Freight Cynos in HS

I would argue against that. Jita is actually pretty far away from a lot of null groups. I would take 2 jumps to Amarr any day over 5 to Jita. Basically that’s over an hour if you’re going for the fastest, sustainable, jump rate for a one-way to Jita.

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If something like this was changed… They would only need to change existing cyno by removing the current HS restriction. Jump-capable ships can only jump to what they’re designed for anyway and they would restrict what ships can go to highsec.

Not 100% true, blops being subcaps would also be able to jump to HS cynos, as well as bridge. Not that I think it would be bad to allow hot drops in HS.

but that bears in contrast to every gank alliance having a camp on these gates and shooting anything that comes through.

Which is why you’d be better off not designating one specific spot to be able to cyno. then it allows someone to drop multiple cynos across a system with some being blops fleets to be fake-out, causing gankers to be spread thinner, rather then one specific spot being a camp-o-thon ■■■■■■■■■■■. Mike’s issue about navy/concord presence for a designated spot would try to prevent gankers from turning that spot into burn jita everyday.

unless:

you make it an area only accessible by Jump Freighter, and by corvette maybe frigate. nothing saying you can’t bump a jf after it warps to it’s destination, nothing saying a determined gank force won’t pull a raid on the site in a bunch of rookie ships. nothing saying that wherever they jump from was safe either. You just got to have this hot drop area free of your typical freighter gank fleet because otherwise trying to cyno in a freighter and get it docked anywhere would be about as difficult as trying to take M0-EE8 from Pandemic.

What is wrong with trade in highsec at the moment?

What’s wrong with trade? Nothing, as far as I know. Ask the OP.

I merely offered a compromise on the suggested feature that does not make it 100% safe for haulers nor a buffet for gankers.

If there is nothing wrong with trade, then why does it need to be facilitated beyond what it already is?

If the answer to that is, it doesn’t particularly, then the best approach, to not upset the meta either way is to reject this suggestion.

Like many others, the primary purpose of the suggestion is to make the game easier to play. We don’t need that.

Nothing about making it easier for gankers. Just simply being able to magic across the map with 90% jump fatigue reduction, in highsec, is just not needed.

The game involves time, however people want to spend that, including the time required to move goods between trade hubs, etc.

This idea does nothing to benefit the game at all. It certainly does nothing to benefit the good haulers and those that use their time effectively. It just makes it easier for the lazy and poor players so they don’t have to develop and improve their play. It just evens out the playing field so that good players lose the advantage they have through their good play.

I find giving a blanket NOPE to everything to be counterproductive to discussion. You could just not reply and let the thread die, it would be even more effective.

Personally, I find the utility of jump capable ships to be sorely lacking given their pricetag. Being able to skip a few HS gates would help with that, so I feel it’s worth discussing.

Sure, it’s worth discussing as it is, when I don’t agree with an idea.

If we all just remained silent on ideas we don’t agree with, this forum would descend into a series of yes threads, with no counter arguments, or discussion that leads to improvement in ideas.

So no need to be afraid of someone that dislikes an idea. Counter views are an opportunity, not a threat.

Also, I don’t see anyone in this forum that gives a blanket no to everything. People are allowed to have their different views on different ideas and to agree or disagree as they please.

It’s not like we are actually making game design decisions for CCP, but just accepting that only yes people should reply to threads does nothing to help CCP rapidly assess ideas posted here either.

Yes, but if you look at the meta the only way to make a ship profitable to gank at all is to do something that is, if you only look at the resulting kill mail, stupid. What you’re proposing would create an absolutely brain-dead simple way to move stuff across High Sec in even larger volumes with much less chance of a gank occurring even if you’re an idiot who Expander fits their Jump Freighter.

Except that there’s a huge difference between “jump range” and “traveling gate to gate”.

If you have to travel gate to gate then the distance between Jita and Rens is 26 jumps through High Sec or about 20 minutes even in an Inty. In a Freighter, even with implants and webbing, it’s around an hour flat.

Saying that High Sec is small while using a unit of measure that doesn’t apply to High Sec is an uncharacteristically ignorant thing for you to be saying Old P and I’m a bit disappointed.

So, I’m replying to this block quote but consider this a reply to the rest of your post because I feel like I must have failed to make something clear here.

First, a statement of a few facts here:

Moving stuff around High Sec is not free. It takes time and time costs. So what you are proposing here is that the use of a Jump Freighter should be allowed to compete with the use of a normal Freighter and a lot more time.

