Currently the price for an office at Jita 4-4 is around 5.5b a month. There’s 20 taken and 4 spare. The demand is there, but the price is way to much for most small or even mid sized corporations.
I understand the mechanics of how the price is set, and supply and demand, but i think Jita (and other hubs) are a special case.
Would it be possible to increase the number of offices at 4-4 and reset the price to the point where smaller corporations can afford the rent. I would suggest at least a couple hundred offices. I mean they have to do something with all that free space in the new 4-4 right?
I would also propose a cap of 1b a month. Doing so would create a larger isk sink (200x1 vs 20x5)
CCP Ice Cream suggested I propose the idea here.
Thanks for considering
Don’t agree with either of you, obviously. There were no offices left last week, 2 left yesterday, 4 today. People are not renewing them due to the cost. A lot of people want the office there but can not afford.
You can either take the path of tough, that’s the price, or you can take the path of making the game better for the people that play / corps that sell at Jita. Simple changes like this make a big difference to how players feel about the game.
So… now you are admitting that people have been willing to max the capacity. And are jumping to the conclusion that people aren’t renewing do to cost rather than because they have become inactive or missed a bill…
Would this impact game play, balance, or ships in space in any way, or is it just a convenience thing? If its the former, then I might have reservations. If it’s the latter, then I don’t see why it would matter if the number of offices got bumped up. And if it actually creates a bigger isk sink, then all the better.
So, what effects would changing this have? I’m seriously asking, because I don’t know.
Lugh I am asking for both. Based on conversations i have with other traders the reason they don’t have corp hangers at Jita is the price. If the price were lower, more corps would take hangers therefore many more would be needed. If they were cheap enough i expect a very high percentage of corps would have a hanger at Jita for convenience.
If you increase the number of offices then the price will get cheaper as the mechanics adjust the price based on the number of free offices. The two are linked by supply and demand. I can not remember the details but i think its something like <2 offices free, price goes up 5% a month. 2 offices free, stays same. >2 free, goes down 5% a month. Sure someone will correct me.
It then becomes a balancing act between how many offices you provide and what the saturation point is. Put in 1000 offices, 500 used, price will go to zero over the next 10 years. Keep it at 20, price is sky high. Balance is needed.
Or as an alternative, for Jita, do unlimited offices and a fixed fee. 1b. 2b. Whatever. But 5.5b is simply too high.
To answer your question Shipwreck Jones, its a convenience thing.
As one example, the traders in my corp are constantly contracting things between them at jita to sell, depending who has capacity, rather than keeping them in a the corp hanger. Haulers have to wait for the right person to be online to get a contract raised rather than just taking things from the permissioned hanger etc.
Jita does not need to be made an exception to the 20 hanger rule. And it doesn’t need to be made cheaper as the current price has people willing to pay.
Jita doesn’t need to be further reinforced. If anything I would be in support of the trade equivalent of a system cost index
The rental cost is dynamic and will change daily depending on how many of the available offices on the station are rented out. The minimum office rent is 10.000 ISK, but there is no upper limit. A bill will always be sent for the current price of an office slot on the station on the day the bill is issued and will remain unchanged until the bill is paid.
I feel like this is arguing for rent control on office space in Manhattan.
I understand the point, but if you truly think that having corp hangers in Jita is going to be lucrative, it had better be better than 5.5 billion per month lucrative. My understanding is that Jita offices have always been more about prestige than actual use. Who actually has Jita offices?
As the main trade hub, unless you allow almost limitless offices in Jita they will always be maxed out. The price will always be high because everyone would want one there for convenience. I don’t see any issue with the current situation of there being limits on offices and paying a premium / having competition for those coveted offices in the main trade hub or anywhere else for that matter. This is Eve. Think of getting coveted offices as another form of PvP. Obviously enough people think the price is worth it because they are paying it.
Other areas such as key cyno systems also have high prices. If you want the best offices with the most convenience you compete and pay the price.
The nice thing is that Eve gives you a choice. Your not forced to pay those high prices. You can get offices dirt cheap a jump or two away from Jita. Save a few bil per month by making a jump or two when you want to shop.
I don’t think its going to be profitable, but i do think it will be very convenient and make life easier for people. I get your point on Manhattan, but also Manhattan has more than 20 offices and new ones are built and added all the time.
But notice that there is a limit to the space in Manhattan, both in land and engineering ability. They can’t build enough offices for every business in the country let alone account for increases in future population. Notice that even as they build more the cost isn’t decreasing because they simply can’t build more than enough space for everyone that might want it.
The cost is decreased with every bit of space that is added to the market. If it doesn’t make a noticeable difference, that’s because it’s still only a tiny drop in a very large bucket. And as already mentioned: real estate in Manhattan is so desirable that there can simply never be enough, and prices will keep soaring.
Now imagine a RL EVE scenario, where Manhattan only ever had the same amount of office space as Bad Ass, Lancre, because the powers that be feel that “that’s enough and sod off if you can’t afford it”. Yeah…
Simply lowering prices in Jita would be a cop-out. But it is kind of ridiculous that the largest trade hub in the cluster can only have the same amount of corp office/hangar space as some dingy backwater station whose daily visitor numbers are in the single digit range…
Adding a mechanic that balances the maximum number of offices (and their prices) according to the traffic/trade a station sees would be sensible IMO — though obviously with some diminishing returns to maintain scarcity à la Manhattan in the more desirable locations.
Whether this should be a high priority for CCP is another matter. Clearly it isn’t the kind of issue in EVE that it would be in RL.
There are 5 open offices today, so 2 more have gone in the last few days. But the price is still 5.369b a month.
Keeping with the Manhattan comparison, I expect there would be plenty of free offices in Manhattan if the average rent was $1,000 psf rather than $82.
As Vorian Alversson points out having the same number of offices in every station is causing an unrealistic limitation. If Jita had 100 offices I expect most of them would be used, and the monthly rental would find a new, more realistic level.
