Smuggler Archive

---

JTGAlpha wrote:

Jabba's smugglers DID do exactly that. They got the spice to the DEALERS who sold out of their cantinas, on the corners or wherever. In fact there was a Wolfman who owned one of the hottest night spots on Coruscant who used his club as a front for his spice trade. He essentially CONTROLLED the spice trade on Coruscant by dealing out of his legitimate business.

---

---

01201986 wrote:

. I dont know who said or where u got the text in yellow, but thats simply not true. Hurlo you are a multi-millionaire. If all of a sudden sliced items on vendors became illegal, you would not suffer, as every other crafter would be in that same boat with you. Right, we get paid 3k a pop for slicing your bulk weapons, while you make 500k more off of a 30% damage slice we get. thats fair? As for the text in red, no. thats what we are now, and you take advantage of that.

---

---

Ybagi wrote:

---

01201986 wrote:

. I dont know who said or where u got the text in yellow, but thats simply not true. Hurlo you are a multi-millionaire. If all of a sudden sliced items on vendors became illegal, you would not suffer, as every other crafter would be in that same boat with you. Right, we get paid 3k a pop for slicing your bulk weapons, while you make 500k more off of a 30% damage slice we get. thats fair? As for the text in red, no. thats what we are now, and you take advantage of that.

---

Absolutely not true, as a smuggler you should know that 75% of the weapons that get sliced are pretty much trash, that 500kcovers the losses on those 75% that end up getting destroyed.

If illegal goods are banned from vendors, smugglers will be doing the exact same thing they are doing now, slicing in bulk, the only thing that will change will be that my customers will be buying weapons in crates from me then bringing those to you for slicing instead of me bringing them myself.

In all honesty I wouldn't mind this at all, instead of having to list 2000 items I would only need to list 200 crates and a bunch of singles, alot less work for me.

---

---

WesBelden wrote:

There has been a resurgence in debate recently concerning merchants and their vendors. Along with this there has also been some discussion over contraband being sold on vendors. So, please choose one of the following options (and if possible, don't add in other options, such as Smuggler Vendors® ):

A.Contraband should not be sold on vendors; it’s illegal and as such should not be so easily available, nor as easily identifiable by the authorities.

B.Contraband should be able to be sold on vendors; this is a game and I want to be able to sell/buy stuff easily!

In my mind removing contraband from vendors would be a step towards actual Smuggling; Smugglers would be required to take spice to their customers and customers would be required to take their weapons/armour to Smugglers. This would create a greater sense of illegality and general Star Wars immersion in my opinion.

There would of course be draw backs to such a change; I guess it’s up to every individual to decide whether those drawbacks would be worth the extra immersion.

Get voting!

---

B.

You may not realise this but I know smugglers that run their own business with their own vendors ( and I've known mayors to tell them not in town...so they set up their shop just outside town limits......). If what you are proposing passes then you will hurt these members of your community.

Additionally if you take spice and slicing off vendors, you will basically kill your profession. If you don't have an easy way to get your product to your customer you will not make a profit. The limit on the bazaar would prevent you from buying weapons or armor, slicing it and reselling it. Also if anything with a global search the bazaar should be banned....someone in the police force probably monitors it constantly since you can do global searches ( I'm not saying that you shouldn't be allowed to place on the bazaar I'm pointing out something that you aren't thinking about ).

Think before you ask for the nerf bat ( after all the Smuggler needs some things fixed before they nerf more......)

---

01201986 wrote:

maybe its not true for you, but it's sure true for others. people will pay upwards of 30k for a crate of power-ups. but if a smuggler asked for 30k to permanently increase the speed or damage ability of a weapon, people would whine and complain and yell at us.

---

---

Ybagi wrote:

---

01201986 wrote:

maybe its not true for you, but it's sure true for others. people will pay upwards of 30k for a crate of power-ups. but if a smuggler asked for 30k to permanently increase the speed or damage ability of a weapon, people would whine and complain and yell at us.

---

30k for a crate of powerups?!? that's as comical as it is weakfor an arguement

try 3k, for a guaranteed improvement.

P.S. I pay my smuggler 5k per slice and I think thats pretty standard now for bulk slicing.

---

Message Edited by 01201986 on 02-19-2005 07:04 PM

---

Hurlobacca wrote:

I'm not here to vote, this poll is meaningless, it's the equivalent of going to the Doc forum andasking if doctors shouldbe able to buff. I'm hear to bust some myths.

1. Smugglers need a ban on vendors selling contraband in order to indulge their RP fantasies - There will always be some players who want to roleplay, and some who just want to play the game. If you want to sit in the cantina and do shady smuggling deals that's great but there's no need to cram it down everyone else's throat. Find like-minded players and play out your fantasies but leave the rest of us out of it. As for the lack of realism of contraband being sold openly, look at med/mind/food buffs, players soloing krayts, snipers firing once per second, shuttles appearing every sixty seconds and a hundred other ways in which the game doesn't follow the script.

