Structure Fee Improvements

[Kerono_Thalmor]

I was doing some thinking about Upwell structures and where they’re at right now, and thought of a couple ways their economy can be improved.

Firstly, I think that structure owners should be able to offer benefits to corporations that rent offices in their stations (e.g., renters get lower reprocessing fees, free jump clones, access to certain services, etc).

Practically speaking, you can do this already, but if you have more than a few structures and don’t keep very good track of who’s renting, updating access lists gets to be a real hassle. Furthermore, it’s not granular, it’s profile-wide. Baking this functionality into the structure profile, and allowing service use on a case-by-case basis (i.e., does your corporation rent an office in this specific station or not?) would go a long way to improving the economy around structures, I think, because it incentivizes higher service fees to the public, while renters get lower fees in exchange for a flat payment every month. This is particularly great for industrial stations, since industrial corporations use a lot of station services and (in my experience) make more use of corporate hangars.

Secondly, I think that there should be a tax associated with rentals that the structure owner pays.

We can call it an administration fee or whatever, but to help prevent rental prices from zeroing out, structure owners should pay a fee for each office rented in their structure. This associates a cost with office rental, which discourages free offices. Note: I will never, and am not suggesting that structure owners should not be allowed to offer free offices, only that there should be a cost associated with doing so. Fuel cost has proven to be insufficient–since it scales with the number of structures/services, not the number of structure/service users–but an (awful) alternative to this tax would be to raise fuel costs; this is mostly just kicking the can down the road.

I love intelligent discussion, so please, feel free.

[Scoots_Choco]

@Kerono_Thalmor

Firstly, I think that structure owners should be able to offer benefits to corporations that rent offices in their stations (e.g., renters get lower reprocessing fees, free jump clones, access to certain services, etc).

This is already part of the game.

You can set ACLs that have varying levels of taxation and fees and access to certain services.

@Kerono_Thalmor

Secondly, I think that there should be a tax associated with rentals that the structure owner pays.

This means nothing unless you provide numbers.
We can talk about vague concept of the tax until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, there’s only really 2 options. 1, it’s too low and becomes insignificant, or 2, it’s too high and becomes unusable.

[Kerono_Thalmor]

@Scoots_Choco

This is already part of the game.

You can set ACLs that have varying levels of taxation and fees and access to certain services.

Indeed, but updating ACLs based on who’s renting at any given time gets to be a real chore if you have a lot of stations.

@Scoots_Choco

This means nothing unless you provide numbers.
We can talk about vague concept of the tax until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, there’s only really 2 options. 1, it’s too low and becomes insignificant, or 2, it’s too high and becomes unusable.

I was hoping to have someone else throw out the first number, but very well; I think that five million ISK per rental per month is a reasonable starting point. It doesn’t push out NPC stations, and encourages structure owners to charge for offices, which helps the economy by encouraging productivity. The tax could vary from system to system, much like the system cost index on industry activities, based on how many offices in total were being rented in the system.

[Scoots_Choco]

@Kerono_Thalmor

but updating ACLs based on who’s renting at any given time gets to be a real chore if you have a lot of stations.

And?
Have less stations if it’s too much to handle.

@Kerono_Thalmor

I think that five million ISK per rental per month is a reasonable starting point.

A starting newbro with about maybe a week’s worth of training can make 8m isk in 20 minutes with a single combat anomaly site. This tax would be insignificant and meaningless.

[Kerono_Thalmor]

@Scoots_Choco

And?
Have less stations if it’s too much to handle.

That’s a bit limiting, don’t you think? Corporations should be able to have vast empires of structures, and give benefits to their tenants, without having to have people devoting their time solely to keeping track of who said tenants are; that’s soulless, thankless work.

@Scoots_Choco

This tax would be insignificant and meaningless.

Then add something to the discussion and share what you think would be better. Clearly five is not enough, so what would be? Because we’re only making alliances pay two million per corporation per month.

[Scoots_Choco]

@Kerono_Thalmor

That’s a bit limiting, don’t you think?

No, I think it’s a good trade off for having a lot of structures.
What alternative are you suggesting?

@Kerono_Thalmor

Corporations should be able to have vast empires of structures, and give benefits to their tenants, without having to have people devoting their time solely to keeping track of who said tenants are; that’s soulless, thankless work.

So then you set up a “Tenant” ACL list with the appropriate values and have everyone default to that? What’s the problem here?

@Kerono_Thalmor

Clearly five is not enough, so what would be?

I don’t know, but I’ve already told you my stance.
1 - it’s going to be too low and insignificant
2 - it’s going to be too high and unsuable

[Scipio_Artelius]

+1 for #1. Automating that seems like a good suggestion.

