I took a look at the system cost indexes within a 2 jump range of Jita and was quite surprised. At 2 jumps, you’ll have no problem finding a manufacturing index around 3% and research index below 2%. The highest index is Jita itself. People are willing to pay over 12% system cost index plus 10% NPC manufacturing tax for the privilege of building in the Jita system.
Your mechanic is location neutral - with the example reduction someone building in Jita would receive the same % benefit as someone building in a low index system - which translates into a much larger absolute benefit.
20% off a 12% system cost index is a much greater benefit than 20% off a 1% system cost index!
If your objective is to discourage people from congregating in high index systems, this seems counter productive.
TBF, this is a bit of ‘pot kettle black’ right here. The game has sufficient means to provide you a location with a reduced SCI. You simply refuse to acknowledge it exists. To the point you willingly made a suggestion asking for a method to do more work to get a meager reduction in SCI compared to moving things around a system or two further and getting a wholesale reduction in SCI because you were willing to travel just a teensy bit further than everyone else.
Being able to reduce the system cost would go against the whole point of it. That’s not progress, that’s going backwards and breaking functioning game-mechanics.
this just means that many others also want to use this system
the system is an organic give/take to push people to other systems that would normally be less worth while if they want to min/max profit.
i would like CCP to fix the auction system and bring back the recruitable scientists/engineers that was meant to go with it. just don’t make the intel public this time and tie them to structures not systems