NPC corporation tax should be removed

Communications Center General Discussion
385

Bad leadership skills is yet another reason for social corps to have NPC tax:

If there is no value in joining a badly organised corporation, people wouldn’t join them.

Tax evasion is what draws a lot of people to corporations now, no matter how bad they are. And it doesn’t matter when they are bad, because no taxes! and you can’t do much wrong without the risk of wars.

With NPC tax in the social corps, there would be no measurable reward for joining bad corporations, weeding out the bad corps because people have no reason to stay. So if you then want to have a growing corporation, you better make the corporation at least fun and social, instead of relying on tax evasion to draw new members.

And if a new corporation leader decides not to put in effort to make the corporation more fun, but instead wants to use tax evasion again, he will have to put down a structure… which gives valuable feedback much faster about how much his corporation is succeeding.

In the form of a pretty structure explosion.

1 Like
386

I don’t think you’re properly envisioning how the system would work. It would work just fine.

387

Explain maybe?

388

Just some quick examples then:

  • The NPC bounty tax already exists, so we know how that works
  • Mining tax by impacting yield (war-eligible player has to be in space to avoid it)
  • Mission LP tax (similar to NPC bounty tax)
  • Market fee tax (seller needs to be war-eligible to avoid it)
  • Manufacturing fee tax (manufacturer needs to be war-eligible to avoid it)

I would even consider doing something drastic, like taxing the direct transfer of items via trade window/contracts, if both parties aren’t war eligible.

Would players be able to use alts to somewhat game the system? Yes, but not without severely impacting convenience and adding a lot of extra work. Really, only the transportation of goods would be able to evade any sort of tax, and since that exposes players to other threats, it’s an acceptable trade-off. All methods of wealth generation would require some kind of exposure to risk on at least one character, however, which isn’t how things work today.

389

CCP Tuxford once had the right idea and I believe it fits the game much more.

War is the norm …
… and people have to declare peace!

390

All of this easily avoidable except mining yield tax and NPC bounty tax. Miners already at constant risk from suicide gankers attacks. Why bother?

391

Avoidable how? Can you provide an example?

392

To provide risk and meaningful choice to the benefits of corps.

If a player starts a wardeccable corp, enjoys the perks that come with it, and then logs off when the war comes…That’s not the wardecs fault. That’s all on the player. Why did they start a wardeccable corp in the first place?

At the moment wars are fairly pointless because corps can enjoy all the benefits of corps whilst immune to decs. Simply lowering the rewards of hisec affects everyone, even those who are prepared for wardecs, and is yet another nerf to agency, choice and responsibility.

393

This is the key issue, however not many people understand how it applies to the PvP side as well.

For instance, most of the so-called 'PvP’ers only cry about high-sec PvP… exactly because they want low risk, high loot drops. They want to farm ISK, they’re just too lazy to do something productive for it, so they want someone else to put in the hours of work and then steal it.

Heck, @Destiny_Corrupted stated clearly they’re looking for “one big kill worth 100 mill ISK rather than 10 kills for 10 mill”. They’re not in it for the fight, or the challenge, or the risk of PvP… they just want easy, fast, fat loot drops and they don’t care what happens to the rest of the player base as long as they get it.

That’s your definition of selfish right there. Also of being a total hypocrite. You don’t see that crowd asking for better PvP in low-sec or FW or null, for instance. They only whine about not enough fat easy targets in high sec where they’re safe.

Then they’ll even blame things like “they just want what they’re entitled to” on the carebears, even though they’re doing the exact same things themselves. The primary difference is that at least the ‘carebears’ don’t require a steady stream of other players to be their victims while also complaining about the unwillingness of those victims to be easy targets, die, and drop loot for them. Apparently, the worst crime these 'PvP’ers can think of is for other people to not give them what they want.

NPC corp tax should definitely remain for the risk/reward reasons. I’d prefer to see some “protection fees” levied on non-deccable corps. In the future I’d even suggest corps be able to use adjustable NPC taxes to alter their ‘level’ of war-dec options.

High-sec PvP is a different topic, but it needs to have more appropriate, balanced and long-lasting consequences than a 15 minute timer and standings hits you can buy off with the profit from your loot drops. Like the rest of risk vs. reward, high-sec PvP is the low-hanging fruit for the worst of the worst PvPers, and should be rewarded as such. If you want decent rewards for PvP then the mechanics should lead you to taking actual risk in actual PvP space rather than sponging off productive players in high sec.

394

Everyone and their mom already have trading character sitting in Jita and never ever undocking.
Everyone can take mission with wardeccable char and undock in corvette to warp actual non-wardeccable mission runner to mission site.
Everyone and their mom already have industrial chars who never undock for anything. At least people who are serious about industry.

395

There’s a FW thread. And @Destiny_Corrupted is part of it,

Just sayin.

396

But right now that character can sit in an NPC corporation, and with the tax, that wouldn’t be the case.

