Upcoming Feature and Change Feedback Center

.

Once again you're going off topic, your original remark was, and I quote:

Not without the blueprint they can't, so for a first time Citadel builder, looking to get into it, that's another 70 billion ISK overhead before get started, never mind research time + costs if you maybe needed to rebuild it if it gets destroyed, researching the BPO to make it more efficient in the long run.

Your comment was that anyone can build one for 3-7 billion, when they need a 70 billion ISK BPO.
Let me guess they can buy a BPC, that's great but as a solo/small corp player how long can you defend it before it's destroyed and you need to build another, feeding back into my original point that: Only Null-Sec alliances have the manpower and ISK to build and defend citadels in High-Sec.

So we're saying that there's the risk of:

• Lost profits due to asset safety
• Lost time due to asset safety
• Lost ISK re-listing
• Lost jump clone (s?) and active clone.

So we need the incentive to be something that could be worth up to something worth whatever that could cost, at most, but in general it can't be too good because the cost of those risks is on average going to be very low.

(And wasn't that a strange sentence to type out!)

If anyone is aware of any other costs, could they write them out too?

I'm of the opinion that risk of loss affects everyone unequally already, so continued low NPC taxes are alright. After all, the noob and the veteran locked out of an outpost are in the same boat, but the Vet has billions lost and the Noob has millions. I'm not going to get into the equation of relative loss, but either way, someone's getting shafted.

Finally, what 'very clear incentive' do I have? I am, I have no doubt, the poorest (or one of the poorer) in this thread. I'm not a marketeer. My net wealth is ~10 billion ISK.

1: Yes, just as you say, they can build one with a BPC likely to cost between 900mil and 700mil initially, and dropping to 400-500 within 6 months, roughly.

I see we are back to the assumption that Citadels will be easy and often targeted by giant nullsec blocks, for the reason of (Choose one by personal preference):

A: We are all bastards, and do it cause we hate you.

B: We are trying to create a giant market monopoly so we can mercilessly gouge you of your cash by forcing you to shop at our Citadels.

C: Killing Citadels is profitable, as they drop roughly 50% of 15% of the build materials, or roughly 500 mil worth of material (lol)

D: We have so little to do in nullsec we will wardec highsec corps and bash 80-200 mil EHP structures for the joy of your tears until there are no more highsec Citadels besides ours.

None of these are likely options.

The most likely scenario goes like this: Lots of people including nullsec players put up citadels. Nullsec players bash a few cause it's funny, get bored, mostly stop, go back to nullsec, and from there on spend the least amount of effort to keep the citadel safe while running profitably.

Some general fuckwits in Code, or Marmite, PIR8. or some other break-a-wish style group realize they can ransom Citadels held by corps where the owners cant put together a small fleet to defend them.

Much crying commences by corps and highsec alliances who are so weak they can't sit 10 people underneath the Citadel during their own primetime to fend off some two bit extortionist pirates and muggers, and too poor or unwilling to hire mercs. The number of citadels held by 1 member corps drops drastically.

That's not nullsec alliances being massively powerful and squashing everyone else though, that just people being so weak they can't defend their structures from the usual highsec vultures.

The only reason you don't see a lot more of it currently is that you can take down a POS in less time than it takes a wardec to start. Otherwise there would be a lot more ransoming of POS's in highsec if it took say 25 hours to change a POS fit.

TLDR: We don't care about highsec, it's the other highseccers which are going to screw you over.

And if you can't even defend your giant, massively shielded, weapon and ewar equipped station with your own strength or hired strength, it's fine if you lose it. Large+ Citadels are not a right for every small group.

This is only positive if the taxes go to the player. If taxes end up going to CCP then i'll be giving them the pinky finger. If you're going to take our isk then give us something in return. npc stations taxing us is nothing more than corporate greed as CCCP has undoubtedly done the math and calculated that trillions of isk lost means tens of thousands more in their pocket in real world cash.
Transparent BS that ought not be allowed to occur.

Go look at the history of the top marginal tax rate in the U.S. Guess what despite it moving all over the place since 1915 or so, and it hasn't produced anywhere near the kind of effects you are talking about.

Here take a look.

We have seen 10-12x increases and some pretty sizable decreases...yet the economy chugs right along. If anything RL economies are far, far more complex. There is much, much more innovation and creative destruction, and leverage is a much more of a factor. Not to mention the meddling in the economy for political reasons. So this notion that the Eve economy is more vulnerable strikes me as dubious at best.