Autopilot, while relatively “cheap” doesn’t work for a large majority of goods moved through High Sec. That’s why you rarely see people propose that someone who has been ganked should tank their ship better next time, they tell them to tank it and get a webbing alt or something similar. This is because in practice it’s pretty hard to tank a ship well enough that it’s not a valid gank target for 20 Bombers, or whatever subset of that is needed to kill the ship in question profitably.

With all of that said, the cost of Jump Fuel for the ~2 jumps needed to get from Jita to anywhere else in High Sec (one for the majority of systems) is pretty minimal compared to the generally accepted cost of a 20+ jump hauling contract. In fact at current Jita prices it costs about 17.5m to send a Jump Freighter from Jita to Hek (if you could jump directly there) and 32 million to hire a Red Frog courier to make the same trip.

What I’m saying, that I think may have been missed, is that if you make it much cheaper and easier to move product to Jita and to buy product in Jita and move it elsewhere you remove most of the impetus to buy and sell things elsewhere.

The price differences between Jita and other trade hubs are largely a function of the difficulty and cost in getting stuff to and from those hubs. If you make it fantastically quicker and cheaper to get stuff to and from Jita then a lot of the reason to go to other trade hubs goes away, and the impetus to sell your stuff in Jita becomes greater. It also becomes much easier to flatten out price differences between Jita and other trade hubs since you’ve just made it no only quicker but cheaper to move stuff between locations.

End result, you’ve probably just compressed the market in High Sec further into Jita, by quite a large margin.

We actually already have a precident for this with the old Hub Gates that were removed either fairly early in Beta or shortly after launch. There used to be connections between the four Empire capitals and Yulai and the result was that there was only one Trade Hub in the game, Yulai, since it was so incredibly convenient to simply buy and sell everything there.

No where in this thread has anyone just said “no” and walked away, or if they have I’ve missed and ignored it. That’s the whole point of the 9/10ths of the post that contains the explanation for issues found with whatever idea has been presented.

Most ideas on these forums get a negative reaction because most ideas in general are bad and poorly thought out, that’s part of the point so people can refine their ideas and hopefully get something maybe vaguely workable.

Also if you find jump capable ships to be lacking then move out to Null Sec, where jump capable ships are god.

I say NO to the OP idea. Moving goods should get harder not easier for a lot of it. Each region should be looking at having a major hub.

Than again I really really hate the Caldari and Jita!!!

This would be bad for markets other than Jita. What you propose would make hauling to a central market such as Jita far more easier especially ignoring bottlenecks at the faction borders such as Niarja and Sivala. You want the opposite, you want to have further usages of the other regional markets and not just the major trade hubs either. The Citadel, Tash Murkon, Lonetrek…every region should have its own market hub not just the factions. Freight cynos would not only prevent this, it would kill Dodixie and Rens, Amarr could hang on but not by much.

Stepped away for the weekend. Haven’t much time so I’ll have to be brief.

Why does something have to be wrong for it to justify an improvement? Whether or not this is an improvement is the topic. The reason for the OP, as clearly stated, is to increase market liquidity.

That is an excellent position to take, one I respect.

If they’re landing on known cyno locations, they become exposed there. JFs are more expensive than traditional freighters… when losing billions in collateral, it would hurt less to lose a ~1.5b freighter over a ~9b jump freighter. As you say later in your post, it’s still very easy to torp gank things this big. A bumping mach and however many bombers would still be more than able to kill these, at greater loss to their freighter counterparts.

Apologies, I was referring to the metric if jumping around highsec via freighter cynos became a thing.

As alluded earlier, the loss of a jump freighter to camp is substantially more expensive. They’re still very gankable.

The trade off between time is the cost of fuel (minimal), the cost of jump fatigue (if you can only make one trip every so often, you aren’t going to want to burn it for nothing), and the cost of the increased risk outlined above. For a ship that costs 8x more and will be appearing in predictable locations, you’ll want to be compensated by whoever is creating the contract.

I am of an opposite opinion on this. I think that if it’s easy to get goods out of jita, you’ll wait for jita prices to sink below those of the other hubs, then ship out to there. Players, having quicker access to goods at those hubs, will be less inclined to fly all the way to jita to place their orders, and then fly back with whatever they had.

It doesn’t. It was just what I read into the earlier post, so asked the question. That was just my mistake in the way I read an earlier post (not the OP’s post. A later one in the thread).

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While this isn’t a bad line of logic having an actual problem does generally help, especially when proposing a fairly radical change to the game like this.

Except High Sec is absolutely full of stations and the vast majority of these can be jumped to in absolute safety because the docking range is huge.

For example the Jita 4-4 station itself has a massive hemisphere right outside the undock point that’s around 50km in radius. You could easily fit 3-4 Jump Freighters in there with zero risk of them bumping off each other, and reasonably you could probably just stack cynos in the center and the JFs wouldn’t even bump out of range unless two jumped literally right on top of each other.

