Smuggler Archive
Thread: Life's Certainties...
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Tych
Fri Jun 11, 2004 9:39 pm
#1
Death sucks, and so do taxes. Unless you're a content starved smuggler, that is. With JTL and the Revamp coming up soon enough (desperately looks for wood and knocks until his roommate yells to cut the racket!) I've been thinking of player smuggling. Now I know that the devs don't want to take away anything the existing player base already has readily access to, but with stat migration going solely to the Image Designers, I'm working on the assumption that a small exception might be made on our part. Now, most of the ideas come, in part, from a thread on the JTL forum linked directly below this paragraph, and my implementation oftaxes comes from assuming that such a system will be introduced into the game at some point.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=lightspeed&message.id=15158
My answer is simply this: taxes. Now, I know taxes have been discussed before, but I'm all for whipping a dead horse, so: taxes.Not on all items, but enough to matter. Also not that EVERYTHING should be smuggled. Taxes are, as stated above, a certainty of life. Some are reasonable, others try to bludgeon you while you vainly hold your empty wallet up as a shieldagainst the onslaught of blows. My thoughts tend mainly toward resources and large amounts of anything, but primarily resources.
Now, say someone grinding out Weaponsmith just bought 500k of grinding quality steel on Naboo. Not worth much, but it's a large quantity of it, thus hard to to stuff into your luggage and sneak past the Imperial Patrols while getting back to his house on Corellia. So, it's going to be noticed and taxed, not much, it's crap steel, but it's enough crap to warrant a kickback to Old Man Palpatine. In this case it wouldn't really be practical to enlist a smuggler. He wouldn't be taxed much, but enough to be reminded that the Empire still holds sway. If it's bad a bad resource, it could be maybe .1 credits per unit, that comes out to 50k taxes on 500k of steel. Nearly everyone has money, it's not a big hit and for 500k steel, it is doable in my opinion.
But, if aMaster Weaponsmith found a beautiful spawn of some insanely high qualityRainbow Gemstone on Naboo, assume that he's harvested it till his heart's content, say about 500k for confusion's sake,but how does he get it off planet and back to his shop on Naboo to craft with and put the items on his vendor. Sure he could go through a public starport, but again, that's a large quantity of resources, and excellent resources at that, this time. The Empire is SURE to notice that. And knowing the blasted Imperials, they'll probably claim rights on the land you were harvesting and tax the hell out of you. Well, for this quality of resource, the Empire could decide to tax you 1 credit per unit, making a total of 500k taxed credits on the 500k Gemstone. But this is a Master Weaponsmith, he most likely has a good deal of cash, not to mention with 500k of awesome gemstone, he's still looking at a damn good profit, even with the tax hit. So, maybe he'd rather just take the hit, eat the credits, and go about his merry way. Well, maybe the Empire might notice that the Gemstone is used for making their ever-handy T-21 rifles. Perhaps, for harvesting on their land, they require a take of the resources themselves, say 20%. That's something for our Weaponsmith to think about.
Well, the Weaponsmith could always set up a crafting house on Naboo to try to get around the customs for resources. But now he has crates and crates of T-21's to export back to his shop on Corellia. Well, he's going try to carry this bejesus load of guns past the Imp gaurds on Naboo AND Corellia. Again, the Empire knows that these T-21's, made with the awesome Gemstone, are of exceptional quality, and starts to think that their soldiers might be better off with some of these new guns. Either a tax, or a percentage of the goods is taken here, again. He can do it, if he wants, and just go on with his day of setting up his new "Ub3r T-21" vendor, or he can take a slightly more clandestine route and enlist the help of a smuggler. And that's our bread and butter.
Contraband is still contraband, but maybe the ante should be upped on how people are punished for it. The more you have, the more the percentage of the fine goes up. Say you only have 1 crate of spice, you get taxed 5k credits. But if you have 20 crates of spice, call it possession with intent to sell, and you get taxed 10k per crate, bring it up to 200k. Or more if you like, I'm just thinking of a system that allows us to be of use to the player base, the numbers and specifics I leave to the devs.
