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Not really. While one can trade exclusively in high-sec, those stations/routes are often saturated pretty quickly. Low sec usually has trade goods selling for cheaper and buying for more, so dipping into low sec along your route can turn a nice additional profit.

I used to do this earlier on since replacing a T1 indy was fairly cheap and at the time the client was a bit lighter so I could usually escape with my pod (pre WTZ, so more small camps), it was a good quasi-newbie activity, though it did not scale well over time.

Good points:

Personally I don't think you should be able to restrict who uses a POCO at all, meaning if you set the tax rate to a favorable level it provides incentive (in all area's of space) for people to try and take advantage of it. If you keep it a bit higher you pay your corp more (which isn't a bad thing) and lessen incentive for outsiders to try to use "your" resources.

With things as they are, however, I would not alter the mechanics for High Sec POCO's at all. Excluding others would be a judgement call. Reserve the resources for your own use, or make money off of the large number of people harvesting the various resources the planet offers... likely most of which you are not interested in to begin with. Also, if you lose one during time of war it's decision time as to whether you replace it immediately, or take the chance that someone else will take the spot (forcing you to make decisions about war decing the interloper in return). No Concord respawn would be a very good thing.

Switching ownership of a POCO during a time of war would indeed have to be looked into. I could see the process taking a few days perhaps, or simply not be possible after a declaration of war has been proposed. These are options that would have to be looked at.


As to the "For Sale" sign, it was simply to provide incentive. Yes, all you said is true, but putting ads in your corp description is a clumsy mechanic for selling property... and observation is always preferable if possible. But if anchored, operational POCO's became available for sale via contract a lot of people would be interested in not only purchasing them solely to glean taxes but also in building them for the sole purpose of reselling them.

We can't commit (right here, right now) to a particular update schedule for the tariffs. I can see the value in that and I will talk to the team but Can't promise anything right now.

Highsec will remain the NPC controlled for the time being, but it's a cool idea.

We have to balance the value in defending a POCO versus the barrier of getting involved. We will monitor this balance and make adjustments if it becomes apparent there is a skew.

Cheers
Omen

Apologies, Highsec PI was the intended subject of that reply specifically. If you do PI in 0.0 you can probably get a 0% tax POCO which means your reward increased for your risk.

Regards
Omen

Everything T2 is going to go up in price. I saw that T2 drones are already up price in Jita as of last night. The taxes from PI are going to simply get added to the cost of everything. Enjoy!

I think they would need to operate a little differntly.

I can recall years ago the headaches caused by people who would buy up all of the newbie skillbooks around the training stations and relisted them at much higher prices. Seems fair in a cutthroat way, but really caused problems for the new player experience.

It would not be difficult for a corp or two to lock down all the POCOs within a few jumps of the starter stations, locking new players out of PI (since newbies are not going to take down a POCO, crow they would not even be able to afford the wardec or know what a corp was), so there would have to be some mechanism in place to stop such situations. Perhaps tax caps in 1.0-0.8 space or something.

Jack Dant it is, sorry on that mate, I mistaked the later part of you name with the more common know author of the„divine comedy", happens when you leave your glasses somewhere out of the room.

I was outlining the scheme for evaluation of the taxable base market value! How the scheme for the tax itself is constructed..., Scrapyard Bob's proposed brake down might just work fine with it.

Taking a 12 month market value average also would support the dynamic taxation adjustments to come. A yearly adjustment based on a 12 month average market value, NET value of course. Otherwise, in two three years the same problem is at the doorsteps again.
The point is transparency, so the one who keeps his excel sheet up, can pre evaluate the coming adjustment by the end of the year. In addition, a fixed date (winter expansion) also supports the planning schedule of the Dev’s.

I think that, at this point, everyone can agree that a third Dev Blog announcing the major changes to the taxation price index (and minor one to anchoring location) would have been a good idea.

One of my big concerns is this:
The new taxation price index (for lack of a better term) is causing the cost of PI to shoot up astronomically. That means that, in turn, the price of PI produced goods is going to shoot up as well. Particularly for things like, say Broadcast Node, where all the pieces run through 3 different colonies before final assembly. Then, at some point, CCP will re-index the prices again, based on the prices that have been drastically increased by the change we are going through now. Which will mean another enormous hike in PI expense, and another corresponding increase in end prices, and so on. And let's not forget the massive increase in demand for PI materials that is happening because of people building POCO's like crazy.

