More profit on transporting contraband

[Carlos_Benitez]

But since smuggling doesn't give official factions a huge advantage over independent characters, you can bet your sorry butt the admins won't pay any attention.

Need to agree here. Without a true smuggling faction, the admin/dev teams will do nothing to improve smuggling.
I used to smuggle. I even have 4 ships I used to smuggle with. I have not used them in like over 6 months. I log them on time to time just to keep them, but Smuggling is useless now. Why smuggle and risk it, when you can take a legal cargo and make the same with next to 0 risk. Sure there are some pirates, but they are to thin, and easy to avoid/get away from. The navy now will swarm a smuggler, sometimes to the point it is not fun, but with a great pay off worth it. Again same pay as legal cargo, so why bother.

Official factions come with tags, tags come with identifiability, and identifiability undermines any attempt to get around house space un-noticed. You think smugglers have problems being swarmed? Try smuggling with a Smuggler) tag, and see how far that gets you.
As it happens various official factions do care about smuggling. The Benitez is one of the wealthiest factions around, in cash terms, and this was collected not through OORP cash transfers with private power trader characters, but by a small amount of piracy, missions, but largely by exploitation of the artefact trade by smuggler associates of the familia. I'd like to think we're not the only criminal organisation that takes its RP role seriously enough to dominate contraband networks, though I could be wrong.

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