The BMD's occupy an important role in the server as they are the gateway to things that smugglers and Grey market dealers can't provide. The stereotypical examples being guns and esoteric goods and services.
Now as far as I can tell (Correct me on this if I am wrong), all of the BMD's are admins which makes sense but also leaves a bit of a gap in a fundamentally player driven economy. It would be interesting to see the BMD's employ players as either smugglers, or contacts to GET in contact with the BMD's themselves instead of showing up every so often like a door-to-door salesman.
The premise i'm thinking of is why not run the BMD like an underground operation instead of people just showing up with a bunch of random goods and flogging them off to the first face that there is, here would be a rough idea how:
The BMD is the head Honcho of the organisational structure mechanically, I'm sure in the fluff that people write, there can be an underboss, and then lieutenants and then the person who runs the network but that is less useful for server side stuff. Now as much as it would be ideal for it to be player run it is unfeesible and I'm pre-emptively getting a headache from some inevitable issue caused by a player BMD so it would be better to keep it as an admin
Furthermore, the goods listed by
@Neonity by price as Low, Med, High is another way to split it up, so say an organisation leader wanted, base/structural supplies, some guns, ammunition, an unlocked AR2 and some other things, they might be priced as the following:
High: Unlocked AR2/Base Supplies
Med: Various firearms and analogue weapons (depending on the weapons in question)
Low: Ammunition and maybe unlicensed medicine
the High-cost/rarity stuff is only available from the BMD directly, and there can be a variety of reasons for this, the most obvious is that they would probably want to know who they are selling to for example, and if needs be a Reputation system could be drafted up, though i read somewhere that was already a thing so that eases the mind a little.
The Medium Cost goods, or more accurately SOME of them can be acquired by the BMD's elected confidante's who would ideally be recruited by the BMD's themselves and would be players. Furthermore they could have a rule that meant the Confidante's weren't allowed ties to a rebel group, or they could have ties but if they were discovered the BMD dealt with them as they saw fit.
Finally the Low cost items could be available to the Confidante's to sell, and the way these could be accessed by non-admin based individuals is simply with a permit, they exist for the loyalists when setting up shops and from what i could see in the menu there are no permits for getting in illicit items, these could easily be made and tooled specifically for the type of individual in question: BMD's or Confidante's.
Finally the Rep's purpose is to ferry the goods from the BMD/Confidante to their given customer, via a face to face interaction or perhaps a dead-drop, the reps acts as middlemen for the operation and fall under the same roof as the Confidante's in that they can't overtly be part of a group, this would mostly be to prevent certain groups from dominating the sales of the black market or indeed having nepotism, the latter though could provide some interesting roleplay though.
Again this is a rough idea, but i think it could be quite good if it was fleshed out a little more, admin-run operations are somewhat needed, but the extent to which they are needed could be lessened so it was more organic and made more sense. a modern-day example can be seen with organised crime in the drug-trafficking trade, the people you purchase narcotics from are not the cooks or indeed the head of the organisation, it is the people at the bottom of the tree who handle customers, and if you want to reach the people at the top, you need time, money and credibility to do so.
All in all i think it could be a more organic way to run things, and having people have to work to get to the top is more realistic. I imagine there will be those who hate this idea, but that's the way she goes.