Eventually, things will balance out. Price index hikes will get smaller each time around, and the current blitz on POCO construction won't last forever. But the way things are set up now, expect a massive increase in PI goods costs (although I'm already seeing 30 to 40% increases in POCO components) and a correspondingly massive jump in tariff costs the next time prices are re-indexed.


I think it's pretty obvious that highsec Incursions turned into a ISK fountain of such huge size that it unbalanced the economy. So at this point ISK fountain reduction and ISK sink increases are needed to restore stability. I had hoped that the problem would be addressed at the source - HS Incursion bounties. But, failing that, I will accept other adjustments, such as removing insurance payments for Concord'ed ships. And I will grudgingly accept the massive ISK sink of NPC CO tariffs. It's just a crying shame that CCP completely failed to communicate this to the player base in any meaningful way - or solicit feedback on the eventual implementation - before the change went live.

I would suggest that you keep your harvesters running and watch Jita markets. The PI product prices are currently skyrocketing and you may kick yourself for folding too early once they stabilize.

Those who speculate the market fully expect all PI stuff to go up at least 20% in price, possibly more. You may want to check again if what you are doing is "not viable".

I'm generally in favor of what you were trying to do here. As I pointed out before release, the big problem is you rushed it; you just didn't give yourself enough time, to handle all the "non-technical" details. I don't point that out to say "I told you so", but rather to say that the core idea was good, but now we (CCP and the players) are in clean-up-the-mess mode, so let's get busy.

Those Robotics numbers are WAY out of line. What you have here is positive feedback, and that's a really bad thing in any system, including an economy. You want negative feedback, overall. I don't think you can fix the mistake now -- FIX FIX FIX isn't a good mode to get into. I think your way forward here is to just use a 6-month or 12-month average of some type. Arithmetic mean over a sliding window may be good enough, but there are many other options.

You want enough stablity that people can actually make plans and attempt to execute them. That includes both price stability, and product direction stability. You managed to destabilize both at once...

I must also point out that you really are trying to hard to tell people how you want them to play.

I think you need to draw the line at pulling the rug out from under people's play style. Give people options and incentives, yes. Rebalance, yes.

But the player who sits in station and trades and hasn't flown a ship in years is not a problem to be solved. He's a customer. Who knows why he plays that way? The challenges involved must work for him somehow. Don't view him as fresh meat that somehow must be delivered to the Goonswarm to be slaughtered, because he must risk his life. Let him risk his ISK instead.

Your first PI changes were a royal pain for me, because I had to spend hours redoing my planets. Despite the improvements in UI, that really wasn't fun.

Massive disruption of existing activities is something you should be minimizing. It basically takes all the work players have done, and suddenly discards it. Basically, YOU become a bigger risk than other players -- less predictable. And in turn, you are TAKING a huge risk .

That doesn't mean you don't make changes; it just means you need to value and respect the players own investments into the game. Having to go through a massive cleanup phase after every expansions really isn't much fun. A little more sensitivity in how things are introduced could avoid this "do all this work before you can have fun again" syndrome.

But the other problem I have with this change is the strong bias against small players. I don't mean "players who aren't in a player corp". I mean both "individuals doing things" and "small corps of a group of people who like to do things together".

I don't want to leave my corp -- people I enjoy and want to stay with -- to do POCO stuff. I'd seriously consider tackling that challenge, but you have designed it in a way I cannot, for purely mechanical reasons.

Likewise, my big concern about losec is that you've designed it in a way that may potentially be used to obtain stable control of large areas by large groups, while discouraging small investment. That's entirely fixable. Just remove the ability to restrict access -- or even remove the ability to vary the rates. That makes it a lot more competitive, and leads to more of the type of interactions you are seeking.

Finally, drop the investment cost of POCOs substantially. I think it likely you'd want to also make both Interbus and player POCOs a bit easier to attack, as well, although I hesitate to extrapolate too much from my experience doing it solo.

My biggest criticism of the game is that it is presently too much about huge blobs rather than direct interaction of individuals and small groups. Kind of like RL, if you think about it. You need to ensure that the individual player has fun, is involved and invested in the game. I understand that for technical reasons, those big groups take a lot of time and attention.

A lot of us simply cannot participate in as many group activities as we would like, because our schedules and real-life commitments are inflexible masters. Instead of trying to force us into "more interaction", you might try designing activities that we can do where the interaction is not tied to schedule. PI/POCO has that potential, if you don't force it into a corporations-only mode.