Before you all sigh and groan. I think its something the game needs. A one off payment you make everytime you dock from your wallet.
How would it work?
NPC & Player owned stations would have a flat rate based upon the size of the ship you are docking. Docking fees would be split 50/50 between ccp and the owner of the station for player owned stations.
A skill would be required to reduce docking fees by 5% per level, level 5 being a 25% reduction.
Pro’s
It’s another way to remove isk from the game at a steady rate.
It actually forces a committment from players when they undock larger ships such as caps and supers to make it worth undocking or deploying to another region.
It could easily fit in with all other sci-fi lore.
It could prevent cap or super umbrellas from being used to drop on small roaming gangs frequently.
It could become a worthwhile tactic to force capitals and supers to undock only to blueball them and cost the pilots isk for over escalating.
Cons
The increasing rate of docking fees would need to be fair. To charge tens of millions of isk to redock a cap or super would only force capitals to stay docked.
Likewise charging large amounts on new players in rookie ships or frigates would only hurt the game.
It would not because player structures just set the fees to 0 (ie. as low as possible) for their peers. The only people this would hurt are those living out of Nov stations.
Plus, in eve where you need to undock to trigger session changes to update certain UI elements or to fix bugs with the UI I don’t think this feature would any positive experiences. Not to mention that you can just scam people out of all their money with your another structure scam opportunity.
You’d not achieve that because of 0 tax for ACL members. But what you would achieve is harming actual combat groups who need to pre-undock their caps for a drop. Since the drop often times end up in duds, they’d have to pay while the crabs pay nothing.
I’m less inspired by docking fees and more intrigued by storage/maintenance fees. The amount of stuff some people have stored in some stations is ludicrous. Myself included. Granted, a TON of it is locked in some station somewhere in asset safety and I can’t be bothered to get it out right now, but still…
We already had this for the outposts that CCP removed and turned into faction citadels. On those you could set docking fee fro players outside of your alliance, i had those set to type of ship by mass , the larger the ship , the higher the docking fee . Every now and then a JF that got tackled ended up in paying a huge docking fee just to save the hull.
I’ve been thinking about how to work this in too, just to stop the hoarders from stacking up ships. I am terrible for this, so it’s also self-indulgent ‘change the game to help fix my obsession’ time for me.
What I’m thinking is that you’d get a certain amount of hangar space for free in every station that would cover you up to, say, a single carrier - lets say 1m m3. Anything above that, it works kind of like corp hangars in that you pay a monthly fee for enhanced storage.
I’d say this should be made as simple as possible - single fee, unlimited storage - though of course you could get more granular if the idea takes hold. If you miss a payment, no worries - the extra ships just go into a modified asset safety, so your first choice is to pay a fee (backdated monthly charges) to release the ships. Other choice is to move the ships to an asset safety system (this would need to be the 20-day 15% safety).
This would discourage long-term storage of assets in null sec, encouraging people to either undock or sell ships on rather than pile them up. You could add to the undocking thing by making it so that your first 30 days are free for the enhanced storage. Other options would be forcing people to spread ships out, so you don’t have massive caches in single locations, or inducing people to move more towards corp / alliance assets over personal ones, which again encourages use of built ships rather than storage.
I think any kind of docking or storage fee would discourage players from playing. No matter how you slice it, if players are charged for docking their ships, they’re going to cut back on the number of ships they’ll undock. If players are charged for storing assets, they’re not incentivized to gather assets.
If CCP wants to diminish the massive stockpiles–and I’d like to see their definition for that–and encourage players to get out there, they need to avoid any kind of punishment for doing so. I don’t know if corporations can see an audit log of who docks what in their stations, but perhaps if CCP had such a feature, corporations could send their members a bill, with consequences for non-payment, but…good luck with that.
Docking fees would make sense with the lore, but this is one of those times when I think realism should take a back seat to balancing the gameplay. Anything that keeps players from undocking their ships is not going to encourage people to play.
I feel you may have missed my point on the first x days free for docking - thus very specifically rewarding players for undocking. To avoid exploitation, you’d probably have to put in place a ‘no return’ limit, or at least 30 days free cooldown.
The whole aim of this is to encourage people to only hold the things they are actively using, and then to actively use them also.
Otherwise, without any penalty for holding massive stockpiles and hoards of ship caches in every corner of the map, how else do we get around the issue? Is it even an issue?!!
For me to even remotely be on-board with this; what would things look like if the player in question didn’t have the ISK to pay the docking fee?
What are you actually trying to get at other than an ISK sink and some other mechanism to make income off an Upwell structure?
Yes, this will cause players to become far more committed to undocking but as a result of this if they don’t feel they will re-coup the costs of needing to re-dock in the next 30-40 minutes or an hour (because every player has variable time and on average most players don’t play for more than 2-4 hours) they’ll just not undock or even worse not even sign-in for the day as a result of the fee.
If Upwell structure income is the goal, just be clear with that and as far as ISK sinks go, plenty of other alternatives exist that won’t directly impact a players ability to play and eventually log off when they desire.
I didn’t see anyone mention what I think could be the worst problem with this. It interferes with real life.
If you have spent enough time to accumulate stuff that you want to keep and suddenly while you are off line for whatever reason and some station gobbles up all of your isk and then ditches all of your stuff in some way I think people will quit in large numbers.
I’ve had to suddenly be offline for extended periods of time for a number of reason, medical, hurricane related and a few others, I would be livid if my isk and stuff were tampered with in any way when I got back.
When the game starts to actively ■■■■ with people’s real life they are going to get really really mad.
I don’t know if it still comes with the 1 tritanium though.