If a mall gets popular, rents go up for the retailer (which gets passed on to the consumer).
If a mall gets really popular, there is not physically enough room for the goods or people to fit in and people are forced to go elsewhere.
Eve doesn’t have these disincentives built-in - Jita unrealistically has infinite storage space. It does have transportation costs, but not negative feedback pressures on centralizing trade itself.
Of course any such system needs to be balanced so there is some consistency, but the exact same mechanic exists in the game now for building stuff with the industry index and it’s not like most people don’t still build close to trade hubs. I see no deal-breaking issue with building in a trading index, building in a new knob to tweak, and such a system might breath some more life into the other trade hubs, or encourage more point-to-point trading.
That argument is patently false for the market because other hubs and alliance specific hubs exist. Dodixie, Amarr, Rens, Hek exist. 1DQ1, DP- and up until recently also one of the stagings of FRT in Detorid as well as OSY-, 9UY and so on all exist. And they exist in part because Jita also exists because it is not unreasonably hard to get things and move them to your area of activity.
And CCP does not comprehend the meaning of flavor. Decentralizing something for the sake of decentralization is not a good approach to the matter. The market is supposed to fuel PVE and PVP. It is not supposed to be an unreasonable burden just because CCP or some uninformed player group wants it to be an unreasonable burden. Decentralization exists already as shown above. It is player driven and follows their logic and needs for a societal construct based that is meant to support their activities.
Were this system implemented, it would cause nothing but more frustration and would not create any form of positive gameplay experience. In contrast, it would remove positive or at least neutral gameplay experience because you suddenly would wreck your alliances home system’s market just by trading there and providing your alliance or group with things to be active in space.
Another false believe here is that EVE is big. At the moment, EVE has around 20000 active chars on average (probably optimistic). That is a very small town that can easily be supported by one big mall/shopping center and a few smaller shopping areas around the perimeter. Even in its haydays with around 50000 active chars, this holds true because the shopping areas around the perimeter were bigger to support more people. With the decline of the city/EVE population, lots of businesses shut down and now these perimeter shopping areas are much more deserted.
I do not see how moving the market around in this small town from one backend to the next or increasing prices on the markets would do anything to stimulate any business. In contrast, more would go bankrupt because they could not support the regular high cost of moving their assets around. In other words, either people stop using this completely false analogy that EVE is some kind of Mumbai-like juggernaut metropolis or they start thinking their analogies through more thoroughly and not just to the point that suits their narrative.
Matter of fact is: Markets do not need to move around at all. Markets are most successful if they can stay in a place and support the people who live from them and with them. Markets are there to provide goods and services, not to be a game of Catch Me If You Can.
Resources, on the other hand, move around all the time and there is logic behind them moving around. Mines deplete, oil wells deplete, asteroids deplete, resource deposits on moons deplete, criminals move to other towns or areas in cities. And so on and so forth.
Steve Ronuken mentions having variable taxes in specific regions on some specific goods. CCP Fozzie says that this is not doable with the current market code but might be possible in the future
Buying and fitting a ship may still be possible at decent price, say 15% here or there (like when you buy and fit a ship at dodixie instead of jita today).
However, when it comes to finding a better price for your 4bil of T2 railguns you’ve built, that 15% makes a difference and may make you think about exporting.
Bolded the important part. The level of price variation that currently exists is not enough to break up market centralization, so obviously you would have to have a much more significant impact from the anti-centralization rules.
And really, on a conceptual level this is obvious. You can’t have “local flavor” in the markets if the major market systems have a full market. Paying +15% for one thing and -15% for another averages out to the typical player not seeing any meaningful difference between systems and continuing to shop at Jita unless they need something ASAP from the local market. If you want “local flavor” you have to create shortages (or at least shortages at reasonable prices) on the market such that different systems have different goods available and players are forced to use multiple markets.
However, when it comes to finding a better price for your 4bil of T2 railguns you’ve built, that 15% makes a difference and may make you think about exporting.
But let’s assume everyone else in the game is at least as smart as you are. The extra money draws all T2 railguns to the alternate system, Jita has none on the market, and anyone who wants to put T2 railguns on their ship is forced to fly to the alternate system to get them. Unless of course the 15% price difference doesn’t last, in which case prices stabilize quickly as the anti-centralization penalty destroys that 15% profit margin, you don’t actually make the theoretical extra profit, and everything goes right back to the current situation with one central market hub.
If you really want to break up market centralization you have to do three things:
Remove highsec level 4 missions and any highsec activities with similar levels of income. Missions create the problematic situation where ISK is an infinite resource and there’s no pressure to spread out. Theoretically you could have 90% of the population of EVE farming within a 5-jump radius of Jita and there would still be an infinite supply of missions available for everyone. Move all of the endgame-level income to lowsec/nullsec and you force everyone to spread out. If PvE activity gets too concentrated then the PvP threats come in to destroy it.
Nerf the hell out of nullsec farming. No more near-unlimited ISK faucets, PvE in nullsec is a scarce resource and you are required to spread out across the entire map to get your share of it. This has some nice benefits for nullsec in general, but the relevant part here is that the number of players a system is capable of supporting must decrease.
Remove highsec-only connections between the empires. Every empire is isolated from the others by nullsec, and each empire is broken up into highsec islands surrounded by lowsec. Now that everyone is forced to disperse across the entire map in search of income they’re forced to use their local markets. No more easy trips to Jita from halfway across the galaxy, you buy what is available locally and it may not be the same things that someone in a different region has access to. Trade is potentially immensely profitable, but also extremely dangerous and limited to the most skilled and daring players instead of anyone with a spreadsheet and the ability to identify a 1% difference in price.
