Originally by: Kharybdis

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Edited by: Kharybdis on 25/01/2006 20:49:27
Edited by: Kharybdis on 25/01/2006 20:46:52
Near as I can tell, the whole "smuggling system" wasn't fully implemented in the game.

It looks like CCP's idea was to make two factors for smuggling:
1) You have a chance of being scanned by customs at stargates (and skills for reducing the chance of being scanned).
2) If scanned, you have a chance of illegal cargo being detected (and skills for reducing that chance).

From skill descriptions on some skills that never made it into the game, it appears that the base chance of being scanned would be 90% and the base chance of contraband detection would be 60%. That would result in a base of about 54% chance of making it through with contraband (unless there are multiple scan attempts at a stargate, for instance: 1 per customs ship).

Black Market Trading (and an advanced follow-up skill that never made it into the game, called Smuggling), would have lowered your chance of being scanned.

Skills, that never made it into the game, would have helped disguise your freight, so that even if you were scanned, the scan may "miss" your contraband.

So where are things now? If you believe the Black Market Trading skill description, you can get that 90% detection rate down to 40%. And if you really do only have a 60% chance of being caught when scanned... then you only have a 24% chance of getting caught with Black Market Trading 5.

Since getting caught with contraband can result in security status loss, fines, and/or ship destruction. For me, 24% after maxing BMT skill isn't currently worth it...

All of this analysis is based on website research, not practical experience. If there are people having fun and making a bunch of ISK with smuggling activities... they are being very quiet.

And I doubt that, cause the first rule of crime is... "some idgit ALWAYS opens his mouth, and ruins it for everyone else."

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