There are also other stations in Jita 4-4, and Jita itself is in range of probably 70% of High Sec, so there’s no mid-points to intercept here, everything goes directly to Jita, and for everywhere else you can pick any one of that other 70% of systems as your mid-point because at any given time probably half of High Sec is unoccupied.

High Sec is not like Null where things are very spread out and there are predictable midpoints, everything is pretty tightly packed.

The obvious solution here is to make it so you can’t light a Freight Cyno within the docking ring of a Station or Citadel. Okay, but cynos are cheap and this is High Sec. Light off like five of the things at once, you can pick which one you want to jump to, and the gankers have to figure it out and get their fleet into position before you warp to your Citadel, Station, ect.

That’s also assuming that they have the punch to nuke a fully tanked Jump Freighter and that you don’t just use a webbing alt as your Cyno, because that turns into “JF lands… aaaaand it’s in warp”.

The only reason it’s easy to torp gank a Freighter is because Freighters have to pass through specific choke points and there’s plenty of opportunity to identify the valuable ones and figure out how much gank you need to kill them before CONCORD intervenes. With cynos all this goes out the window. Not only are there no choke points except the destination but you can completely avoid .5 systems and the window to tank is tiny AND you can’t scan your targets so you know there’s something valuable enough to be worth ganking.

Oh and on top of that lets remember that like 95%+ of High Sec commerce never gets ganked in the first place, so even if we somehow do make things more gankable that doesn’t actually stop the consolidation, because a Jump Freighter full of Trit, or T1 mods, or a single massive stack of ammo is never gonna get touched.

Fair, but my point about the metrics stands, and the entire problem here is that you want to turn High Sec from something large to something small in terms of trade.

As pointed out above, pretty much none of this is actually the case. The only thing that’s remotely relevant out of all of this is the cost of fuel, but when you can easily move billions in cargo in a Jump Freighter, and the cost in Red Frog terms is still more than the cost of fuel, that argument gets kinda weak.

For an industrialist the time is far more valuable. A Character that doesn’t have to spend time moving stuff is one that can spend more time building, mining, fiddling with jobs, or can flat out not exist in favor of one that can fly a JF and do all that other stuff.

Here’s the problem though, you’re not just making it easier to move stuff out of Jita to sell elsewhere, you’re also making it massively easier to move stuff out of Jita as a consumer, and Jita is already a hugely concentrated and popular trade hub because there is very very little that you can’t buy in Jita. It’s a one-stop shopping spot. That’s why so much trade goes on there, that’s why people takes stuff from all over already to sell it in Jita and people make trips there to buy.

If getting something from Jita for me becomes as easy as poking a friend with a JF already sitting there and winging him 10m for jump fuel then why would I ever shop anywhere else?

If all the demand goes to Jita (and most if it is already there anyways), and the prices even out, then why would anyone sell stuff anywhere else?

I’m of the opinion that the “pre-lit” cynos that Mike suggested would be better than allowing player-lit cynos. In this regard, it creates very tight choke points with lots of opportunity for ganking.

I agree that a difficult-to-gank hauling ship full of trit, T1, or ammo will not get touched… but how often would you use a JF for that when you could use a regular freighter? That’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t need to be “rushed”. While the courier doesn’t care what he’s carrying (and in fact would probably prefer cheap crap like that) the person creating the contract doesn’t want to pay a premium on their bulk stuff.

How much does it “cost” for Red Frog or PushX or similar to ship things by freighter? Zero tangible cost. There’s most definitely a cost in time (and a big one at that) and that’s what you’re paying for when you create a contract for them. Along with some risk incentive built into the pricing.

For a JF, the pricing will have to include the tangible fuel cost, increased risk incentive (because properly designed, JFs would definitely be vulnerable to ganks at cyno choke points, which are way more expensive than regular freighters), as well as factoring in the jump fatigue. They can only make a limited number of jumps in a day. I’d be all in favour of an increase fatigue for HS to HS jumps to make this more of a factor, if needed. Then you would probably factor in the “enhanced speed” markup that the hauling firm would add, depending on competitor pricing.

That’s the thing… if you’ve in LS or NS you probably already have a friend with a JF, and they probably already do logistics trips to Jita. Making it easier for JF to get to and from wouldn’t change any LS or NS logistics, save for cases where trips to other hubs would save them fatigue and fuel. In short, existing JF business wouldn’t change.

You already JF your mfg’d goods to Jita because it has the biggest market. You already do your market seeding supply runs to Jita because it has the biggest market. But what if it didn’t? What if you knew your orders would fill at a hub that was closer?

