Smuggling Mechanic Revamp, FR5, Freighter Docks - A discombobulation and suggestion

[Karlotta]

I skimmed through the thread and while I agree with most of the things stated, there's one good reason why smuggling isn't and wasn't profitable for all these years, and it's the same with PvE missions - the main goal of smuggling is to not interact with anyone. You want to ideally get from point A to point B without meeting a single player, unload the 4.3k cardamine on your pirate train and quickly smuggle back without getting spotted. In theory it's nice to get viable smuggling routes, but in practice people'd fly offplane, use alternate routes or simply log off if it's too hot.

You might ask "the ore traders can do the same?", and the answer is yes, they can, but luckily they don't because they don't expect the pirates as much as a paranoid smuggler expects -anyone-. The ore powertrader has to only concern himself with pirates, who are in low count nowadays anyways, while the smuggler has to concern himself with almost anyone - even his rogue "friend" who'll betray him for the sheets and giggles.

Same with PvE missions - you make money by shooting NPC caps, and while it's fun, it directly discourages player interaction by making you fly 30k in the middle of nowhere where you won't be found or interact like if you hauled ore, and even if someone finds you, you will want to get out of that interaction ASAP because you're likely taking hull damage and aren't in a position to defend from a player.

The way you make police factions work is to get more pirates. The way you get more pirates is to get more traders to pirate. The way you get more traders to pirate is to make better connections between systems so there are actual choke points where you know something's gonna pass rather than there being 4+ entrances between any systems on the route to make bottlenecking impossible. Again, we go back to poor connection of systems relative to the amount of players we have.

I was going to say the same thing Antonio said, which I've already said many times.

If you want positive interaction feedbacks you must start with one thing: Making interactions happen in the concentrated places, by not spreading activity out. Not only smuggling, trading, mining, but also missions by making them available in one concentrated place (like Minor, Gamma, and Alpha used to be).

Yes, the start in doing that, which is the easiest and fastest without any extra work is changing jump hole connections. And you all can contribute in doing that here:
https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...tid=157354

Even if you think devs wont do it anyway, and even if devs have said they wont (without giving a valid reason, I may add), doing nothing to convince them isnt going to help either. The best way to convince them is to offer a concept that many people can agree on, leaving little of the work for them by helping doing it / deciding details for them. In the case of smuggling, putting in faster connections will already buff the profit without need for price adjustment, to compensate for the higher risk of getting caught that comes from less alternative routes.

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