This is incredibly disappointing. I've really enjoyed the face to face interaction of my trade and flying around through dangerous space with hundreds of millions to a few billion isk worth of drugs in my hull. It was actual smuggling and drug dealing. The only real issue, in my opinion, being the inconvenience of contracts. People learned to trust the Es and Whizz name because we earned that trust over years of successful dealing.

When our CEO offered constructive input to the CSM for other options on dealing with this, we were ignored. We have competition, we aren't the only booster dealers in the game, and with our considerable experience, one would think our input would be seen as valuable. It's a real shame.



The only thing that's been done is an entire profession will be removed from the game. A corner of the sandbox will be gone. It's like removing rats from anoms, banning scams, or removing industrial ships. (Yes, I realize these are possibly extreme examples.)

Instead of making smuggling more interesting, CCP is just nuking it. It's not even the high sec smuggling that is going away. I seldom went through high sec. We smuggle past gate camps, roaming gangs, and trap orders. Now boosters will just be bought in trade hubs and moved via normal alliance/corp or third party courier services; just like the rest of the market items.

I do not like this change, and I do not like that the people most intimately involved in the profession were ignored while making this decision.

As someone who just joined Es and Whizz, and was very interested in doing the smuggling activity they've done for years, this is a punch to the gut.

I suppose all there is to do in eve is buy items via market. Shoot players. Rinse Repeat.

Not a good choice, removing ideas from the game instead of expanding or adjusting them.

Quick Lore Break:
In recent months the CONCORD Inner Circle has started seriously considering a new approach to the issue of New Eden's illicit booster trade. Prohibition was successful in reducing booster addiction rates, but has had serious downsides across the cluster.
The illegal booster trade has enriched the great pirate factions (especially the Serpentis Corporation and their Angel Cartel partners), and led to an increase in underworld violence as local pirate bands compete for slices of this lucrative pie.
Escalating enforcement requirements have stretched the resources of the DED and the empire customs authorities to their breaking points.

In response to these issues, the Inner Circle is planning a complete shift in their approach to boosters. Booster possession, trade and consumption by capsuleers will be legalized, and licenses for legal booster production will be available to certain non-capsuleer corporations (X-Sense being the first authorized manufacturer). Booster production and research by pirate corporations and unlicensed capsuleers will continue to be illegal.
Some CONCORD resources will be diverted to harm reduction programs (mainly focused on treating addiction among non-capsuleer populations).

This change in approach is obviously good news for the X-Sense corporation, and experts predict that it will deal a non-trivial blow to the income of the Serpentis Corporation and Angel Cartel. Nobody yet knows how these powerful pirates will respond, but it's a safe assumption that they won't take it lying down.


In practical terms we are planning to legalize all raw and processed boosters in all areas of Empire space, starting in the 118.6 release at the end of June.

This change will only impact boosters (there is a similar but separate change planned that will also legalize Ectoplasm). Other illegal items will continue to have their bans enforced by empire customs officers (so if you try and carry slaves through the Republic they will continue to be cross with you).

Manufacturing and reactions for boosters aren't changing at this time, and will continue to be restricted in highsec space. CONCORD is only providing licences for booster manufacturing to X-Sense at the moment meaning that capsuleer production will continue to be prohibited by the empires. From a design perspective, we're happy with this section of industry being unique to lower security bands.

Beyond the storyline connection, we want to make this change because the current system of booster illegality is not serving a strong purpose in gameplay. It makes the use of boosters annoying for many pilots, and causes other frustrations such as blocking contracting of ships that have boosters in their cargoholds.

We won't rule out potentially making more changes to the system of item legality and smuggling in the future (including but not limited to complete reworks of the system) but we believe that this change is a significant benefit to the game by itself.

This change is on SISI now so we encourage you to give it a try and let us know what you think.

Thanks and happy boosting!

can we get an update on how this is going to work with POS tower becoming useless in the near future? how is the production going to work?
It's quite a large investment to produce drugs so a little heads up on what actually is going to happen to the production of it might be nice?

For now, no changes. When the structures get round to redoing reactions, then you'll need a new structure, but until then, it'll remain in POS.

_May_ come in the Fall release, but reactions have always stood to the side of industry.

LAME.

As someone who doesnt produce boosters, and is always in short supply of them, im sure this change will enable me to use boosters a lot more often.

However, wtf. This was an interesting gameplay mechanic. It added variation to the game. These small things you guys keep axing is what gives this game depth and variation. And now you're getting rid of it, in favor of.... nothing. Nothing new will be replacing it. Its just gone. Poof. Eve will now be a little less deep.

As things stand the Booster trade has a fairly limited impact on a fairly small number of people. Opening that up so that more people can be (and will likely choose to be) impacted by Boosters and their mechanics gives CCP a lot more that they could potentially do with Boosters and surrounding mechanics.

