Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Your ideas will end hauling between hubs, whether you believe it or not. Just think of it this way: if YOU are willing to pay 10% extra to have it auto-hauled in 30min, other players will likely do the same. Even if not all players feel that way, you are taking a significant amount of the hauling business away. Just use courier contracts, since that's what they were designed for. Or fly yourself there, and pick up what you need. It really doesn't take that long, especially if its just a mod or two and you don't need to fly a hauler for the occasion.

I would like to note that population caps are pushing people to other markets(Amarr currently).

Seriously, what happened to HTFU lately...

Courier it. Pay Red Frog to deliver it for you. Get an alt to haul it. So many ways...

I have to second that. In 2012, about 20% of our 100k contracts in Red Frog were hub-to-hub contracts. With OP's proposed system, we would likely lose a large proportion of those (espcially by end-users of products). I'd rather lose business to a competing player-driven service than an automagic delivery option.

The argument that "broken" is local dynamics and flavor I disagree with. I also disagree with the argument that "well its broken but we're making lots of money from it so it shouldn't be fixed". They're both nonsensical.

If the traders were actually doing their jobs of transporting goods to hubs then then the hubs wouldn't be dead and unstocked. Jita wouldn't have a huge queue of people and you could buy and sell stuff in any hub instead of the mandatory trip to Jita.

I think its also fallacious to say that I could have Red Frog transport something I needed for me. If I wanted to buy specific item to fit on my ship the idea that I would contact Red Frog Freight and have it ordered down to Rens from Jita is ludicrous. That's like going to my local shop, finding their out of milk and having to get a courier van to bring one from the other side of the state.

You can argue all you like that the hubs are not broken but a simple trip to a hub to fit out a ship will show you are incorrect, unless you're in Jita or Amarr.

This has been proposed before (look up Interbus), but I am against it for several reasons:
1. I prefer to have competition between players about delivering the best service, not NPC's
2. I don't like arbitrary price ceilings and floors set by NPC's, whether it is for products or services, and I see no need to introduce a new one, as I prefer prices set by supply and demand among players.
3. Both public couriers and private couriers seems to function pretty well atm, there is no need to make an NPC service doing the same service as players easily can provide now. There is no shortage of people wanting to haul it seems. You have gathering points like Haulers Channel to increase the visibility of your public contracts, and you have several courier services (most notably PushX and Red Frog, but there are others as well).

To a limited extent I could see some of this but not as broadly as you outline it. No way in hell should cross-hub purchases and deliveries ever be allowed. Convenience shopping is a huge motivator for a great deal of trade in EVE.

What you could do is have each empire & station implement a "protectionism" market schema - "local" goods have lower taxes on them, "foreign" goods have higher taxes on them with no way to negate all taxes via skills & standings.

This would also be tied to sec status of the space stations are in - more protectionism in higher sec systems, less and less as the sec status goes down. Pirate stations wouldn't care what was sold being as their stations are run by thieves so the bulk of what's sold there is stolen.

Simply put; costs go up on for selling from "out of empire" sourcing (pirate goods always taxed a lot out of empire), but the lower the sec status of a system, the less enforceable this ideology is.

Design the tax structure based upon status of the source type - friendly v.s. hostile - (amarr selling in caldari, gallente in minmatar, SOE in gallente, etc.) so that the relationship is expressed in taxes levied.

With respect to interbus and concord stations - they would charge the highest tax rates possible between empires so the equivalent of Amarr goods being sold out of Minmatar space and the like. They are there to service the empires in different ways - not to compete with the empire's taxable markets.

By making costs higher for out of empire, you'd encourage more niche marketing within a given empire. The ability to look up prices cross region wouldn't be a consolidate view but a region by region view. You would have to pick what area you want to look at - not just a list view based upon item across all space.

Don't remove rewards from those who research markets.

you are correct, it was after ccp had removed some of the old "highways" of space travel that jita became a more central place and went up in popularity.