Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It seems old and silly to still have a limited number of corporate offices in a station (NPC or outpost). Please remove this restriction, and to maintain the ISK sink (or even increase it, since clone upgrades were taken out), give them a high base cost, plus a per-member cost.

As the number of members increases and the cost of a corp office increases, it would become more financially prudent to move into a POS (thus the "remove limitations once POS / Sov are revamped"), thus moving more people and assets into space and increasing a potential for conflict, as well.

It currently works that way, but with a limited number of offices, which can make things a rather huge pain when you can't just hop to another station in the same system (or, sometimes, even the same constellation).

At present, prices go down if there are two or more offices available, remain static if there is only one office available, and go up if there are zero offices available.

As for what a POS has to do with offices, Corporate Hangar Arrays function like an office, and different arrays all have a similar structure, as well. As a corp grows, it would eventually behoove them (in my own considerations above) to move to a POS as the price for a large corp could grow to be quite large.

The suggestion is mostly made of my frustrations with trying to run industry in an area where no offices are available and you can't put up a POS. Having to move materials between characters and accounts has become frustrating enough for me that I'm actually considering pulling out of the situation entirely and abandoning the process, just because offices are available elsewhere.

Not even close. It's a quality-of-life issue, not a profits issue. The profits I have right now are actually higher than if I had a corp office available, as using in-station trades is free, and private, zero-value contracts cost 10k ISK regardless of the value of the items within. A corp office is going to cost a lot more than I would save, but it would lessen the headache of moving goods between my characters to such an extent that spending an extra several ten million ISK a month on it is more than worth it.

Having offices available simply means that, instead of having to use trade windows and private contracts to move goods between my five characters, I would simply be pulling from a collective corp office, instead, where all goods are located and all characters can reach.

As well, the way that corp offices work currently is rather outdated. In a quiet system, a 200-person corp will be paying only 10k ISK for their office as a flat fee. A single character would be paying the same price (though, since a single character doesn't really need an office, let's go with two characters. A corp with two characters in it would pay the same 10k ISK fee as the 200-person corp).

What I'm proposing is to scale the cost of offices off the number of people in the corp while making offices unlimited instead of finite. A two-person corp needs less office space than a 200-person corp, wouldn't you agree? If there is a desire for it, increase it by a percentage for each office rented, in addition to a flat cost plus a per-member cost.

How about this? An office costs a flat fee of 10 million ISK per month, and then has a 1 million ISK per month cost per member. In addition, there's an extra flat fee of 5% per office rented in that station.

A corp with 2 members in a station with only one office rented would be paying 10m + 2x1m + 1x5%, or 12.6m ISK per month. This same corp in a station with 50 offices rented would be paying 10m + 2x1m + 50x5%, or 42m ISK per month.

A corp with 200 members in a station with only one office rented would be paying 10m + 200x1m + 1x5%, or 220.5m ISK per month. This same corp in a station with 50 offices rented would be paying 10m + 200x1m + 50x5%, or 735m ISK per month.

Just to reiterate, in a quiet location where only a single office would be rented, both corps are currently only spending 10k ISK a month on that office. This would be an increase for everyone in return for making offices available for everyone wherever they so pleased.

Of course, those numbers are just off the fly. They would absolutely need to be adjusted to absorb the full ISK sink that offices currently are (and then some, to handle clone upgrade costs).

It would still provide incentive to not gather a large number of corps in a single location unless there were an overwhelmingly powerful reason to do so (such as with Thera, for instance), and as a corp gets larger, it provides incentive to move out of a station and into a POS (which, again, is why I said in my first post that it should wait until after POS and role mechanics have been revamped).

To reiterate, a corp office will actually cost me more ISK than the free trades and very, very cheap zero-value contracts I do between my characters. This would be a quality-of-life change that would increase my costs and reduce my profits, but the quality of life improvement would be so huge that it would be worth it. A person could, much like they currently can, get around the mechanic by trading and contracting between their characters (as I currently am), but they're making a sacrifice in order to do so: they lose convenience to make more ISK.

It would affect nullsec, as well, I hope you realize, as well as trade hubs and mission hubs.

Not only that, based on a raw-ISK total, with the numbers I tossed out above, a 735m per-month cost for 200 people is less per character (3.675m each) than the 42m ISK for 2 characters (21m ISK each). The rough cost would actually go down on a per-character average as you added players to your corp.

If you're concerned about giving an undue advantage to smaller corps, though, then make it a higher base cost with a lower per-member cost. 100m base, 500k per member. A 200-person corp would have a monthly cost of 200m ISK, while the two-person corp would have a monthly cost of 101m ISK (both before any total-usage modifiers).

Just a quick edit, but the primary reason I originally even considered per-member costs was so that there would be an incentive for a corp to eventually move its assets into space, where things can be destroyed. Just so long as there is a static base-cost that will never be reduced, the system would be more beneficial to a larger group, as there are more players to spread that base-cost across. How much of an advantage it is would depend entirely upon how much said base-cost is.