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Hauling a load of cheap items from anoms to a highsec hub right now pays a small profit (covers fuel bill plus a bit) - Once taxes and brokers fess go up many of those items won't be worth hauling as the profit margin on them is just not enough to cover the additional fees.
Traders in the existing hubs aren't going to start offering more on cheap buy orders simply because I need to make a profit.

Posting in an apocalypse thread, get your bottlecaps and fast cars here!

/s

WTFAYTA? Nobody is stopping a large or medium citadel from being a trad hub. Nobody is stopping anyone from plunking down a trade citadel either.

And here is a problem with Goons, et. al. trying to take over the world...errr HS trade. Every fleet and every pilot they have to go shoot a citadel in some system somewhere means that that is one less fleet to defend their space.

People are now talking about monopolies, but in reality they do not really know how monopolies work. There is a concept known as a natural monopoly. One of the requirements for a natural monopoly is sub-additivity of costs (note that this is a necessary condition, but not sufficient--that is you need this condition, but by itself it won't lead natural monopoly). It works like this.

Suppose we have two citadels. Citadel 1 has Y quantity of trade. And citadel 2 has X. So costs are subadditive iff (no that is not a typo, iff = if and only if),

C(X+Y) < C(X) + C(Y).

That is, costs are less if you have everything going on in one citadel. This condition is met if we consider just the immediate costs of running a citadel. That is, a citadel of any size can, AFAIK, have an unlimited number of market orders and the material to run said citadel does not increase as the number of orders increases.

But, and this is a big but, economists do not just look at those costs*. Another cost is the costs associated with having to travel to just one citadel. Thus, it is quite possible that having just one mega mall citadel will actually cost more than having 2 or more. To see that this is a cost consideration, consider where you buy at the mega mall, but then have another player haul it. Unless they charge nothing for hauling travel time is indeed a valid cost to consider.


Another cost is system congestion. It's great if the prices at the mega mall citadel are really low, but if you can't get into the the system to buy said items due to congestion then they might as well have prices 1,000x higher.

So it is not clear that even the necessary condition is met. Could be, but there should be some doubt here. After all, this all applies even more so to NPC station trading, but we do not have just 1 big trade hub and none anywhere else.

As for the sufficient condition there needs to be price vector that covers the costs and prevents another firm from entering and siphoning off some of the trade business and earn a profit. I am highly doubtful of this one and one would be hard pressed to show that such a price vector exists given the large number of prices and the possible permutations of that vector even if the economy were in equilibrium.

So no, I don't find the arguments that HS trade is going to be exclusively a thing of the the rich and powerful--i.e. NS alliances. I put little credence in the monopoly argument.

*Natural monopoly and monopoly in general is something that should be looked at from the level of "society" and not just the firm. The idea here is that if you do have a natural monopoly the socially efficient solution, at least in theory, is to have 1 firm, but even in this case there might be limits unless the subadditivity is global. This is why there are regulated utilities. Instead of having N distribution systems and N-times the costs to serve the same number of customers.

I've already dumbed it down quite a bit....

Any monopoly that does not satisfy the definition of a natural monopoly cannot be sustained except via a continuous and credible threat of force. The continuous and credible part means that anybody trying to monopolize or cartelize HS trading will have go knock down any entrant. Failing to knock down an entrant means many more entrants will follow. That is an additional cost of trying to create a monopoly/cartel.

Explain how that is accomplished? Positing what if scenarios with no explanation is mental masturbation.

I still have not seen a valid rebuttal to the fact that the proposed implimentations will have serious consequences to player retention. As it has been stated by many they will drop subs and even mains and walk away from the game. An then it has been stated that the proposed implimentations will also have serious effects on the retention of new players as well. An the later is from those that deal with new players on a daily basis.

Also what has failed time and again to be address by those that seem to love these plans is how it deviates from the over all plans and goals CCP Seagull has stated time and again.

Some seem to think that us from CAS just want people to stay in CAS forever. This is actually not the case we want people to stay in the game as long as they are having fun. We want people if they choose to join a player run corporation to know where they are going, why they are going, as well as to be a benefit to whom they are going.

Some may want to set the goals as stated by CCP Seagull aside fine so be it, yet you can not set aside a retention issue. Hell even the Mittani in his art of war tells you this. Retention and keeping people logging in is so vital that wars and sov are won or lost over it.

So basically if things go as planned what Citadels will be bringing is an over all player retention nerf.

