so you mean it's not possible to successfully do a whole run of these in a single sitting? I'd normally think of 50m in 3 hours as 16.5m/h so that it's comparable to other profits, but I wouldn't expect to actually finish the run in an hour.

I tend to take my time and derive my own cr/hr from how much I make, and would use someone else's claim of 20m/hr as a rough guide; I'd probably assume from that that I could make 12-15m/hr fairly reliably, over the course of a 2-3 hour run.

yes, that's what i mean. that kind of large-scale smuggling needs a minimum of time available at a point. either you have those 3 hours, or you don't. you can't break it down in smaller pieces. if you have an hour in the morning, and an 2 hours in the night (10 hours later), you can't make it, because mission timers will have run out. i don't complain, but this makes it hard to compare with cr/h profits if you do A-B-A trading for exampel.

 

[Grenian]

Are you saying 70k FINE for smuggling is anything more than a slap on the hand? Especially when you're making 10x that?

Maybe you didn't understand. It's the perspective that you can get more fines in smuggling than you can for murder.

 

[Uncertain]

yes, that's what i mean. that kind of large-scale smuggling needs a minimum of time available at a point. either you have those 3 hours, or you don't. you can't break it down in smaller pieces. if you have an hour in the morning, and an 2 hours in the night (10 hours later), you can't make it, because mission timers will have run out. i don't complain, but this makes it hard to compare with cr/h profits if you do A-B-A trading for exampel.

Well, say you have 80 tons of cargo space, and with a full cargo hold and all the time in the world, you find yourself making 20 million credits per hour. But the next day you only have 20 minutes to play, so you decide to quickly snap up the first three smuggling missions that appear on the BB, using 24 tons of cargo space, offering you a total reward of 6 million credits and taking only 18 minutes to deliver. It's the same amount of money per unit of time spent playing, even though you only actually spend 20 minutes. So I think you should be able to break it down, unless I'm confused.

Hrm, I suppose 18 minutes for 3 deliveries sounds rather tight. Maybe it doesn't quite scale, but 12m-15m per hour might scale.

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

Maybe you didn't understand. It's the perspective that you can get more fines in smuggling than you can for murder.

Fines mean nothing.

 

[goemon]

Well, say you have 80 tons of cargo space, and with a full cargo hold and all the time in the world, you find yourself making 20 million credits per hour. But the next day you only have 20 minutes to play, so you decide to quickly snap up the first three smuggling missions that appear on the BB, using 24 tons of cargo space, offering you a total reward of 6 million credits and taking only 18 minutes. It's the same amount of money per unit of time spent playing, even though you only actually spend 20 minutes. So I think you should be able to break it down, unless I'm confused.

won't work, at least not with the sothis bottleneck. you need around 15 jumps to sothis/from sothis, that's alone 20 minutes jump time in the very best case, without docking and interdictions.

 

[Grenian]

Fines mean nothing.

I dunno, unless I missed something fines lower rep, get fined at all 10-15 stops or whatever and that's a bit of hate.

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

I dunno, unless I missed something fines lower rep, get fined at all 10-15 stops or whatever and that's a bit of hate.

And you don't have to pay them. It's not like you're wanted. Should you not pay them off they end up as a "Legacy" and you have to pay the fine + your insurance if you die. You don't die very often smuggling. If you lose rep at the destination it doesn't matter. Rep is also very easy to gain.