Prices will never perfectly even out. There will always be fluctuations on any scale (station, system, region, etc). There will be plenty of opportunity for someone to say “hey I can buy these for x isk less in Hek, jump them to Rens, and sell them for y isk… yoink”. Dude that placed his order says cool, it filled, and continues to use that hub because it’s easier for him. Substitute jita for either of those hubs if you like, the net result is increase liquidity in both hubs.

The lazy people that don’t care about maximizing already use Jita for most of their goods… if this change happens and they choose not to use it to fill at whatever happens to have the highest price, it will be status quo, not “worse”.

The “one stop shopping” people already use Jita for the sheer liquidity of its market, so worst case, they just keep going to Jita.

Ultimately, people with market scanners (every serious trader has one) will be able to quickly find deals that would allow them to quickly flip goods from one hub to the other. If orders are filling at these other hubs, people will still use those other hubs.

It’s true, not everyone uses Jita for their personal shopping needs. That would not change with something like this, unless you think everyone will train into Black ops or jump freighters to use those jump drives for that ammo run and dumping of whatever modules, minerals and salvage an independent mission runner uses.

I myself have been playing for nearly 10 years and I don’t think I’ve ever jumped into Jita yet. There is a vast market that won’t want/need jump capable ships that would continue to use the local hubs.

As I said elsewhere in the comment, just because something doesn’t “need” to be rushed doesn’t mean it won’t be. Time is valuable, and that account could be doing something other than hauling. To take your courier example above, someone being paid to make runs can either make 1 run in an hour (roughly) or they can use a Jump Freighter and an alt and make half the profit per run, but make 3+ runs in an hour. What’s the better deal there?

As for the pre-list Cynos idea, I’m not a fan.

I mean, that might just manage to kill Jita by moving a trade hub on top of one, but it’s kind of at the “kinda bad and crazy add-ons just to make the idea not broken” stage of PFaID idea generation. This one also takes away player agency and basically turns the beacons into a ship-restricted stargate with a tax, and we’ve done the whole hub gates thing way back in beta. It got removed, because it caused massive consolidation of players and market activity.

This is basically into “the ore I mine is free” territory. There is still the opportunity cost on the character, so unless there is literally nothing else that character could possibly do or be used for to make you money then the time spent by that Freighter is not free. In fact most Freighters aren’t even that brain dead, because if you autopilot people will gank even fairly cheap stuff because it’s just so absurdly easy.

As for the “increased fatigue” thing, as above we’re into tacking on weird and arbitrary restrictions to make the system not broken. If we need to do that, and there’s no pressing problem solved by the idea, then it’s probably just a bad idea.

Most people don’t JF stuff to Jita, actually, and even for Null groups they don’t JF it directly to Jita, they JF it to a Low Sec system and then sneak it through a gate.

Which actually brings up another issue with this, that last jump is the most dangerous of an inbound run so you’re making JF runs into Highsec massively safer this way. Of course you could just block jumping Low/Null → High but again arbitrary restrictions…

There’s absolutely nothing here that would magically make stuff in other markets sell better and I’m absolutely baffled as to where this conjecture is coming from here.

Perfectly even out, no, but if you’re within a few percentage points that’s pretty much even. Basically what happens is you’ll see this relationship between JF volume and item value. Anything that moves enough stock to be worth jumping a load of will see it’s price end up within the cost of fuel spread over however much you can stuff into a cargo rigged Rhea, because anything past that will be squashed as someone buys from Jita and jumps a load over, or buys up a ton of the stuff until it’s within Jita Sell and then jumps it to Jita.

End result, any deviation down from Jita gets quashed by movement to Jita, any deviation up gets quashed by an influx of goods from Jita, though the latter is unlikely since it’s now drastically easier to shop there via Jump Freighter.

Also you can already one-stop at most of the other major trade hubs most of the time. That’s part of why they see as much volume as they do. They’re just not priced the same as Jita. Sometimes they’re higher, sometimes they’re lower.

Your core assumption here, I think, is that most Null people know someone with a JF but somehow most High Sec people don’t. High Sec is home of Incursions, among other things, and there are tons of old players around. Plus a good chunk of the day to day industry in the game is in High Sec. Capitals get built in Null, but High Sec builds ammo, T1 stuff, aka 90% of the value in items traded in Jita most days. There are tons of people with haulers in High Sec, and if you make a JF an option it’ll be a quick month before tons of people have JF alts, unless you make the system too inconvenient and dangerous to bother using, in which case what was the point of introducing the system in the first place?

decided i would be okay with this if you go suspect and get a weapons timer if you jump to one

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