On the other hand we saw a shift in policy towards more home ownership at the lower end of the income distribution and it was done, in part, with lowering lending standards. Looked great so long as prices were going up, when that stopped happening the **** hit the fan.

Compare this to say a much more obvious and blatant policy to promote home owenership such as subsidizing people obtaining the 20% down payment requirement actually leads to more stability in the housing market. And the reason is simple, with a higher level of equity people are less likely to walk away from a house where they are underwater.

We have nothing at all like this in the Eve economy. Literally nothing. We do not have lots of counter party risk in the game. And as such there cannot be the cascade effects we see in the real world when thing suddenly move in an unanticipated direction.

Making a well publicized change to something like taxes which everyone can see and can figure out the effects of...has not had the same effect....ever.

Now, think about this carefully. In general, I agree that tinkering with the economy, especially to try and back door policy goals, can and often has blown up in everyone's face. However, when the changes are announced, relatively simple and people can plan for them, things rarely go horribly off the rails. Yes, you could end up with mal-investment, and even a recession, but nothing like was seen in 2008/2009. You are being wildly alarmist and there is no reason for it.

As for limit entry pricing that is a theoretical possibility, but it is harder to find in real life. This is why you find alot of legislation that in the end is designed to limit entry into markets. Examples are licensing requirements, certification, trade barriers, and so forth. It's a great story that sounds good when you first hear it, but in reality the idea of a dominant firm keeping out entrants without the coercive power of government is not much more than that a story.

Because we believe it is important to the long term health of the game that Citadels, which are with no doubt the most important feature added to this game since outposts were added in 2005, become a healthy and integral part of the game.


Lot of us nullsec players are thinking really long term here. We have been playing for years, and will continue playing for years, and want the game to continue improving, even if it means some short term inconvenience.

Citadels are the first step in CCP revamping everything from POS's, to Outposts, to mining, production, research. deployables, intelligence gathering, new player controlled stargates and systems, etc. Everything is going to be based on and centered around the citadel bases and mechanics, tied into a unified command and ownership structure instead of the current small fractured and disorganized legacy code that was a result of building in features one at a time for years without concrete plan or deployment structure. It's been CCP's road plan since they announced citadels years ago.

We need it to NOT flop like so many features which have come before. And if easy station trading needs to become a little less easy and simple than it is now to provide Citadels that initial kickstart, I'll do my part to make it happen, even if I make no money off Citadels, lose my .2% broker fee's at NPC stations, and have top pay my enemies to use their Citadels.

Hmmm...whom should I believe?

The guy who is arguing in line with his vested interests....?

Or the guy arguing against his own vested interests....?

Hmmm...decisions, decisions.

I kinda get the sense that you misread my post :).

I've emphasised where we agree: we both think that the Eve economy isn't like real life. Our difference is in our interpretations of the action of the tax increase: you're treating it like it's an income tax issue, which I disagree with: a more comparable tax would be a V.A.T or Sales tax. It's still not exactly comparable, but it affects the items and not the purchaser, which an income tax change would.

I'm treating the tax as a financial transactions tax, which I feel is more suited than a consumption tax. The implementation of a Tobin Tax in Sweden led to a decrease in trading volume, collected taxes and the vanishing of futures trading. Needless to say, the experiment ended very quickly.

As for vulnerability, I didn't realise I'd raised the issue. I do believe that all complex systems have vulnerabilities though, and it isn't good to magnify them. Shock therapy doesn't work, as I understand.

Finally, we both agree that Eve isn't like real life. :P. In Eve, at least, there is no government to coerce the market, but the players can act in such a role. Goonswarm's various successes and failures in exploiting markets are proof of such.

I have to say, "based on and centered around the citadel base and mechanics, tied into a unified command and ownership structure" sound like CCP is leaping straight back into the legacy code pond it had just climbed out of. The 'unified system' definitely sounds like the old Crimewatch mechanic, which ended up so awful that they were ripped out wholesale. I *don't* like the idea of a unified system, because (in my experience) unified systems fail uniformly. You fail there and it fails everywhere.

I believed that CCP was developing agilely in a modular way, so that elements which could be tweaked or removed could be dealt with without causing other issues.

Also, Outposts more important than Supercaps or FW or Wormholes or .... etc? I think you may be just a little wrong there.