Market Discussions

There isn't a downside that I can see. It's just a matter of difficulty of implementation (which is obviously a question for CCP).

You would obviously implement corp and alliance/empire taxes on top of the POS owners fees. In Hi-Sec the NPC station owners would take that tax allowing CCP to replace the current tiny isk sink with a larger one. In Low-Sec the same would be the case but it would make sense to set the taxes lower to balance risk/reward. In 0.0 the taxes would go to the corp and alliance that own the Outpost, giving Sov-holding alliances another way of earning isk from activity in 0.0 (people making stuff) rather than inactivity in 0.0 (moon mining). With a standings element in the tax calculation you can reward high carebear standings in empire while giving 0.0 entities a neat way to control how much they tax different people.

It very much follows in the direction POCOs have gone and is in-line with CCP stated ambitions for 0.0 and elsewhere.

In order to balance the risk element of a player trusting another player to keep their POS array running for the duration of the job you would ideally make it so that the isk fee is taken from the player using the slot but is not handed to the player providing the slot until the job completes successfully. This way you still risk having a job interrupted by a POS destruction or failure (and that is a good thing) but you also make it impossible for a player to rent their slots just before tearing down their POS (they cannot take the fees and run).

That would also increase the value of hi-sec real estate.

If you think about having a large faction POS in a busy system near a hub. Put 12 Hyasyoda's in it to give you 48 ME and 48 PE slots (all faster than normal NPC slots) and then rent those out for an average of 10m per month. That's 960m per month, minus 300m fuel (or whatever when the prices settle), for 660m per month in profit. 10m per month slot fee is peanuts to the end user.

I really do not think you will have a hard time finding people to rent out slots in good locations.

The same goes for Outpost systems in 0.0, which can be turned into industrialists playgrounds if you throw up a good number of supporting towers. That is a stark contrast to the current situation in 0.0 (and even after the proposed outpost upgrades).

Put up large ship array, tear it down when someone puts a long job in

What /might/ be interesting is an escrow for 'if your job is cancelled, you'll get this in payment, per hour.', set by the players. Take the risk, and go for the cheaper slot without escrow, or go for the more expensive one, with at least some being given.

Then you'll have a reason not to tear down towers on war decs.

I don't think it is a good idea to remove all the existing slots to introduce this. I think there is a place for both NPC slots and Outpost slots as slower but safer options for the risk adverse. You do not really want to force people into a new playstyle, rather bait the hook with profit and people will move over all by themselves. The prices for NPC slots need to be re-evaluated anyway, but players can compete with the NPC offering quite easily with their faster slots. Let each player choose which they want to use and in time there will be plenty of people providing and using player supplied slots.

Also there are places where POS cannot be anchored, so removing NPC slots from those locations would cause a bit of a black hole.

It would still be an isk sink due to tax. If coded correctly it would be a larger isk sink with CCP adjustable settings. No new isk would be generated and it's a market priced service industry so if it's too easy and profitable to do then prices will naturally fall.

Almost the entire EVE industrial model is AFK isk making. Changing that would be somewhat more fundamental. I don't think CCP want to make people actually put together the ships themselves, so afk is probably the way it is going to stay.

Resource gathering, without which none on the AFK industry stuff can happen, is where the activity happens and that is where CCP is moving with recent and planned changes.

The fee, tbh, isn't the thing people would be concerned about. I's the loss of materials when the job gets cancelled. Or the waste of time.

But those are, I guess, more important for the assembly lines, than the ME/PE research lines.

~
tho taxing the transaction would compensate/exceed the station fee´s I guess




na you can`t say that... while the process of the manufacturing itself does not require any player interaction, nearly everything surrounding requires a lot of it. it reuqires at least buying minerals, hauling minerals (wich can be quite some effort when it comes to ship/cap-ship construction), invention/researching/copieing, starting/finishing indy -obs and the selling, while your proposal only requires to fuel a tower to keep the isk flow up

. its also something different to solve a problem as creating more of said problem.

Do not forget that if this is lucrative and you pick a prime spot for your POS then you are going to have to manage and defend your POS. Other POS owners will be undercutting your rates and attacking your towers.


I'm sorry those figures where just an illustration to show that it would be worth doing initially. I totally accept that prices will find their level. That level will vary from location to location, but for most 660m per month is not going to happen. It is also worth noting that private research POSes under the current system make billions per month. By taking on this new approach you are moving in to budget price self service research, not some technetium style broken isk fountain.

I think the best of what this will achieve will not be in hi-sec anyway. The impact on 0.0 industrial corps will be massive.

I wrote up a little more readable version in a blog post.

All your POS are belong to US

Without too much feature and mechanics jargon.

--- Without images ----

POS Rental

NPC slots for building, and the associated issues have been in game since launch, and are, by and large, not felt to be an issue by most players, outside of industrialists and researchers. Due to this lack of attention from players, this is not an issue which is raised regularly. Another reason for this issue not being given higher priorities on wish-lists is that it has been a problem for so long that people just seem to adjust to it.