An youll just get new players from where exactly?
You will combat the yeah I used to play even but then CCP did ______. How exactly?

I have talked to 8 people in the past two weeks alone that used to play but left because of one change or another that I had almost had talked into coming back but when they saw this particular set of changes said nah it would effect their style of play in a negative way to much. I know its only 8 people but you think I am the only one that has a story like that? You think I will not hear it again? Your seriously suffering from cognitive dissonance if you believe so.

So why impliment something that you now blows up the supposed plans and goals and will also cause retention to be a bigger issue?

@Gil.

The reason you've not seen a rebuttal is because your post, in the most blatant sense, is ungrounded, baseless, unsubstantiated fear-mongering.

There are many, many reasons to be worried about Citadels. You raised none.

Yes, I repeat, none.

No-where in your post did you raise either evidence or data to support your post. You have failed utterly to enumerate why you believe such things will happen. You are, I have no doubts, the worst example of the insanity that Lucas feels he reads every time someone on our 'side' posts.

By posting, you have devalued the arguments of anyone who supports your cause.

Look, I agree with you. I think the some of the changes are bad. However, I think the changes can be argued against from evidence and data. There's no need to leap off the deep end.

Ahhh, yes the poor new players. I think this should be a corollary to Malcanis' law. Whenever there is a change existing players do not like, they invoke the interests of new players as an argument against said change.

And we saw similar arguments, for example, with PI.

I am always amazed at how brittle people seem to think the Eve economy is.

Seriously, why would people suddenly stop playing, because on average the price of things will go up at most 1.75%? And the actual price increase will probably be less if people do move to citadels and the broker's fee is lower than the NPC lower bound of 3.5%? Seriously?

As for "how it will work", it works on a number of assumptions.

1) The build time is relatively long, the BPOs are relatively expensive and the BPC Citadels are built relatively quickly.

2) Few enough people will be first-adopters for Citadels, and they'll be the evangelists who will be willing to set up their own citadels.

So, it boils down to this:

There are ~5 Citadel BPC with ME10,TE10. They'll be the first 5 Citadels to be anchored.

There are ~25 systems **worth** anchoring a Citadel in now, (where a Citadel makes back it's money if the market is relisted etc)

2 of those 25 are unanchorable: Jita/Amarr. That leaves 23. (Remember this is all in Highsec). Effectively, that leaves 18 'future Citadel Systems' to be taken.

So, the best 5 Citadel systems are taken, and the evangelists move into those Citadels to make their ISK.

(This is where the conditioning begins.)

Ebil enemy kicks down these 5 citadels: first Citadel KM is going to be a big draw. People worked hard/spent lots to kill new ships as they were introduced. Remember these Citadels won't have good modules or guns.

Evangelists get burned.

Now there's a period of there being **no Citadels**, of up to a month. This is when the conditioning heightens, either by propaganda or just ganking BPC carriers or building a public cartel.

Then the second wave of Citadels come out: Ebil enemy organises more 'burn' campaigns. Evangelists repeatedly burned via harassment and such things. They don't want to build a Citadel because they've seen what happens when you put one up.

Now you've got no/very few evangelists willing to take the risk because the 'reward' is known. Effectively, a conditioned response.

Basically, it's cost Ebil enemy enough tags for ~10-15 fleets, Ship losses and such, and they've gained the experience of fighting a Citadel (sounds familiar? :P) and a conditioned passive player response, which is self perpetuating.

It isn't a thousand Citadel kills to control the markets, it's 10 to 15 kills to tell people what happens if they *try* to control the market.

But then we've seen no data (IIRC) on the building times of modules and Citadels, so maybe it'll be a lot quicker to build than I imagine. Nevertheless, Citadels don't have the benefit of safety in numbers which POCOS under NPC and Player controls have.

The problems with this argument are that you've not defined what time period they must make back their cost (I fully expect larger citadels to take a long time to achieve this), you've limited it only to market trading while they will undoubtedly make isk in a host of other ways (office rental, refining, manufacture, clones) and you've not considered that markets might spread differently with citadels than they have without them.

If that worked, it would have worked in other areas where large groups have tried (and failed) to monopolise an area. When people keep losing their citadels, they don't just think "Oh well I'll not bother with a citadel", they make it a goal to burn the citadel down of the group that forced them into that position. There's more than enough other players to burn down the citadels of any of the biggest groups.