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I'm not going to argue the changes, however it would be nice if you gave each player a one-time option to reset faction/npc standings. Most of us increased standings for highsec anchoring and tax/broker benefits. So now I have high faction standings that do nothing, and negative faction standings that are a considerable nuisance.

You are seriously paranoid. Most highsec dwellers don't trust people like Goons, so don't be surprised if they don't use their market hubs. If Goons try to corner a market in their little citadel, then buy orders will increase in neighboring Jita, and other suppliers will fill that void, thereby decreasing the market activity for the citadel. I'd give your scenario a good 2 days before it fell apart. Maybe a week if they went for broke and purchased every reasonable market order available in Jita without relisting anything.

You either missed the boat or simply didn't understand my comment.
I wasn't talking about high volume sales, I was talking about the things traders with less isk trade and make a living from. Those just starting out, unlike the Lucas's of the game not everyone has more isk than they need (his words not mine) and have to start out trading cheap items with little markup.

No small time trader is going to be making a living off trading trit for example.

Many of them trade meta items that have a slightly better than zero return on them. Many of those items will not be worth listing once cost to sell is increased, simply because there is not enough margin in them to make it viable.

And your right, for the small time trader just starting out, CCP is removing the cake so they won't get to eat it.

So, mind telling me where the contradiction is?

Doubt it. I don't even think jita will be abandoned.

The main problem is that if citadels were introduced with EVE and the NPC broker fee was always so high, the big hubs were never formed at the first place. Little guys would use small local citadels operated by the local power, each serving a close proximity, if they'd overextend, someone big would siege them. The inter-hub trading were done by professionals who avoid taxes by direct trades, contracts, maybe even corp hangars. Simply everyone relevant would know to convo Adam Adams if you have 1B+ ores to sell or buy and he'll give you a good price. Without large hubs, there would be nothing to hijack by Goons and PL.

Due to the low fees, and no citadels it became possible to use the market feature for everyone. Then, when everyone is used to go to Jita/Amarr... when he has products to sell or a new ship to buy, CCP rises the taxes and make it possible that huge nullsec powers collect the trade. Sure, people will adapt, local hubs will rise corps will start ore buyback on contracts and so on, so in a year or two the Goon/PL Perimiter hub became abandoned. But until it happens they make about 500T... more ISK than all ship destruction in a year.

It's like CCP announce that from now on Titan doomsdays will need Slaver Hounds as ammo and create a convoluted production method to make Slaver Hounds for about 100M each. In a few months the production lines build and things go smoothly. In the meantime, Joe Somebody who happened to have 10000 Slaver Hounds made 10T out of nothing. And it has absolutely nothing to do with Joe Somebody's alliance mates on CSM. If there is a new feature and Goons+PL take it like Tech Moons, the more power to them. But CCP shouldn't hand existing things over to them.

Same mechanics as a POS but more firepower. People will use them.

This thing you miss though is that the margin on those items is small because a large number of people trade them. When the margin hits zero they stop trading them and the margin increases. If the fees increase, the gap between buy and sell will increase until there is a non zero margin, then the exact same thing will occur again, people will trade with a small net margin.

What manipulation and scamming? The worst they can do is lock you out of your goods and you just click a button and the system relocates them to a station for you and you learn not to use that groups citadels again.

I can't imagine it happening since citadels will earn them ISK, and currently people lose titans and replace them and they pretty much get used for the jump bridges, so I don;t see people just not using them. I imagine if they did though CCP would change the defense mechanics and/or add more benefits to using them.

So basically "what if the weak give up and the strong thrive"? Well that's just the way of things. If other groups are so weak they jut give up and don't fight back then they don't really deserve a citadel anyway. The response is pretty much covered in the HTFU video.

Man, and the discussion was going so well earlier.

First off, the volume of ISK being traded can be found in the February Economic Newsletter/Devblog published by CCP Quant. The Forge has ~700 Trillion, which is basically Jita.

Secondly, (and I thought we'd agreed on this) Lucas, you agree that 0% and 0.9% are different, right? And that the attraction of being able to set taxes lower than current NPC taxes will be a pull factor for usage, right?

If so, please stop saying that without NPC tax rises, it'll be impossible to get people to use Citadels. Thank you :).

Thirdly, I thought we'd talked about the impact of NPC tax rises being this:

• Initially decreased trading volume due to low-no profit margins
• Increased barrier to entry for new traders, as standings and skill become required
• Exit of Market Makers (who in Eve are market traders) due to decreased trading volume (which means decreased income)
• Stratification and decreased liquidity due to exit of station traders
• 3 month (at least) drag on markets as people who list all items before changes have a competitive advantage over other in NPC stations

I think that is most of the impacts covered.

Finally, (and this is more philosophical),


In real life, there's an incentive not to kill yourself: you keep on experiencing. In Eve, if you make things unrewarding/punishing, people can leave without cost.

If the weak give up, the strong can't play Eve. :P

Yeah, but it is not Jita. There is nothing preventing a person or a group of persons from setting up in Perimeter right now. Drop your prices a bit and save people a jump to one of the systems with the highest ship loss counts in the game day-in-day-out. But it does not happen. Why is there so such coalition of traders the can siphon of a bunch of ISK into their pockets? Well?

As for the 7% the problem is that a tax increase is only born entirely by the seller when the good in question is perfectly price inelastic. That is a very, very restrictive assumption, hence total Bravo Sierra. There maybe price increases, but not that large.

Second it is a permanent effect. It is not likely to cause some cascade effect. It might, but I'd like to see the mechanism for this cascade mapped out.

As for Goons and the Imperium: hint, they could have done this quite easily in....wait....wait....NS where most of us live and prefer to live. So this notion that Goons will set up a super discount citadel in Perimeter or some such is just errant foolishness. Please show us this business plan and how it will work. Where, for example, will Goons, et. al. get the Stuff™ to go in this WalMart Citadel? Hmmmm?

As for letting in people who are not Goons then mocking them endlessly, yes because that is such an awesome way to increase your customer/tax base. **** all over these people and they'll stay because :reasons:.

Even when Goons tried to run a POCO empire they set the taxes at a reasonable level...why? They wanted people to use the fraking moons. Nobody using the moons, no taxes revenues.

Here let me help you with some math:

0 times any number is....still 0.

I don't care, the point still remains. You have in inherent contradiction in there. You can't have traders driven out then the reduced competition driving prices sky high without entry by new traders at that point (or even old traders coming back). That is exactly what you wrote. You wrote,



Seems pretty clear that you saw the exit of traders in certain items leading to "monopolies" (another hint, monopolies tend to need some sort of exogenous support such as a government preventing entry into the market in question to survive long).

Further, competition is price competition, as in the sense of Bertrand. That is prices cannot stay elevated for long with even a few traders as the ONLY dimension they can compete on is price. That is just a small number of traders will continuously drive prices down.