Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The idea I had this afternoon:

1) Nerf NPC stations the same way that NPC corps were nerfed: Add a 5% tax, in this case, a market sales tax.
2) Then allow building of any size of citadel in high sec, including current trade hub systems.
3) Then allow the owner of a citadel to set a percentage sales tax for use of the market which they (as citadel operator) get to keep.
4) Let the fun begin.

The isk at stake in even a tiny sales tax is hundreds of billions a day.

That would certainly get the content going
And it would certainly break up the monopoly on trade shared by about half a dozen systems (mainly 1 station in Jita obviously). I seem to constantly hear about how much the devs would like us to be trading in different places, including 0.0.

Just imagine the shennanigans - giant superalliances fight over getting the first jita citadel but they can't use caps so literally anyone can get involved. Then the traders are driven away from Jita, either by lower tax rates or getting their assets stuck as the citadel gets destroyed, changes hands, etc, or even prefering to deal with lesser levels of TiDi. The cycle repeats itself in another system. Given a couple of repetitions and the traders are spread out over a much larger number of systems, there is no central hub.... but hubs are organic so another will always start to form, triggering a repeat of the whole process.

I can see a world of eve where everything in high sec is dynamic and moving, nothing is static and sedentary, jump fatigue is no barrier to content because capitals cant be used, newer players can get in and make a difference in epic pvp fights right next to where they ideally need to be to get their skill books, rifters, etc and the 0.01 isk game is mainly borked when everyone gets more spread out.

I can see a concern that one giant conglomerate could get a stranglehold on all trade in what would turn into "the new Jita" but I would argue that the number of giant power-blocks in the game would always ensure vicious fighting over the isk at stake and that anyone could undercut the tax rate in a system next door and so keep the dynamism of the situation going.

Now I just know there are loads of things that I didn't consider here, so I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks would happen instead of my somewhat utopian view

Can you? Could you please give me the name of your drug dealer, I want some of the same stuff you take. It has quite strong and exhilarating effects.

In an a bit more serious note, though, Jita is what it is in part because people need a central place to trade big volumes of things. The majority of people are not interested in regularly changing superhubs because it would end up in a gigantic amount of tedium to move things around and re-setup things every time they are required to move. Likewise, players want everything in one place when they buy it in a hub. Not spread over dozens of citadels and then brought together by paying an additional charge to either NPC magic/interceptible convoys or player haulers. This is already more than enough of a problem in Null sec, where a badly supplied hub in a region has many things, but then the supplies run out or the things in question were never supplied in the first place or are only available in a system xyz jumps away from your location. People love this tedium.

Moreover, Citadels are not indiscriminate with regards to standings. Not everyone can potentially dock in every citadel, making it an unnecessary gamble when you have stations where no player can screw you up and reduce your sales just by not allowing everyone to dock.
And, as I think it is going to happen, in High sec, the tax system is likely going to be similar to the POCO tax system: You pay the SCC the normal, maybe reduced tax and in addition the player imposed tax on top of that. Cost benefits? Looking at that, looking at industry changes (which were supposed to drive people into POS and Null sec because of vastly superior capabilities and rates), I doubt that citadels will become a hub station replacements at all.

Ok, clearly I didn't explain myself well enough.

What I am suggesting is to take the current sales tax, which is about 1%, and change it to 5% for NPC stations (yes, still with the minor variation for standings).
Then allow the owners of citadels to keep the entire sales tax that is paid for orders in their citadels, coupled with their ability to set that sales tax. So they could, for instance set the sales tax at 2%, take 2% of every transaction in the citadel while the station traders would still be 3% better off.
(All these percentages are just examples, the actual size of the differences would need to be carefully worked out by someone with a very big spreadsheet).

Now, the huge bulk trading in Jita is done a LOT by station traders for whom the tax they pay on every transaction is extremely important because it drives down the gap between buy and sell orders and makes margin trading and short term speculation the activity it is. If a bulk trader thought they could save 4% (for example) on every transaction they made, you can bet your bottom dollar that they would move their activities into a citadel if it looked at all feasible, practically speaking. When you pay corporation tax, you only ever pay it once, when you pay sales tax (or brokerage), you pay it every time you buy and sell, it is a constant drain, so even a tiny percentage difference has a huge effect on your profit. Anyone staying in NPC stations and trying to station trade simply would not be able to make a profit.

There is quite a lot of eve history of open stations which anyone can dock at (ISS, current Providence, etc.). It would stand to reason that any alliance hoping to end up running the Jita hub citadel would set that particular citadel to be accessible by everyone... Or maybe they wouldn't... maybe 4 or 5 power blocks would each have their own citadel in Jita that was open to blues and neuts but not reds, which would open up various other dynamics.

TL;DR: If you hike taxes in NPC stations to a level where station trading cannot compete with citadel trading, the station traders _will_ move into citadels because otherwise they will be out-competed by their piers who do and when that happens, everyone else will follow them.