Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Can we please return Yulai to the way it was before please?

Background for new players: in the old days Yulai was a neutral territory owned by DED/Concord and was connected to all four of the major race areas. Thus, Yulai acted as a neutral hub. The shortest way from any capital to another was through Yulai. There were 4 main capitals: Oursulaert (Gallente), Rens (Minmatar), Jita (Caldari), and Amarr (Ammarian). Yulai was the most populated system, but the race hubs still had large populations. Anyway CCP didn't like having so many people in one system so they decided to disconnect Yulai from the other systems so it was no longer on the shortest path. The stated objective was to make people go back to the racial regions. This completely failed. What happened is that everybody moved to Jita, the second biggest hub due to the popularity of Caldari ships. This had the effect of benefitting all the Caldari-based players and screwing everybody else (who was operating in high sec). For example, being a trader I had to uproot and transport all my stuff out of Alentene and move to Caldari space to be closer to Jita. Since I had literally 1000s of assets in depots all over Essence and Verge Vendor this was a huge pain in the ass for me. Now, years later, the situation is the same: a Caldari-focused high-sec map. Travel became slower and less convenient because you could no longer go through Yulai. So, for example, to go from Jita to Amarr became a longer trip. Virtually every important major high sec route got longer.

Anyway, now that the cut-off-Yulai experiment is complete I don't really see the benefit. In fact, it just seems to have distorted the game in the favor of Caldari and slowed down travel needlessly.

Can we please restore the links to Yulai the way they were before? I think this would result in a much better gameplay.

we should do the exact opposite of what you suggest and make it even harder to get around hisec, because making things easier cheapens the experience.

Look at the idea in my signature

When CCP Veritas and the team manage to get "Brain on the Box" to work so that it is considerably less server taxing to jump/dock/bridge, etc then I don't see why those connections can not be reestablished. As it stands right now the lag jumping in to Yulai would be many times worse than Jita as masses of people relocate from Jita and the other hubs to Yulai.

Expect some significant backlash as people defend the fact that there is nothing wrong with the way things are now. From what you have said the current market hubs still existed then. I would expect that they would continue to exist after this change, although is a lesser capacity than they do now.

No? Way to strawman.

See I can do that to.
By your logic anything not easy is bad.

The OP's suggestions seems to be leading to making Yulai a Super-Jita, with even more congestion than Jita has now. Ugh. What would be much better would be to alter map connections to reduce the dominance of Jita and make the secondary hubs more equal to it. Tricky to do, though. Cutting a connection or two to Jita will likely just result in another Caldari system emerging as the game's uber trade hub. Sufficient connections would have to be altered to make Caldari space in general less of a crossroads to the galaxy.

I always thought it was a bad change tbh. So yes I agree, time to change it back.

+1

A "neutral hub" does not necessarily need to have any usable stations. Would Yulai be such a problem without any stations usable by players in it? For that matter what if CCP could just block market access in the entire system so that you can't buy or sell from within it?

Edit: Please note that trading and establishing or accepting contracts would also have to be blocked in the system as well to eliminate all trade-based server load that isn't explicitly related to transportation.

Basically, I couldn't exploit the price difference, as a central easily accessible hub acts as a normalizer across regions much easier than decentralized hubs do now.

People aren't limited to caldari space because it would be hard to get to another part of high sec - after all, for a bargain price, you can have all your assets lifted over the night by Red Frog or similar services. People are stuck in caldari space for other, mostly historic reasons.

I would agree with reactivating Yulai only if this were the case, not for the market aspect but because Yulai's only station was wiped off the map by the Elder fleet. I wouldn't mind buzzing through the wreckage of that.

The last thing this game needs is an even more centralized trade hub.