Assembly Hall

OK so when CCP put out the new customs offices they said they readjusted the base tax amount from November averages. They did this because the old market value was out of date and far too low.

After this announcement and some carebear tears the market value of PI shot up again, but the taxes are still based off the old November rate.

The base market value used to calculate PI taxes needs to be automatically updated on a regular basis.

During downtime every night an extra routine could be added to the downtime upkeep programs to pull average buy and sell prices for each individual PI material to set the next day's taxes.

So if Construction Blocks are going for 5000 a unit on average at downtime. Then the next day a 10% tax on Construction Blocks should be 500.

Actually I don't really agree with that. The price will always stabilize at whatever people can make a profit at. Just look at the profit margin on something that is easy to make and has a high consumption rate, like ammo. Your average highsec miner will took at their minerals and look at what they can build with those minerals, and if they can make even one isk more selling the finished product over the raw minerals they will do it.

I did some math and feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

Lets say you are doing the most tax expensive thing with PI. importing refined commodities, building, and exporting specialized commodities to sell.

I got these prices off of the average buy price in empire space from eve central, so I don't know what the actual prices would be in your region.

Lets say you are making Neocoms that cost 80000.00 per unit. You'll need to buy Biocells at 9191.91 per unit and Silicate Glass at 4646.92 per unit. you'll need 5 biocels 45959.55 isk, 5 silicate glass 23234.60 isk, which will produce 3 neocoms which can be sold for a total of 240000.00 isk. So after buying all the biocells and silicate glass if you sell the neocoms you'll make 170805.85 isk in raw profit without taxes.

Now lets say you paid 10% taxes on the current market value of all the materials, once to import the 5 biocells and 5 silicate glass and once again to export the 3 neocoms. That comes out to 30919.42 isk. Subtract that from your raw profit and after taxes you are still left with 139886.44 isk.

So if my math is right (My spreadsheet looks ok so far) if you set up your planets in Jita paying carebear tears 10% tax based on live market data for every factory churning our neocoms you'd make 139886.44 per hour. And anyone with decent PI skills can put quite a few factories on a planet and have quite a few planets running. yeah you'll miss out on the 30919.42 per factory per hour tax, but that's the price you pay for the warm embrace of a concord security blanket.

After fiddling with the numbers I figured out that CCP could raise the tax to 55% of market value before you'd stop making a profit on Neocoms. Granted at that point the profit margin on PI in highsec would be so low that people probably wouldn't bother.

Yeah this might be something to wait on. But the November tax updated happened all at once, and the surprise of it all caused a speculation bubble. If CCP waits another 18 months and does another tax update it cause more carebear panic and another PI speculation bubble.

I'd wait for people to get used to the player owned customs offices, then set the taxes to pull from the market value of PI and gradually update themselves.