The bounty payouts are earned by the shooter, who isn’t necessarily the mission-taker, and as such, is taxed. The LP tax could in theory be circumvented, but that’s a minor point (and also counteracted by the direct transaction tax I mentioned).

And now those characters would need to be in war-eligible corporations instead of sitting in NPC corporations and enjoying unlimited access to premium services without any risk.

I think you’re focusing on the ability to be able to kill players, as opposed to make them pay for the benefit of premium protection services. I’m fully aware that you can’t make a manufacturing character undock, because they don’t need to by virtue of their activity. However, you could force them to take on their share of risk via structure ownership, which they don’t have to do today.

397

Eh, I see a lot of crowd asking for better PvP in low-sec, but I don’t see how that is related to also ask about better mechanics in high sec.

Isn’t this fallacy called a ‘whataboutism’ these days?

That sounds good!

And yes, adjustable taxes based on risk could work. It doesn’t need to be on/off based on wardeccability status, more granularity is welcome!

I don’t agree. After all, it’s not CCP but players who decide the rewards for high sec ganks, so how do you suggest CCP adjusts for stupidity?

I agree that high sec ganks may be a bit too predictable from what I’ve heard about it (although I can’t speak from experience), and if you’d like to make the outcome of ganks less predictable -similar to PvP elsewhere- by for example slightly randomising concord response times, you may have more success than by saying ‘PvP in high sec is too rewarding’.

CCP doesn’t stop players from paying too much to gankers after all, but CCP is able to make ganking less predictable.

398

Next day CCP introduce taxes for non-wardeccable corps where will be open-for-all wardeccable corps with 0% tax. Like before there is was free-for-all corps for jump clone placement, for example.

Bounty will be affected, for sure, but almost all income from missions come in form of ISK/LP payouts and loot.

Same as trading chars, They will just sit in holding corps, which not worth attacking anyway. THey do not need to undock for any of their tasks, so wardecs will be meaningless for them.

399

I don’t pay attention to what it says anymore. It’s like a light breeze that you feel, but don’t really register. I suggest you do the same.

400

That’s fine. We can further iterate on and balance the system in the future by working with variables like citadel core costs. At some point, an even balance will be reached where there’s enough incentive for people to group up and defend their assets, instead of treating this game like a single-player experience.

Taxes are just one facet of the whole picture. Restructuring wars, how Upwell structures work, adding a proper bounty-hunting system, are all part of the final equation.

401

Risk vs. Reward. EVE is about consequences, etc. If the players determine the rewards, then it’s up to CCP to adjust the risk and the consequences. That’s the point. At the moment, high sec ganking is essentially just a math calculation: “Is the loot drop plus bounty from this gank going to equal or exceed the cost of the cheap-ass gankships I’ll throw away to nuke it?”.

No challenge, no actual risk, very little in the way of consequences. That’s why high sec ganking has just become a boring, repetitive business that actually drives more characters away from the game than it attracts. (My opinion, although backed by the logic and math. Not something I can prove.)

Bounties are useless, hunting gankers is unrewarding and a waste of time, there are few consequences. It’s a stale environment that simply leads to victims crying about being blown up and weak PvPers crying about not enough victims. It adds nothing to the richness and value of EVE.

The rewards are fine, who cares what some idiot in a freighter loses in Uedama? The risk/consequence side is what needs work.

What if every attack ship needed a quantum core based on it’s DPS potential by class? Then every single gank ship out there would be a valuable target worth blasting, and suddenly those high-sec "PvP"ers would be engaged in actual PvP, not just “ganking for profit”.

What if bounties paid out 35% of destroyed value? What if you could place bounties on entire corps? What if you got Concord LP and some sort of special “Protector” standings from blasting gankers, and what if gankers got special “Privateer” standings from blasting Protectors? What if the ‘criminal standing’ of your corp altered it’s war-dec status?

Things like that could lead to a very rich ecosystem of criminals and hunters, but instead all we’ve got is people crying “You blew up my freighter!” and “Your freighter was too hard to blow up, and didn’t even drop enough loot!”. It’s just sad.

402

Maybe just skip taxes then and apply some fee to highsec structure anchoring? So they always will be worth defending?

403

I thought about that, but that sort of system could still be gamed much worse than a system of fees and taxes.

Expensive structures would force players to create conglomerates for collective defense (even if it’s just though collecting funding to hire defending parties), instead of simply writing off structures as a sunk cost. For example, everyone would be clustered around TTT-like structures which are backed by extremely powerful entities, instead of buying their own, smaller structures for “mom-and-pop” business. The end result of this is that most players would still be individually exempt from risk, which isn’t the goal. The goal is to make all players shoulder the burden of increased risk for maximum levels of rewards, and to also transition high-sec PvP to smaller-scale, proportional affairs, instead of blanket-dec mass warfare.

404

I thought goal is to provide meaningful highsec PVP opportunities?