Science & Industry

Other players shouldn't get to passively accumulate income through my hard work. That's unfair and ridiculous. Anything above 1% tax rate is ridiculous. Quite frankly customs offices should be removed from player control entirely. Let the NPC factions control them.

So, go build your own poco. Then you can collect this "free" isk you speak of.

If you encounters difficulties then maybe its not so free to obtain/upkeep these.

They are too expensive and there are no free planets in high-sec. If I could guarantee a free planet, okay, maybe, but there aren't any. The older corps already have a complete monopoly over this aspect of the game. The tax needs to be lowered substantially.

With the new NPC reduction skill, there are plenty of planets in high sec that are now less costly in terms of taxes than before Rubicon was launched. Yes, a corp that spent 70m to launch a POCO is now earning 150k of the taxes you used to spend anyway. Try not to let it ruin your life.

I disagree. And I've just used as many facts and solid numbers as you did.
Just a sidenote - 'unfair' has rarely to do anything with game design/balance.

This is unfair!... It reminded me of something my six year old son would say and I almost spit my soda out from laughing...

Eve is all about PVP. PI is no exception. If you want lower PI tax join a corp that has POCO's

What I meant is that fairness is a subjective term(and on a smaller scale) , while game balance approaches the situation from all directions.
An example would be that it's unfair that frigates have lower dps than battleships, but it's balanced because they are cheaper, faster, ect.

Taxes balance out relative safeness of highsec.

Well said, but I disagree. It would be perfectly logical to say that it is fair, rather than unfair, that frigates have lower DPS than battleships because they are cheaper and faster. In other words, it is fair because those few opposing attributes balance them, their strengths and weaknesses offset each other in practice. But it would be unfair if for example the frigate had such low dps that is made their cheapness and speed irrelevant while the battleship remained useful; that is if the scale was tipped slight in favor of the battleship.

So in respect to the PI, fairness would mean that the pros and cons of buying and owning a POCO and the costs associated with PI offset each other perfectly, that is balanced each other out. But they don't in reality because the tax rate is above and beyond a reasonable percentage compared to the ultimate practical sale price of the PI commodity. There are other ethical issues involved too however: One is for example that the current POCO system gives older players and large corps an extremely unfair advantage over noobs since only experienced players and corps can afford them in the first place, while the noob is forced into servile industry.

Also the safeness argument isn't really fair either. PI isn't so lucrative in the first place to warrant the dangers of low-sec and most likely guaranteed death.

You are clearly not getting the point of this game...

It is hard for me to say from my limited time in the game, but on one of my other characters I was all set to do PI, and then found out about how it is no longer worth it due to the substantially higher taxes in high sec.

Now I have not personally checked it out, so I am taking it as true what some fairly smart and honest people have advised me, and then too, no one witjh those traits has advised me they are wrong. Together, that satisfied me, and so I just abandoned PI totally.

Again I am still new and do not "know", but it seems unless you are in a reasonably strong pvp corp in null or low sec, or in a similar wormhole corp, well you have to pay the taxes. And it also seems more "bad" can happen to your investments of time and isk.

So frankly, not being in a large pirate or similar corp, and not in a good wormhole corp, it seems there is a substantial part of the game that CCP created that is just not going to be workable for me. Now if that applies to just me, no one but me cares. But if that is negatively impacting substantial numbers, as I suspect, perhaps a majority of the players, and especially the newer players, well that might mean activity and engagement and interaction with a large part of the game CCP invested a good bit in, is going to be steadily declining, harkening me to one of my favorite laws of reality: The Law of Unintended Consequences

If the goal of CCP is to try to find ways to tacitly "force" paying customers to play the way CCP wants them to, well put me down as forecasting that just like the other 1000 times it was tried, it will fail. So what happens is rather than seeing the paying customers herded into pvp and all that, you see an exodus from PI. Which I suspect is close to the last thing CCP really wanted.

I hope to one day enjoy that aspect of the game, so I hope they rethink the changes. It is fine and good to allow all sorts of play in a sandbox game, and not so good to favor one segment at the cost of an equally important segment. Best it would seem is to make PI sufficiently profitable to be worth doing in high sec, but much more profitable (and riskier) in low and null sec.

If and when they get the balance right, it will again be attractive and attract more activity.