Was playing around with some trading between stations, used the Eve market trading tool and found some Elite Slaves, couple jumps, entire trip in Hi-Sec and a small 2M ISK profit. For a beginner, with not much ISK, thought I would give it a try.
Purchased, loaded and clicked undock - and that’s when I was informed it was contraband - that would have been nice to know before, but went ahead and undocked anyway. Two gates from destination I was hit with the notification (while jumping) I was caught hauling contraband, I could hand it over or be destroyed. I had only 10k ISK invested, so clicked yes to handing it over. Honestly, I didn’t really read all the details of the message, figured I got caught and so I lost the cargo and would probably get hit with a penalty. When I reached the other side of the gate, I clicked jump to next gate, figured the cargo was confiscated. I get to my destination, cargo still there, so sold it and made my profit.
I received a notification, I had 0 ISK penalty, 0 standings penalty and the result was confiscation. So what happened?? I basically made the trade, got my profit and had no negative impact. Does anyone know the mechanics here? Was I actually suppose to do something, i.e. drop off the cargo before jumping to my next gate? Did I just evade the customs authority?
NOTE: No, I do not plan on hauling/trading contraband for a living in EVE, I just used this opportunity to gain some more experience and a little ISK.
I’m surprised you thought the slave trade was something you could enter in without any moral repercussions!
To be honest, I think it’s mostly a role-play thing in eve… I suspect you made warp before faction police actually scrammed you (they’re slow) and so your payment didn’t land.
Its not that I thought there wouldn’t be any repercussions, but with these items being shown on the market in places like Jita, etc… I wasn’t sure how the game viewed/handled it - now I know .
Perhaps a little more research before hand would have been a good idea - lesson learned.
Thanks for the reply.
Is there a list of items considered contraband? Most are probably obvious, but just in case I thought I’d ask.
Contraband used to be more punishing, but not so much. Also depends on where. If you attempted this in minmatar space you would have actually been punished
This is very old content, created in a time when they were not convinced the player driven market would work fine. You can buy and transport NPC stuff to other NPC locations to sell it there to NPC buyers, but as you already found out, it’s not really worth your time.
Earlier (non multiplayer) space sandbox games featured this kind of economy, so I think it’s a reminiscence of the last century.
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