I don’t think #2 is necessary. If people want to 0 out the cost of an office, that encourages their use, which has potential asset safety fees down the track. I don’t think a 0 cost office is a problem for the game.

[Shipwreck_Jones]

@Scoots_Choco

@Kerono_Thalmor

Corporations should be able to have vast empires of structures, and give benefits to their tenants, without having to have people devoting their time solely to keeping track of who said tenants are; that’s soulless, thankless work.

I don’t know if this would be worth the developer resources, but this is a good point. There are a lot of people getting burnt out from handling administrative stuff in Eve. Now, I think this is more of a problem when it comes to the people handling the administrative affairs of large corps and alliances, and I don’t think OP’s idea is going to be something used by a lot of people, but I am, in general, supportive of changes that reduce administrative work for players.

[Scoots_Choco]

OP can change that by just delegating work to more people.

[Kerono_Thalmor]

@Scoots_Choco

So then you set up a “Tenant” ACL list with the appropriate values and have everyone default to that? What’s the problem here?

Yes, but automating the process with a simple checkbox that says “tenants only” or something like that, and checking to see if the player’s corporation is renting an office in their current station really reduces workload on corp officers. I do enough of that as it is, I don’t want to do more just to do make my office rentals worth the price.

[Scoots_Choco]

Are you making separate ACLs for each structure?

You realize that you can just set ONE ACL and then have that apply to ALL of your structures.

Seems like you’re just doing things inefficiently.

[Kerono_Thalmor]

I know I can do that. I want more granularity, I want my tenants to be able to use services only in the stations that they’ve rented offices in.

If you were living in an apartment, that was owned by a large firm that owned many apartment complexes, you wouldn’t expect to be able to use the laundromat at another complex owned by the same firm just because you’ve rented one of their apartments in another complex, right?

People can do exactly that with stations, as things are right now.

[Scoots_Choco]

@Kerono_Thalmor

I want my tenants to be able to use services only in the stations that they’ve rented offices in.

This is asking for a greater change than just Fees. You’re asking for the system to be changed.

@Kerono_Thalmor

If you were living in an apartment, that was owned by a large firm that owned many apartment complexes, you wouldn’t expect to be able to use the laundromat at another complex owned by the same firm just because you’ve rented one of their apartments in another complex, right?

I don’t really care about these attempts to make real life parallels since this is a video game.

[Kerono_Thalmor]

@Scoots_Choco

This is asking for a greater change than just Fees. You’re asking for the system to be change

This isn’t that hard to implement, since TQ already tracks where corporations rent offices; all it needs to do is check that list for a given player’s corp, and see if the player’s current station is on that list.

@Scoots_Choco

I don’t really care about these attempts to make real life parallels since this is a video game.

You can’t have a game with a realistic economy and not expect people to draw parallels and expect things to operate a certain way. I’m not really sure how you arrived at this way of thinking. I mean, it’s my understanding that CCP has an economist on staff.

[Scoots_Choco]

@Kerono_Thalmor

This isn’t that hard to implement

Spoken like someone who doesn’t program.

@Kerono_Thalmor

You can’t have a game with a realistic economy

The game doesn’t pretend that it has a “Realistic economy”. In what “realistic economy” can people go out, kill pirates and magically just have currency appear in their pocket? You’re derailing the topic if you choose to continue down this topic.

Anyway, we’ve already established that you’re asking for a bigger change than just fees. Maybe you can work out a better written idea on that basis.

[Kerono_Thalmor]

@Scoots_Choco

Spoken like someone who doesn’t program.

I do program; it’s a simple search, and you’re even using data that already exists and is organized and sorted properly for this application.

@Scoots_Choco

The game doesn’t pretend that it has a “Realistic economy”. In what “realistic economy” can people go out, kill pirates and magically just have currency appear in their pocket?

It’s a free market economy, and last I check bounty hunting was, indeed, a thing that people do, in real life. Maybe you’re not killing people, but bringing them to justice nonetheless.

@Scoots_Choco

Anyway, we’ve already established that you’re asking for a bigger change than just fees.

We’ve established no such thing; I’m asking for a little bit of convenience in making my fees more granular, and I’ve already shown it won’t require much in the way of implementation. At this point I’m just going to ignore you, since clearly you only read about 20% of what I actually say or you’d know I already knew that you could do the first change with ACLs and stated as much within 10 lines on my first post, and you haven’t offered anything constructive to this thread.

[Scipio_Artelius]

@Kerono_Thalmor

I do program; it’s a simple search, and you’re even using data that already exists and is organized and sorted properly for this application.

While the structure code is relatively new and should be extensible and “relatively” easy to modify, it’s never a good thing to assume anything about how easy something is to change, nor is it really important.

If CCP like the idea, they’ll work through the implementation stuff. That isn’t really our concern.