EVE General Discussion

T2 BPO cartels were an outlier and shouldn't ever again be mentioned in 'ways to fund an alliance'

I say nonsense. My first time around eve about 3 years ago I was ice mining in providence with a mackinaw on my first account and was never really in danger with the intel you had about those that moved in and out of your area.

industrial alliances if they have the customers to buy what they make should have the means to wield as big a club as their isk can afford them.

Ah, the wonders of weasel words.

Yes, it might not be CCP's fault since there are other explanations that would lead to the same result. None of those explanations match reality, of course, and it is CCP's fault, but as long as we stay at the hypothesis stage, it might indeed be due to one of those other reasons (which then turn out not to be the case).

I hope people don't think these moon and industry changes will ever mean a place for the mythical "little guy" (whatever individual pastiche of fantasy this means to you) in nullsec.

The moon change is ultimately a tweak on an existing system for organizational incentives and the indy changes an extremely minor sop for people who actually want to do "stuff" in nullsec.

None of these represent any movement towards a fundamental change in how organizations and power functions in nullsec.

Really it's this simple

It costs X to make $stuff in hi-sec

It costs Y to make $stuff in sov 0.0

It costs M to move $stuff from hi-sec to 0.0

(Where "cost" is the sum of mineral cost, production cost, transport cost and opportunity cost to make a given quantity of whatever item)

As long as X + M is less than or equal to Y for any given product, no one is ever going to build those things in 0.0 unless for RP reasons or a straight up game rule disctating that they can't build anywhere else. All the extra slots in the world can't change this. M is pretty low because jump freighters, rorquals, etc, can move a cubic metre fairly cheaply, and they're fairly common. Any industry balance has to assume that the sum cost of moving goods between hi and 0.0 is very low.

At the moment, hi-sec gets 3 massive "cost" advantages

1) A huge amount of free invulnerable, inalienable slots, often in the same station as you can easily get perfect refines, loads of office slots, research slots etc., etc.

2) CONCORD protection 24/7 at zero cost, which hugely reduces the overhead of moving finished products and materials.

3) A massive local supply of low-end minerals; it's much cheaper, logistically speaking, to move the high ends to where the low ends are than vice versa.

Now the Odessey ore changes will go some way to redressing cost 3, but hi-sec cost advantages 1 & 2 are left largely intact.

Until such time as either 0.0 stations get an efficiency advantage equivalent to those cost advantages, or else hi-sec stations charge "realistic" amounts for the use of their slots, very little industry will take place in 0.0; ammo, cap boosters, cyno frigates, etc.

That's nonsense. Those were broken by the drone regions making mining worthless, not "oh look a side effect of invention". The utter collapse of the highend minerals that made 0.0 mining a joke half a decade ago is the problem there, and the drone regions didn't create this unstoppable pvp juggernaut. They are also not industrial alliances, they're nothing more than today's spacelords renting to ratting bots instead of mining bots. Endless supplies of mega and zyd do not create local industry, they just created local resource harvesting. Today, that's ratting instead of mining, mostly, thanks to years of minerals being completely borked.

The "open to all" player owned stations were largely the result of people trying to force an ideology into a game that doesn't support it (the laughable collapse of the goonswarm libertarian free-trade-zone for example) and getting crushed because it turns out it just doesn't work as a paradigm in this game.

Much of the difference between early eve and current eve is also not fundamental mechanics changes but just the process of learning how to play the 0.0 sov game, the increasing number of people in 0.0, and the vicious evolutionary process winnowing out bad forms of alliances.

With t2 bpos, the "can be rich and powerful" still existed, it was just you had to be lucky enough to have some t2 bpos. Then, not only did you have an endless isk spigot but you had one that could never be taken away from you. That was going to create the same crowding out, just in a different way.

I agree.

Personally I'd like to see the following:

- Much higher transactions taxes in Empire, the current tax in lowsec and NPC 0.0 and alliance set tax in 0.0 to allow lower prices in 0.0/lowsec.
- A complete end to mineral compression, potentially through lowering reprocess efficiency across the board dramatically (does it really make sense to get back 90+% of the materials from building something afterwards?)

Personally, I'd also remove jump drives from jump freighters or at the very least ban them from empire. **** those things tbh.

That's why you should nerf importation of finished products (you can't nerf it completely because we still gotta import tons of ice highsec mines even under the 80% max plan, and export tons of moon mats) and buff the everliving **** out of mineral compression, not continue to believe that 0.0 should be mining its own lowends

or i mean let us do that in a reasonable way, I am all in favor of nerfing highsec into the ground but ending even their ability to mine for scraps is a little vicious even for me.

A fundamental change in how organizations and power functions in nullsec? I don't think so.

Even a massive shift in nullsec-destined industry from hisec to nullsec will do little to change how organizations and power functions in nullsec. Moreover, it will have even less of a chance of producing a place for the mythical "little guy" that so many people who bleat about ringmining, etc seem to be advocating for. Better industry infrastructure is a boost to the day to day gameplay of the average member and a better moon system is a boost to the organizational conflict drivers, that's all.

My point is that these changes are about making existing nullsec better based on how it runs now, not changing the very fundamentals of how it runs, and even less so towards something where smaller and weaker organizations will have a better chance of surviving and thriving.