In the spirit of transparency and improving channels of communication between Dev's and players, I'd like to launch this blog and forum, similar to how Xoria, Skorak and others have done in the past.
Not all details are revealed, gotta leave some hype for patches, but general direction, my thoughts, conclusions and perspective on certain economy topics, and wacky ideas can and will appear here.

Since joining the Dev Team, my primary focus has been showing some love to our forsaken smuggling commodities. This includes bringing up profit rates to the current standard (hovering around 500 csu's), adding or removing sellpoints/purchase locations where appropriate with lore, and progressing these routes along their storied expansion into new markets.

The profit rates aren't fixed at the above rates as I try to apply a sliding scale based off distance, base ownership, and potential risk.
For a side note,

To date, I have worked on (though as my experience grows in these reworks, some slight retooling will be done at some point):

• Nox
  
• Gaian Wildlife
  
• Kemwer Munitions
  
• Artifacts
  
  

with several more coming this patch.

Cardamine is the ubiquitous symbol of smuggling in Freelancer many would say. Cardamine is grown exclusively on the Planet Malta by Outcasts and brought down in bulk by them and their allies or quasi lawfuls into House markets. Historically, Liberty has been its biggest focus, where strong connections to the local underground has given rise to dedicated facilities designed to handle the bulk drug, repackaging it from their large vapour tanks into smaller portions for resale into more "local" markets.
Because of this, there exists a "cloned" commodity selling from Buffalo Base (Rogues) in New York. Having two commodities with completely different routes and sellpoints but named the same thing on the front end is confusing to folks not familiar with this subsector of the economy and so the repackaged commodity has been renamed "Cardamine Cartridges" for clarity and its routes updated and expanded upon.
The bulk commodity as well has been updated and new selling locations added showing the Maltese' push into markets previously not taken advantage of very much such as Gallia.

Though not directly for profit, the three necessary repair materials for base maintenance and construction of special equipment Hull Segments, Reinforced Alloy, and Robotic Hardware drew my attention as well this go around. Over several years of system changes and base moves, some of these selling locations have redundancies and inconsistencies that needed addressing. (i.e. having 4 RA sellpoints in 1 system).
To address this and keeping an eye out overall for areas that have become virtually impossible to launch a player base due to how difficult it would be to supply, a bit of rebalance has been done, trying to consider all spectrums of reps and distance to commodity sellpoints. In spite of this, the other side of the coin was to try and make sure one single base didn't become the golden horde of repair materials and therefore lead to over clustering of POB's around it. This I'm sure is a controversial subject, as most of the community have very strong opinions on player bases in their current form on Disco, but the idea and motivation is to make supplying POB's less of a soul sucking experience and more approachable to players. (Also keep in mind if anything is overlooked, its not spite, hate, etc and can easily patched based on feedback)
The perceived over-deployment, over-clustering of bases is left as always to the governing players in their respective regions to be played out through House/region/sovereign laws.

This has become long winded enough for now, so until next time ta-ta.


If you have idea's, questions, concerns or whatnot by all means, post below or dm me