Jita Park Speakers Corner

Even without details posted, I have feedback for you already.

Read this and give it to CCP: http://themittani.com/features/addressing-tritanium-problem

These, as well.
http://themittani.com/features/vision-thing
http://themittani.com/features/creation-and-destruction
http://themittani.com/features/destroying-shipyards

Combined, they cover a lot of ground regarding the economy and industry in nullsec, and why it's important. They also talk a lot about the idea of "bottom up" income.

Bottom up income is simply, we want an alliance to be able to thrive and function on the basis of the actions of its membership, rather than on moon mining, or taxing renters. For that to be the case, people need to want to live in an alliance's space and do all their activities there. They should want to make their money, by ratting, or mining, or by PI, or what have you, and the alliance should be able to collect taxes on those activities; note that for an alliance to be able to do that, a tax must be obligatory. For mining, it's not; I address this in the "Addressing the Tritanium Problem" article.

When it comes to taxes on commerce, it should actually be worth doing commerce in nullsec. That means improving the production facilities in some way or another, covered most thoroughly in the "Destroying the Shipyards" article. It means ability to set and collect taxes on those facilities, which admittedly already exists; however, with the rock bottom taxes on production in highsec, there isn't much room to adjust things there (this is a symptom of highsec production fees being too low, though). An alliance should be able to set its market fees as well. Right now we collect the broker fee, but can't set it, and the sales tax is still a sink. Ideally, we'd be able to set and collect both, though simply being able to set and collect the broker fee would be sufficient.

Finally, moon mining. CCP has talked about Ring Mining, and a lot of us who are interested in the topic have a lot of fears about it. Ring mining comes across as a jesus feature, when on its own it will do little to address the problems that nullsec has. While we like the general idea of replacing moon mining with a bottom-up income source that we can tax (hopefully; on the surface it would have the same problems that regular mining does with taxation), we worry that developing a complete, brand new system like that will absorb all of CCP's limited development time, leaving the many other problems the area of space has untouched as a result.

More thoughts to come if I think of them.

Here's hoping CCP agrees with you then.

Unless you're present at the Summit, hoping is about all you can do. Ball's in the CSM's court to try to sell CCP on not only adopting this vision, but acting on it.

That simply isn't even close to true. We have all seen what CCP will do when the playerbase is really fired up about something, it was called Crucible. If those ideas had even a quarter of the enthusiasm we saw 18 months ago, CCP would devote the resources to get it done.

Did I miss the part where having massive amounts of Hi-sec minerals would not collapse the Hi-sec markets, and once again make mining a waste of time for everyone but Null residences?

If a hisec mining being a "waste of time" is the result of low prices, such as those found before they nuked the alloys out of the drone regions, then highsec mining has been a "waste of time" for most of the game's history, pretty much all of it except for the past six months. Nevertheless, people mined. Quite a lot of people mined, in fact. And, those same drone alloys produced an enormous amount of lowends. That didn't crush highsec mineral prices, neither would nullsec being able to provide for themselves locally.

Basically, your point is invalid.



Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to ring mining in general, when treated in a vacuum. I think it'd be a neat feature and a pretty decent way of replacing moon mining with something driven by individual players.

My concern is that it's not in a vacuum. CCP does not have infinite manpower and time, and I fear that if faced with a choice, they'd choose to go with ring mining, half-assing or ignoring completely other changes. I feel that while those other changes (such as the industry revamps Weaselior proposes and the mining revamps I proposed) are probably less FLASHY than ring mining would be (maybe not if they did it via POS revamp as Weaselior suggests), they are more important to nullsec's overall health. Think of it as sort of analogous to how players reacted when they learned that CCP was neglecting flying in space in favor of walking in stations back around Incarna.

If CCP were to, say, deliver nullsec revamps one expansion, and then ring mining the next, that would be okay. Heck, if they could do them both in the same expansion and do a quality job, that would be better still. It's just that from the scope of the past couple expansions, I'm not sure they can.

Then how can we prove to CCP that lots of players really like these ideas ?

It is such a complex issue, I feel it will take several patches to address it all. But some of changes are so basic, they could easily be incorporated into point patches. (Null Market Fees for example) Maybe they can start sliding some of those changes in now while the debate happens.

I want to make one comment regarding this topic from the view point of a small alliance player looking at the inaccessibility of nullsec to the small group.

Fencing off areas of nullsec is something I think will have to be done to encourage small groups to expand into null. Having some kind of home system that can't be flooded with hostile supers, caps and fleets is just about the only way to let people try their hand at building a sandcastle that doesn't get automatically trampled by the sandbox gangs. The added safety of a home system would need to be compensated with lower resources. There are many ways to design such a system, but I think until there is a way for small groups to experience nullsec at a slower pace the population will never significantly shift out of high sec. The power curve is just too much in favor of the groups/players with years of experience and overwhelming numbers to make nullsec appealing to the general player base.

Pretty much what corestwo said, save perhaps that I'm a bit more enthusiastic about ring mining.