Smuggler Archive
Thread: Revamp Discussion: Contraband & Smuggling Missions
Tonteth wrote:
Smuggler_Caylin wrote:
The game's "visibility" system will be expanded. Any player can now accumulate small amounts of visibility for a contraband infraction. The amount of visibility will be dependent on the severity of the infraction.
Isn't this too close to pvp without consent? Carrying an illegal item and being punished by an NPC is one thing, getting hunted down by a bounty hunter in a PVP situation is another.
Did a smuggler, or another person hold a gun to the other player's head forcing them to use a sliced weapon, or spice? Didn't think so. It was consentual.
Smuggling Missions are received from various underworld bosses, called ‘suppliers’. Jabba, Lady Valarian, and other key criminal characters, as well as new characters, will offer smuggling missions. Smuggling missions are only offered to smuggler characters. The difficulty of the mission will scale to the average tier level of the smuggler’s skills.
At its core, a smuggling mission is similar to a delivery mission. The player is given a crate of illegal goods to move to another contact. The player must then return the payment for the goods to the source of the mission.
Ex: Jabba gives the player a crate of 50 narcostims to deliver to a cantina in Mos Eisley. After the player delivers the narcostims, she receives a payment of 12,000 credits. The player then returns to Jabba and delivers 8,000 credits, pocketing 4,000 as payment for the job.
There are no skill boxes specific to smuggling missions, but the smuggler’s skills in scan avoidance and slicing will come into play.
So how does a smuggler figure out how difficult these missions will be? Will a novice smuggler be able to take the same missions as a Master? I'm not quite comfortable with that.
You could always do it the way Invest is set up. Problem solved.
The target for a smuggling mission will only wait so long to receive the delivery. If the player does not deliver the goods within a reasonable amount of time (dependent on mission difficulty), the mission will be lost and the player will receive some visibility.
This makes me wonder about the possibility of making our missions give out an XP type required for progression. If that happens, you are again having PVP without direct consent by the player, in order to progress up the skill tree. Interlocking XP progression with PvP is not a great idea for those smugglers who chose neutral for a reason.
Once again, did you or someone else hold a gun to that smuggler's head, forcing them to take the mission? The easiest work around would be low level missions are NPC based if failed, and PC based for the higher level ones.
No Tonteh, you are taking away someones playstyle by what you are saying. We have been told by the devs upto this point that both PvE and PvP have their parts in this game... in fact it was advertised that the game would be for the casual gamers, social gamers, and powergamers. As a casual gamer that happens to play quite a bit per week I find any system that puts me into a scenario where I can be confronted by another player as being not only unconsentual but goes directly against what we have been promised since before beta.
If you want to PvP they make it very simple and extremely easy to switch back and forth between PvP and PvE. Simply go overt and your now in PvP mode, go covert (or stay neutral) and you are now in PvE mode. Injecting PvP into a PvE mode is unconsentual no matter what the user decided to do. They devs have a responsiblity to make sure the players have a clear and very noticable distinction between PvP and PvE and should never have to worry about PvP while in PvE mode. Doing otherwise is taking away from my playstyle and forcing yours onto me.
I will not PvP, I have no interest in PvP. Yes I have tried it, dont like it, could care less for it. But I respect those that do in fact like it and want it. I have always supported Overt's and their playstyle. I simply ask that you also respect ours, do not force your playstyle on us. You have lots of ways to engaged in PvP, leave our gameplay how it is and purely PvE.
What he said...
RellikCro wrote:
Tonteth wrote:
Smuggler_Caylin wrote:
The game's "visibility" system will be expanded. Any player can now accumulate small amounts of visibility for a contraband infraction. The amount of visibility will be dependent on the severity of the infraction.
Isn't this too close to pvp without consent? Carrying an illegal item and being punished by an NPC is one thing, getting hunted down by a bounty hunter in a PVP situation is another.
Did a smuggler, or another person hold a gun to the other player's head forcing them to use a sliced weapon, or spice? Didn't think so. It was consentual.
Smuggling Missions are received from various underworld bosses, called ‘suppliers’. Jabba, Lady Valarian, and other key criminal characters, as well as new characters, will offer smuggling missions. Smuggling missions are only offered to smuggler characters. The difficulty of the mission will scale to the average tier level of the smuggler’s skills.
At its core, a smuggling mission is similar to a delivery mission. The player is given a crate of illegal goods to move to another contact. The player must then return the payment for the goods to the source of the mission.
Ex: Jabba gives the player a crate of 50 narcostims to deliver to a cantina in Mos Eisley. After the player delivers the narcostims, she receives a payment of 12,000 credits. The player then returns to Jabba and delivers 8,000 credits, pocketing 4,000 as payment for the job.
There are no skill boxes specific to smuggling missions, but the smuggler’s skills in scan avoidance and slicing will come into play.
So how does a smuggler figure out how difficult these missions will be? Will a novice smuggler be able to take the same missions as a Master? I'm not quite comfortable with that.
You could always do it the way Invest is set up. Problem solved.
The target for a smuggling mission will only wait so long to receive the delivery. If the player does not deliver the goods within a reasonable amount of time (dependent on mission difficulty), the mission will be lost and the player will receive some visibility.
