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I think we agree, but phrasing like that is needlessly hostile.

Yes, there will be better treatment for NS alliance members. That's really who Citadels are for.

The issue you and I have is that the rest of the game is being treated poorly. We shouldn't be punished for playing the game elsewhere. Null is not the only area of the game.

You can setup a citadels if you want. Of course you will also have to defend it just like we will have to defend ours. We are not getting any preferential treatment. We are only going to make a better use of the available tools while still playing the game by the exact same rules as you do. The fact that we decided to work as a group to achieve stuff is the reason we will have it easier, not arbitrarily because we are in null sec. If you are un-willing to make an effort to build a group of player to setup 1 or more citadels, then you will have to do the work by yourself. Should CCP hand you lower tax rate just because you are un-willing to jump through the hoops required to setup a citadel and maintain it just because you are un-willing to play with many people? It's a MMO FFS...

They are currently too low to make citadels competitive while taking into account the added risk of using citadels instead of NPC stations which is why NPC station are getting modified. If the tax for example was only set lower than the current NPC taxes, the incentive would just flat out not be good enough to use it while taking into account what risk you take for being in a citadel instead of a NPC station. They could not set citadels even lower because we are already so close to 0 anyway.

They are not unbalanced with themselves but would be unbalanced with citadels if left at the current level.

The problem is simple.

Citadels and their services will cost isk to run, even if you mine it yourself. NPC stations will offer the same services at a much cheaper/free rate simply because they have no fuel costs plus the added bonus of not exploding and ammo is thrown at them.

In order for citadels to work the NPC station are going to have to charge a bit more than citadels for their services otherwise the effort, cost and risk of owning a citadel is simply not worth it. So because the costs of NPC station services is so low the only option is to hike the prices so the citadels can have the option of charging less as a reward for using them.

(Quoting you because you can use grammar and capitalisation correctly.)

This argument is based on the false premise that services should and will always cost ISK to run: CCP decides if services will cost ISK, or if their fuel costs will be negated via structure bonuses. If Citadels are "specialised towards corporate support and defence", it is easily possible that the market module will have a nullified fuel cost.

Furthermore, even if CCP decides that the market modules' cost won't be nullified, they can choose to set it as low or high as they wish: the belief that the market module won't be possible to fund without NPC station nerfs is unfounded. An argument based on this point is essentially unreliable.

I accept the point that NPC market fees are low. However, the incentive of trading at the lowest possible fees (or lower!) is going to have an attraction, though you deny it. We know that lower taxes are a pull factor in Eve, otherwise no traders would wish to grind for standings, or pay to have others grind for them. Why would easy access to low taxes not be a pull factor?

If you believe that low taxes will bring in no ISK, then you need to look at Merchant Monarchy and Eve Prosper and see how much those two pay in with low standings. I assure you it's not a small amount.

Edit: at 1800 sales per day and ~12 million tax per sale, that's a 21.6 billion ISK of tax that could go into a Citadel owner's pockets. In a month that's easily enough to fund an XL and fuel/rigs. By my calculatons ~12 mil is the lowest possible tax rate with current plex prices.

1: POS's currently consume an absolutely stupid amount of fuel each day across EVE.
2: Citadels are intended to eventually completely replace POSs as a method for everything POSs currently do, till POS's are gone.
3: If citadels don't require fuel block to run, and Citadel services don't require fuel to run, suddenly you have literally hundred of billions of isk a day worth of PI and ice products that are no longer being consumed. Way to accidentally nuke entire professions to avoid some trader inconvenience.

Low tax's are a pull yes. But since transaction tax stays the same between NPC and Citadels, the primary difference is in Broker fee's. And since that can get down to less than .75%, the draw to use a Citadel instead of a NPC station is close to nonexistent.

CCP MUST use the stick here, because we are already hip deep in carrots.

Citadels will be competitive in systems that have no stations.
Aside from mediums for corp use... why would you put one in systems with more that one station.

And that Ladies and gentlemen, is the Killer feature!

There is absolutely no reason to drive people out of NPC stations using punishment mechanics.

Build it better and they will come.

First off, I was saying that 'role' modules could have a decreased or negated cost, not all modules. This was based on the idea that Faction PoSes get bonuses to fuel block consumption, and some racial PoSes get bonuses to Silos. So, good job on reading that, huh? :P




Secondly, we don't have any statistics on movement of people based on Tax increases or decrease. I'm going to repeat the fact that the majority of people are being taxed at a higher rate of taxes: the 'competitive space' is larger by far than just .75%.

I'm open to Tax increases if we have proof that Citadels aren't attractive enough. Right now, however, we're presuming they're going to be unattractive without proof. I'm a pessimist, but that's too far even for me.

You and I can agree that changes made without rationale are knee-jerk reactions that don't often go right, right?

We don't have any stats because it hasn't happened, because the transaction fee's have as far as I know, never been changed.

We are presuming that people won't see Citadels as a attractive trading location because for something to be attractive compared to something else, there needs to be a difference between them. There is currently not much room between current NPC broker fee's and 0%.

As far as the "The majority of people are being taxed at a higher rate", I'm basically going to laugh at you here.

Broker Relations is a 2x Skill. You can get it to 5 in roughly 9 days on a spec remap. Accounting is a grand total of 3x. but we can ignore that because transaction tax will be the same at both player Citadels and npc Stations, and is outside of the scope of this conversation. That's about 3 days to get Broker relations to IV including the trade 2 prereq, and 4 to 5 only makes the difference between .75% broker fee's and .8% broker fee's. that's a REALLY low bar for being competitive in trade.

We can make fairly safe assumptions that there will not be a giant exodus to player Citadels for trading if the tradoff for potentially having to move and relist all their orders, repay broker fee's, and rehaul everything to a new citadel is a grand total .75-.8%. and that would be if the station owner was entirely selfless and had no broker fee at all.

Realistically, we can assume the Citadels open for trading will have at least .25% broker fee's, making the margin for switching even slimmer, at .5 to .55%.

Are traders going to switch everything from their Jtia super-center for .5%, at the expense of a significant risk of needing to redo everything at high expense if someone kills the Citadel? No. Do I need pre-existing empirical proof for this? No, because it's really obvious what the reaction will be. I wouldn't change, and I'm only a midlevel trader, probably move about 130 bil a month in products.