I'm not going to go into the process of creating a mission, read about that in the thread I linked above. I'm also not going to go into running the mission, that has been discussed in many a thread before me, if ever there was a horse corpse beaten to a bloody pulp, it's that one.
A few ideas I haven't really elaborated on because I'm a "For Dummy's" kind of person when it comes to coding and scripting, but how do people get scanned? I'd considered that the ticket booth scan him, if possible, but all they would have to do is buy multiple tickets and store them in their banks, backpacks, or droids. I'm kicking around the idea of having the ticket taker droid scan people when they use the droid or their ticket. Or we can just have a few Imperial Customs Agents, CorSec, Naboo Security, etc., etc. at the starport upon arrival. But it has to be at departure or arrival, not both. Otherwise, I forsee bugs and bugs that could cost people a lot of credits and resources.
If you've gotten this far, please, feel free to comment and criticize (contructive only, you malicious bastards) the idea. Help tweakand perfect it, and maybe if it's decent enough byt he time Caylin gets back, we can make sure something like this gets seen by the right people. Yoda said, "Do or do not, there is no try."But I say that in our cripled state of being, to try is all we can do, dammit.
SBRD0C
Fri Jun 11, 2004 10:48 pm
#2
I'll 5-Star that...
Though I don't think the devs will ever get that strict on it, I acn always hope...
Perhaps they could use this with the scanning process I posted this morning.. Darn scoundrels didn't give me any feedback on it though... 
LordOfFatness
Fri Jun 11, 2004 10:57 pm
#3
I'd be OK with the taxing of resources, but I think this would be a very hard thing to manage. I am dead set against the Empire taking some of the resources, though I'm alright with having to pay atariff of some type. I also don't think you should adjust the tax rate based on the resource. The weird thing with resources is that something that is average or even mediocre at best is invaluable to another profession. If I have a Polysteel Copper with a great Conductivity to make crafting tools, I would hate to pay absurd taxes just because it is great for Composite Armor.
The possible problem I see is detecting what should and what should not be taxed. Do you tax components? Do you tax final products (i.e. gun, armor, etc.)? If so for both of these, how much should they be taxed? Also, if you tax tax the final product, does your customer get taxed every single time they travel. That could get very expenstive when you take into account all taxable goods (meds, weapons, armor, food). Would they scan your droids as well?
One other note to you suggesting the ticket taker do the scan. We will have to see JTL is implemented. I would suspect you will not have to talk to the ticket taker to fly your own ship, and it is yet to be seen if you can useyour personal shuttle or not to fly between planets much like the current shuttles do.
In general, I would have to say I likethe idea though, and I am interested to hear feedback. It would certainly give the smugglers something their title suggests they are capable of.
Lithrac
Sat Jun 12, 2004 3:56 am
#4
I really like this idea. Its realisitc and would probably give the feeling of oppression by the empire than a few random scans and some star destroyer floating above our heads ever would. Hitting people in the wallet is a real imperial crackdown. The problem (apart from the crafting community probably hating this idea) would be the affect on the economy. Most of the time people will just take the tax hit and then just up their prices on whatever it is that they are selling to cover it. I know at least on the my server our economy is over inflated anyway. I think it would take someone far more creative than me to find a happy balance. Still I do love the idea as I have been a smuggler since a few weeks after launch so I am fairly well known and do allot of bulk slicing for Armour/weapon smiths so I'd never be short on work. 
Tych
Sat Jun 12, 2004 1:44 pm
#5
Well, in the idea, it references the player created mission system that's outlined in the post I gave the link for. More money that goes in, stays in. It would just recirculate through the system. Of course you'd still have a good many NPC missions, but that would be a decent balance between them and the sinkholes like maintenence. Granted I don't have a Masters in Economy, and if I did, it probably wouldn't apply here in a game world, but it's a nice idea to think on.
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