This makes me wonder about the possibility of making our missions give out an XP type required for progression. If that happens, you are again having PVP without direct consent by the player, in order to progress up the skill tree. Interlocking XP progression with PvP is not a great idea for those smugglers who chose neutral for a reason.
Once again, did you or someone else hold a gun to that smuggler's head, forcing them to take the mission? The easiest work around would be low level missions are NPC based if failed, and PC based for the higher level ones.
No Tonteh, you are taking away someones playstyle by what you are saying. We have been told by the devs upto this point that both PvE and PvP have their parts in this game... in fact it was advertised that the game would be for the casual gamers, social gamers, and powergamers. As a casual gamer that happens to play quite a bit per week I find any system that puts me into a scenario where I can be confronted by another player as being not only unconsentual but goes directly against what we have been promised since before beta.
If you want to PvP they make it very simple and extremely easy to switch back and forth between PvP and PvE. Simply go overt and your now in PvP mode, go covert (or stay neutral) and you are now in PvE mode. Injecting PvP into a PvE mode is unconsentual no matter what the user decided to do. They devs have a responsiblity to make sure the players have a clear and very noticable distinction between PvP and PvE and should never have to worry about PvP while in PvE mode. Doing otherwise is taking away from my playstyle and forcing yours onto me.
I will not PvP, I have no interest in PvP. Yes I have tried it, dont like it, could care less for it. But I respect those that do in fact like it and want it. I have always supported Overt's and their playstyle. I simply ask that you also respect ours, do not force your playstyle on us. You have lots of ways to engaged in PvP, leave our gameplay how it is and purely PvE.
Saabotage wrote:
Their is an easy awnser to consentual pvp, if a smuggler wants to remain off of the bH terminals he could easily "Pay" the "proper authorities" off, also it would add alittle content to make the pve only smuggler or smugglers in general, have to discover "what authorities" were after him. and then pay one of them off :-P. That way theirs a monetary consiquence to being a bad smuggler. Also for the other classes we could do the same thing for them, and "pay the authorities off", with alittle skimmed off for us. Say that a BH gets the mission, the smuggler would be notified via an email.and be given a certain amount of time to bribe the right person, and if sucessful the BH would get an emial stating that "mr. Smuggler was found dead out side of a death stick factory", and instantly lose the mission. doing thiswould do 2 things it would 1. give the smuggler a reason to "be good" and 2. It would giev the BH an incentive to find the smuggler as soon as possible.
Also as our visability goes the bounties should get bigger!!
And i think that smugglers with a imfamous amount of visablity should be made todo different political/illegal quests to get their names cleared
Also i still like buying faction, i would hope this too would be expanded, maybe made cheaper todo so the war could start up again. And for goodness sakes remove the 500 faction cap!
Some quick comments on the proposed contraband/smuggling ideas:
I LOVE the new level's of illegality (quasi-legal, banned, highly illegal). I think the idea of the more risk = more visibility is a great one. Hopefully with the combat re-balance players won't have to rely so heavily on sliced weapons and/or armour but your ideas for the visibility system should still be implemented, if you don't like the punishment then don't take the risk. I do however like the idea put forth by other players of varying the punishment from city to city, eg being scanned in Mos Eisley would result in less visibility than say being scanned in Theed. I also like the idea of giving mayors a similar system to implement levels of punishment in player cities. This will serve to spread the player population around, decreasing the load on the Coronet and Theed servers and possibly increasing the credit sink via the travel system.
I would like to hear your ideas on how to address the issues Caylin highlighted though. I too don't want to see smugglers blatantly slicing BH terminals to help their BH friends or make some easy money. One suggestion I would like to make is whilst there is a bounty on your head the level of smuggler missions you can take is severely hampered, after all why would Jabba give you an important mission if the chances are you are going to be killed by a bounty hunter (and fail the mission) before the job can be done.
Regarding the comment about losing faction if/when caught with contraband.
Is this statement intended to apply to the faction the contraband came from (eg a smuggling mission for Jabba) or the player's GCW faction?
If it is the former then I don't have problem with it. However if it is the latter then some things need to be considered.
As pointed out by someone else in this thread, beggars can not be choosers and with that in mind why would the Rebels punish anyone for carrying contraband? Case in point; the two most (in)famous smugglers in SW lore, Solo and Calrissian, were made Generals in the Rebel Alliance. Without smugglers the rebels wouldn't have weapons, armour, medical supplies even defectors (no one to smuggle them off-world). In the case of non-smugglers who may be carrying sliced weapons, armour and maybe even spice I again ask why would the Alliance turn such people away?
When it comes to Imperial players my initial reaction would be keep the faction point punishment after all they do get a small immunity based on rank anyway and they are also meant to get access to better faction perks that should offset the dependancy on sliced items (or at least they should eventually). On the other hand, getting fined and getting some visibility as punishment could be severe enough without losing faction points as well.
In conclusion I don't think any rebel aligned player should lose rebel faction for being caught with contraband and in the interests of fairness the same should apply to Imperial alligned players. Unless of course I totally mis-read the statement and you meant Rebel players will lose Imperial faction and vice versa but then isn't that a moot point?