This could be elaborated on in a lot of detail, going over the historical discussions etc, but instead of arguing what the problem is, I would prefer to address a suggested solution which is very much in line with many of the solutions which CCP have already done in relation to NPC controlled aspects of the game.

The reason for bringing this up now is because of the recent ice changes. These changes will be felt by the POS owners as fuel costs increase, due to a decrease in the availability of ice (LINK TO POST). This means that it is going to become more and more difficult to compete with the NPC rented slots, this would be equivalent to the NPCs selling max research BPOs at a fraction of what players can sell them for. To give a specific example: In lowsec you can rent at 1isk/hr research cost.

What we fundamentally need is to finally start shifting more and more aspects of eve into the player to player, or PvP aspects. A good place to start is in industry, as this already has a lot of attention from all types of players. The suggestion is that we need a public rental solution whereby players can directly put their POS slots up for public access.
So, without further ado, the idea is, in simplified form, as follows:

NPC slots would be priced in a similar manner to Office Rental slots, with the price increasing if all slots are taken, and decreasing with lower levels of usage. If a station is continually unused, the price would continue to fall. There would be no upper ceiling on the costs, as with office rents, and a minimum fee would be set by the average ice prices, in a similar way to the estimated costs are based on average market prices.

Whilst one effect of this would be to encourage industrialists to spread out, based on previous changes in game (changing of agents standing for missions etc), we know that players are creatures of habit, and we all like being near hubs and supplies for building, so the population of industrial hubs is likely to change little.

A good way to help the player base come to terms with this fact would be to have a similar warning on rents as you do with trading on the market, so if you are renting at several 100% above the average rental fee, you would get a warning pop-up. A two tier might even be beneficial, one yellow warning, that you are now potentially using a slot at a loss, and one red where you are taking a larger hit.

The way that this would become more of a player-to-player involvement is that players owning POSes would have the ability to rent out slots to members of the public, whether for research, invention or for manufacture.

The way this would work is that when you put a Lab etc online, there would be an “activate public access” option. This would be accessible from space, whilst the S&I interface would have an option under Installations for the POS owner to set the rates at which they wish to rent their slots out.

From the control tower manager screen, you would be able to set the “View”, “Take” and “Use” drop down menu to “Public” in addition to the filters already available.

From the S&I interface, you would be able to set the parameters such as Price, and standing discounts, as at present.
Once set, your POS building/research etc options would be listed under S&I at stations which you have an office at, and available to anyone who wanted to access them, providing they met the criteria set by your corp, so non-red for example.
They would show on the S&I interface as “Affiliates” on the drop down list which currently shows Public, Personal, Corporation
Due to the nature of eve, the owner of the POS would be anonymous, as would the name of the person renting the slot, so the transaction would show in the wallet journal as a “Lab rental slot fee” from the station which the job was injected from, that is, the NPC station would act as a middle man, so it would show as “Lab Rental Payment: Roden Shipyards, Rancer IV – Moon 18”.

The items being manufactured would not show either instead there would be a time that the slot was being used for, as there is now with NPC slots.

In the event that a POS goes offline, or is wardecced, the jobs would be moved to the next available slot, and placed in impound after completion. The price to claim would be the difference in costs for the time which the job was moved. (I have to admit this is a thorny issue to deal with, and am not sure what the best solution to this would be, as there are so many ways in which this could be abused, I can think of 3 or 4 right now, and I am sure there are many more)

These problems could be alleviated a little by showing POS uptime, visibility of the owner if you have blue standing, and ability to see the prices, much as in the market, so you could see if there was a 10x difference between two owners in the same system.

This is, as mentioned at the start, a simplified view of how it could work, and there are many tweaks that could be made, and various ways to run the system better than I have suggested, but, I wanted to get the discussion going, and to get some ideas out there which might be noticed.

I did a little research and some number crunching. Just to see how bad things actually are with this issue. I expect some out there have already done some of these numbers, but here goes.

With current Fuel cost at 20k per block and about 2.5k on charters the monthly fuel cost for a small tower is 150m give or take..

If setting up a research POS the slots add up to about 30, whereof 25 have practical value. With npc pricing the rental income of these if they are plugged 24/7 would bring a grand total of around 50m best case. So npc are basically giving away 100m worth of research every month. Competing with that is not just hard its impossible.

POS income from slots: 50m

POS expenses on Fuel : 150m

So even with these rather simplified numbers, we have a rather considerable problem imho. I have actually used the 2000 isk per hour numbers, and not the low sec 100 isk per hour avg.

To break even the actual rental prices per hour would need to be somewhere in the 5-10k range.

This not considering all the detailed numbers, like investment in POS equiment, logistics and risk..