You seem to completely misunderstand. Small shops would be relatively unaffected. And affecting peoples small shops is NOT the goal. So you WOULDN’T have to have significant anti-centralisation rules for SMALL shops.
Right now, for a quick buy of a ship or ammo, people don’t go all the way to jita, and after this change they STILL wouldn’t go all the way to jita. That doesn’t mean ‘crank up the tax so that they do’. No one here is saying that.
That completely depends on what’s on their shopping list. And buyer habits may shift according to local supplies.
You are confusing the concept with something it’s not. You keep going back to hiking the tax or making things so rare to force everyone to move around to buy the simplest of things which is not what anyone said in this thread ever…
This does not make sense.
No market is going to become a barren wasteland just like no markets outside of jita today are wastelands. Nor could the mechanic somehow cause a cycle of decentralising and then recentralising. That is quite literally nonsense.
Then what is the point? If small players are capable of existing in Jita then clearly the penalties are not significant and nobody is going to care about them. You’re creating a complex mechanic with very little return as far as I can see.
Or are you suggesting that the penalties only apply to “large” sellers and the sole effect will be forcing major players to split up their market activity across a farm of alts so that everyone still counts as a “small shop”?
You keep going back to hiking the tax or making things so rare to force everyone to move around to buy the simplest of things which is not what anyone said in this thread ever…
People haven’t said it because people in this thread are dealing with some vague concept of “remove Jita” or “local flavor” and not bothering to consider what that would actually mean. Shortages are an inherent part of what we’re talking about here even if people don’t admit it openly.
No market is going to become a barren wasteland just like no markets outside of jita today are wastelands. Nor could the mechanic somehow cause a cycle of decentralising and then recentralising. That is quite literally nonsense.
Again, you can’t compare markets today to markets in a hypothetical anti-centralization system. Obviously no market becomes a barren wasteland today as a result of crippling “this system is too crowded” taxes because no such tax exists. But if you have a sufficiently high tax that people are driven to do business elsewhere then guess what, everyone except the people who put up market orders 30 days ago and haven’t logged in since will pack up their shops and move somewhere that doesn’t eat their entire profit margin.
As for cycles, why wouldn’t it create cycles? The whole premise here is a variable tax that depends on market activity. That inherently creates cycles as high taxes drive people out, low activity reduces the tax, and low taxes draws activity back in. The natural pressure is in favor of centralization so decentralized markets will only exist in the periods where the penalty tax is high enough to enforce them.
This sounds like a great way for the ultra rich market players to gain an even greater advantage.
I would just go ahead and stock up three most accessible systems with all of my alts. As the taxes rise in one system, everyone will look to another system with lower taxes, and guess what, with my wealth and alts, I would already have established another system. It’ll be nearby, in a relatively central location, be found in highsec space (like Jita or Perimeter). And thanks to my alts, I can have almost everything you could ever want already stocked and ready to go.
Now, all of the other small time traders are put in a terrible position. Their orders are stuck in a system with high taxes. Which means either they need to (1) just wait out the months until the taxes get low enough that people come back, meaning tens of billions trapped in assets that won’t move, or (2) unlist everything, eat all those brokers fees, and risk hauling them over to the new system that I’ve set up shop in, with frieght costs eating into their profit and then losing even more brokers fees to list the stuff up again.
To stop it being the one stop and dumping ground for the ENTIRE of new eden. Perhaps i confused the matter by using the term groceries.
People who live outside of caldari space, and do industry outside of caldari space, are still using jita as the place to do weekly/monthly shops and sales. Because when it comes to it, there really is only one choice of where to do it. The idea is to create an incentive to go else where, which will organically favour local markets and cause some regional price differences (but it really depends).
However, going out to replace a ship would be relatively unaffected. Common items would be relatively unaffected and still available everywhere. It’s also unlikely to cause mass migration in the same way production indices did not cause mass migration. Forcing people to move is not the point. So we wouldn’t need to crank it up if they don’t move.
The most likely items affected would be where regional resources are present. T2 components being one possible example. These would have the greatest chance of having regional price differences.
No they aren’t.
It’s a very specific and even a copy of existing mechanic. Copy production indices for trade. That is all. Op makes no mention of jita.
I then imagine this could decentralise trade from jita.
Production indices haven’t consumed peoples margins, and neither would trade indices…
Raising taxes won’t decentralize Jita. People are lazy, they know they can buy/sell in Jita and will continue to do so. The effort would however give a benefit to trading at other markets.
Because I don’t need to right now. Jita is where Eve Online lives and breathes. Why would I go and start doing something based off some random moron and his bad idea on the forums?
Who said it was an issue? It’s long been a goal of ccp to find a way to spread trade about and I’ve already stated in this thread why it could lead to some interesting depth to trade and hauling.
Both you and merin, stop looking for something that’s not there.
But that’s not what I’m asking. I get the point of these vague ideas about decentralizing the market, I’m asking what’s the point of a system that has no meaningful effect towards that goal. If common items (which make up the majority of the market) are “relatively unaffected and still available everywhere” and the mechanic is “unlikely to cause mass migration” then what is the point? You’ve essentially just said “this change will add complexity and cost developer time but won’t do anything”, so why keep pushing the idea?
Production indices haven’t consumed peoples margins, and neither would trade indices…
Because production and markets are two entirely different things, with choices driven by completely different pressures. This makes about as much sense as saying that the cyno nerf is fine because stacking multiple MWDs was nerfed and people still use MWDs.