2. Weaponsmiths/Armorsmiths are hurting our business - All weapons/armor are sliced by smugglers already, so it's impossible to increase your 100% market share of this business. Like it or not, we have a free-market economy in this game (well, sorta) and such markets gravitate towards efficiency. It's simply more efficient for me to pay a slicer to slice several hundred weapons at a time and offer them for sale so players can pick the slice they want rather than having to force the players to buy multiple weapons hoping to get a decent slice. It's also far more efficient for the slicers I hire to slice for me rather than standing outside the starport in cnet having to trade and collect payment from every player wanting a slice. If a smuggler's idea of immersion is having the equivalent of a buff line that's what you're gonna get.

3. Contraband shouldn't be sold openly on vendors- I can see the argument for sliced weapons not being available on the bazaar since it's a public forum, but I wouldn't support that as it would mainly hurt the noobs who are the main buyers of weapons off the bazaar. As for vendors in player-owned houses, that's private property. I can restrict access to my property and vendorsand only allow players I know are ok with the fact that illegal good are being sold there. Also, I don't have vending machines sell my sliced weapons, I have NPC vendors that sell my banned goods. That's my contribution to immersion. I'm not Wal-mart or 7-11, I'm an idependent businessman who seeks business opportunity, legal or illegal. I don't really care if I'm breaking the law as long as there's a buck to be made. I'm a merchant and I value commerce before the law, something I have in common with many of my RL counterparts. This is how I roleplay and it's every bit as valid as how you chose to roleplay. The only difference is I'm not the one trying to tell you how to play the game.

4. A ban on vendor items will work/solve all smugglers problems - I rely on selling sliced weapons for my swg living. No change in vendor operations is going tostop that. I know from personal experience that players will pay for the convenience of being able to purchase the type of slice they want and that's not going to change either so stop kidding yourselves. There are several ways I can work around a ban on selling sliced weapons from vendors and it would be a major hassle that would wind up increasing the cost to the players but as long as the market demands sliced weapons I will be there to meet that demand. I hear smugglers complain about wanting more smuggling content, but it sounds like what you want is to be transformed into a profession of slice-monkeys.

5. Smugglers should get vendors to sell sliced weapons/spice/slicing tools - This is the argument I love the most. Those who hold this view want to take a skill away from a class that has already invested their skill points on those abilities (Artisan/Merchant) and be given the ability to place vendors without investing any skill points. Yeah right. Keep dreaming.

Here's what I'm in favor of:

1. Smugglers are member of the underworld and should be capable of extorting protection money from merchants who sell illegal goods. Once a merchant has paid off a smuggler, the smuggler then bribes Imperial officials to overlook the contraband on that merchant's vendors, thereby saving the merchant the risk of a hefty fine proportionate to the number of contraband items listed.

2. Just yesterday I was transporting over 100 sliced weapons to my vendors from my workshop as they are in different cities. I was stopped by a probot, who curiously found nothing. If I could hire a smuggler to escort me so he could talk his way out of my being scanned, that's something I would consider doing, especially if being probed meant being caught and db'd by the probot, which it probably should, at least some of the time.

I'm sure there are lots of other ways to incorparate a richer gameplay experience for Smugglers, but these are just a couple that would be alternatives to the lame idea of ending contraband vendor sales. There's got to be more brainpower on this forum than this poll would indicate so prove my assumption wrong and come up with some ways to improve your game experience without taking away from somebody else's because next time it might be some other profession crying that Smugglers shouldn't be able to do ___________ and if they get their way I'd say that's karma for you.

---

---

JTGAlpha wrote:

Yes I know what they are. But they're what we have. They are, in Pen and Paper terms, commoners. They do the grunt work for us, like make sure our shop is manned 24-7. They do the menial work. And if I wanna be big-time criminal man smuggler, I need peon footsoldiers. If I wanna be the owner of a franchise of shops, should I hire Players to man the post at every outlet? They are there to do the unfun work. Just because we have a cool product doesn't mean we should shut out Merchants, especially not when a decent segment of our population sacrificed Combat Coolness to be a Merchant/Smuggler. This change would render that combo absolutely and entirely pointless.

---

Maybe I'm a bad person, but I don't really care if it would impact Smuggler/Merchants. Or any combination of Smuggler with any other profession. I want to see Smuggler become what it should have been from the start. Things should be illegal, rare, hard to find, and damn expensive if youmanage tofind it.

I'm all for option "A".

But that's just my opinion.