It's being replaced by wider availability of boosters, which means more people making the choice of whether to use them or not and if so which ones to use and how to deal with the drawbacks. The "in favor of" here is "in favor of more people using a mechanic that has historically been so niche probably 95% or more of players never see it or interact with it except *maybe* getting killed by someone using a Booster".

This idea that things that are changed *need* a direct and equivalent replacement is a little bit ridiculous. The idea is that something is being changed because the outcome of the change is more desirable than the status quo. This is always going to involve some kind of trade-off, whether it's the death of niche playstyles or wider or more restricted availability of some good or service.

As things stand the Booster trade has a fairly limited impact on a fairly small number of people. Opening that up so that more people can be (and will likely choose to be) impacted by Boosters and their mechanics gives CCP a lot more that they could potentially do with Boosters and surrounding mechanics.

In this exact case they indeed sacrifice minority for the well-being of majority. It is sad, but I can deal with it.

What I am really against is the _trend_ of removing features that actually work and giving nothing instead. Even the best release of the recent time, Citadel, comes with a bitter pill: citadels dont have racial flavors. The gameplay behind it - poof - just gone. They do it step-by-step, in small iterations, they justify it every time: not enough dev time, used by small percent of population, too hard for new players, etc. And then suddenly - no one wants to log in, why could it be?

If you have a suggestion for something to replace this without defeating the purpose of these changes then by all means suggest away, badger the CSM about it, or whatever else. Maybe push for something else to be made illegal

-1

Why remove a whole profession and game style from the game?
Oh, wait, it's easier than actually improving the existing mechanics!
That's why!

You can do better than this CCP, you are taking away the sand from the sandbox.

Considering the people claiming to be in this profession in this thread have themselves mainly talked about low & null, I really doubt they are actually having their profession taken away. Since their profession really is called logistics.

The only thing being actually taken away is the need to avoid randomly generated customs NPC's & a bunch of hassle with contracts. Someone still has to move the drugs around avoiding players now, and I'm betting most of the smart ones already do things like use jump bridges to move their drugs, exactly like..... all the rest of the logistics guys do when moving all the other products.

And in return they get a much larger market to make isk on.

I did.
We have a CSM member here in this thread, who position himself as industrialist. But he seems not bothered at all.

You have no idea how nullsec logistics work, do you?

This seems like focusing on the wrong side of things to me. The discussion here has very little to do with Null-Sec Logistics and more to do with the logistics of moving Combat Boosters. It doesn't really matter if he's right about how Null Logistics works, it matters if he's right about how Combat Boosters are moved.

The focus is clear: organized groups do logistics via jump-freighters. This is how it works. You buy stuff in Jita, you set courier contract and later get it in your alliance home system, or vise versa. While hauling from nullsec to Jita has some peculiarities (because of suicide squads), logistics from Jita is really straightforward. Cyno up, jump, dock. Login next cyno, rinse, repeat. Usually the entire thing is done by 1 human. That's it, the whole gameplay. Exciting, right?

That's pretty much what the other player said. Personally I'm not seeing much difference between this and a similar way of moving boosters. The main difference is Boosters are small enough that you can jump them without a freighter, which means by Covert Cyno, further reducing the risk inherent in the process.

Once you've got the Combat Boosters into high-sec, so long as you're using a cloaky ship, you're under very very little risk of getting caught by a Customs Officer, and even if one does manage to scan you that's entirely an RNG check.

How is that significantly better than Null Sec Logistics?

My point was more that this will not significantly change even if drugs are legal.
The only change to risk is in highsec where it's a change to NPC risk only. Suicide gankers might still target you.
Low & Null player risk will remain exactly the same. Using JF's might even increase the risk instead of using BR's & Covert Cyno's. Drugs will still need shipping to markets, and you can still sell direct to customers also just like now, nothing makes you use Jita ever.

I wouldn't say this is really accurate. Nothing makes you use Jita but if you can then it's much more convenient for the buyer so whoever does sell there has an advantage in the market. Case and point, as soon as Faction and Deadspace modules became available on the Market tab the contracts market for them almost entirely dried up.

That's actually a thought, would it be worthwhile to allow these items to be moved but not list them on the markets, or would this just create inconvenience rather than add depth?

-1


You can do better than this CCP, you are taking away the sand from the sandbox.

Another part of this great game gets their training-wheels put on. There are only so many nails needed to close this coffin CCP.
Eve is ever faster becomming space-wow... yawn

You could've made intelligent additions to this best of games, yet most all you do is taking the lazy RL "best for your economics" choice

/me starts looking for that next game with a cliff-side challenge