Market Discussions

My understanding of economics is limited, but I believe that this is more correctly 'supply and demand', not 'inflation'. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

yk

A subtle removal of ISK could be through money transfer fees. Your main is in one system, your alt is thirty systems away, so transfering ISK between the two could be 1% per jump. You are paying for the electronics to transfer from system to system.

A direct trade between two players could have a flat fee. Since you are not "physically" moving goods between each other, you are subtly paying dock workers or drones to do the work for you.

Quick buy or sell orders versus long term buy or sell orders on the market could have different fees too.

Taxes for trading transactions are too high as is, if anything CCP should add the skill "Tax Evasion" to reduce it to 0% for traders.

In the U.S, taxes on capital gains is on average about 30% which gets futher reduced by expenses like broker fees, interest, tax breaks, capital loses, etc. So the average tax percentage after deductions is about 10-20% per year.

In EVE, the lowest tax is 0.5% PER sell transactions. There are are no deductions, no tax breaks, no writeoffs for loses, nothing. So assuming you are a passive trader doing 1 trade per week on the same item, you are already paying 26% per 52 week period
If you are a more active trader, you probably pay 100%-300% per year just on taxes.

Add broker fees into the mix and things get ... fugly.

Maybe my math is off or maybe trading in EVE is more like retailing instead, in that case I've been doing it all wrong since I started playing.


TLDR: Trading transaction fees are too high, focus should shift to the ISK faucets.

Personally I thought the influx of ISK from bounties to be rather high. Something like 26 Trillion ISK per Annum

Taxes on sales are redundant as mentioned. If anything, it will just make profit from manufacturing harder and squeeze out the little guy a little more. Considering governemnt usage of taxes and the impact they have on economy, small business, and working individuals, you'd think someone would have thought of this

Bounties obviously aren't really that high, given the totals come from all over known space and are affected by a much larger portion of the player base than pretty much anything else

This leaves fees as the only remaining suggested means of dealing with it, and their is no reasonable way one can functionally impact the system with fees without bankrupting new players or even invested players, so that doesn't really work

Here is an option and it does involve taxes, just not the standard kind we are all used to. Tax the buyer. The seller isn't impacted and provided it is only on end products, neither is the manufacturer for the most part. Any complete ship or module sale would be taxed on the purchasers end through a new sales tax applied to end products. 10% or more should be sufficient

To avoid the workaround with contracts, all contracts would have a fee based on their value placed on them which would affect all contracts in the system, excluding direct item for item trades. This includes the possibility for fees applied to courier contracts, and would also affect Want to Buy contracts for the value of that contract.

PLEX would not be available for Trade Contracts of course and would be considered at ISK market value for purposes of fees. Fees could be around the 10% margin as well and paid by the purchaser. All existing taxes and fees would still apply of course

Side note based on one of the more recent posts I can see as I sit here and type: Current taxation where I live, including all taxes on purchases, freight, tariffs, and manufacturing, as well as inherited taxes from manufacturing and resource aquisition and employment before it reaches the consumer market, and income tax, property tax and all the rest is more than 62% of annual income.

It was estimated at 62% more than a few years ago and is considered to increase by 2% per year on average. I'm sure we'd like to believe that is impossible and it couldn't possibly continue to increase in such a fashion and yet, it does.

Place odd ball item on market in isolated station, set price to X, pay less tax.

Doesn't surprise me that there are ways around it easily thought of, but I don't think that is really a concern. Tax evasion is possible in rl; why not in a game?

Taxes work weird when you start analyzing competition and growth. A flat taxi is what creates the diminishing returns phenomena. If you raise taxes, smaller corps have more of a chance because the larger corps cannot grow to monopoly size.

OP proposal is to tax high sec, home of the small corp. and put a loose reign on null and low. Presumably this is to encourage growth in null. It would kill the market too cause we would all go to contracts to avoid taxes.

We already have the largest corps/alliances in null. Op's proposal would further the rift. This works for the null move but kills small business incentives in the gamer sandbox versus the professional sandbox

Creating needless hoops and busy work for customers, is not a good idea.

Another possibility would be to charge a monthly fee for alliance / corporation registration with the authorities. Maybe even a per-member tariff and per-corp tariff. The problem with that is "how do you enforce it?". Do you require the monthly fee to be paid in order to keep your station offices open? What happens if the fee is not paid? Disbanding the corp/alliance?

Transaction taxes are tricky. If they are too high, then you encourage people to just vertically integrate to avoid sales taxes and broker fees. Which is exactly what you see happening with Planetary Interaction. Because the tariffs are so severe, people go to great lengths to avoid paying them.

PI was a multi-faceted problem:

- PI goods aren't worth all that much. CCP has failed to add additional demands for PI goods (such as implant BPCs, adding more PI goods to other recipes). No new item should have been introduced in the past few years which depend on a single material source (such as "only minerals" or "only PI inputs").

- The PG/CPU limits on command centers are so low that you can't setup a harvest colony that generates more then a few million ISK/day in low/null. If CCP were to increase the PG/CPU on the colonies, it would be easier to pay for POCOs from increased volume.

- Planets have such low re-spawn rates that you can easily run them dry if you have too many people working the same planet. Which discourages people from flocking to the same planets (it's better to see a world with few competitors).

- One-size-fits-all of the POCO, instead of giving us 3-4 sizes (like POS towers) so you could pick how much HP, office capacity you wanted to pay for.

- Because individual colonies don't produce that much income, you have to tax them at a high rate to pay off the POCO.

- The ability of a POCO owner to charge anywhere from 1/10th to 10x the rate of a hi-sec POCO is too variable on the upper-end.