Post-Pochven highsec trade routes are so bad! Empire space now essentially forms a horseshoe with Amarr space at one end and Caldari space at the other. This has resulted in all trade hubs except Jita withering away to shadows of their former selves, and none have suffered as badly as Amarr. Jita imports having to take a 46-jump via dolorosa has absolutely devastated Amarr as a trade hub.
This has been the situation long enough that it should be safe to say that things will not reverse direction without CCP making changes to the game. So thatâs why they should make some changes. I havenât analyzed the entire map with a magnifying glass to find the most optimal solution, but hereâs one simple trick that will cut the JitaâAmarr route from 46 jumps to 25.
Make Vecamia, a 0.4 sec system, into a 0.5 sec system. Vecamia is currently the shortest lowsec chokepoint on the JitaâAmarr route when one avoids Ahbazon, Tama and Rancer. Elevating it to a highsec system will make JitaâAmarr hauling much better without having to add any new stargates. Itâs not a faction warfare system, and is mostly inhabited by small pirate gangs preying on haulers who think they found an amazing shortcut no one else knows about, so it turning into highsec isnât a big loss, but it is a big gain!
Sure - seems like a reasonable and well thought-out proposal. Is Uedama still a choke-point in this scenario? Anything to reduce the ridonkulous number of jumps from Jita-Amarr would be a welcome change (even if low-sec campers lose a single system).
And you would have more 0.5 systems besides Uedama for ganks.
Totally unintentional side-effect: these shitty Insurgencies can no longer cut Amarr off from trade via Devoid.
Still better than 46 jumps and no one would move out of Uedama for ganking purposes because it is still the ONE choke point EVERYTHING has to go through to Amarr, Dodi, Rens, FW space and so on.
If anything, the campers from Devoid would move over to Vecamia-Kador-Genesis, which really opens up a long safe route (if there arenât any Insurgencies), a short but more dangerous route (for freighters, anyway) and the shortcut (for anything nimble).
Uedama being a chokepoint between Jita and the rest of the universe is an entirely different question. Personally I almost feel like it is a good drawback that, if the way to Amarr wasnât so ridiculously long, might serve to balance things out between the other trade hubs. Instead of trading in Jita and having to haul through Uedama, you might choose to do your business in Dodixie or Amarr instead.
The Vecamia change would also make it the shortest route between Amarr and Dodixie (35 jumps â 17 jumps).
It also would make the Amarr-Jita trip significantly shorter as there is no point in going the long route when any low sec route is the best you can take.
But as a big bonus it gives haulers the opportunity to earn a lot more ISK by taking risks that others arenât willing to take, as Iâm sure people will still want to move items between Jita and Amarr.
Instead of more connected HS systems I think we should get less connected HS systems. Why not turn HS into four HS islands, one for each faction?
I think further separation would just lead to further withering of every trade hub except Jita. The Pochven geography (or should I say astrography) changes did nothing to invigorate the other trade hubs â on the contrary theyâre all worse off now than they were ten years ago, while Jita is still as big as ever.
People will never move freighters or DST trains through lowsec chokepoints. The game mechanics are simply so stacked against doing that, no matter how great the reward. Empire isolation would mean that essentially all cargo between them moves via jump freighter. While some local production would probably end up being directed to the nearest tradehub rather than Jita, the overall effect on everywhere except Jita would be withering, because only a minority of commodities are actually produced in highsec. If youâre already producing outside of HS, itâs roughly an equal amount of effort to haul your goods to any of the trade hubs â and with that being the case, why not pick the biggest one with the highest volume and best prices?
As a segue of the previous, I want to highlight a couple of stats from the Monthly Economic Report:
1. Production Value By Region
The Forge and The Citadel are #1 and #3 here, with all other top spots taken by nullsec regions. The first non-Caldari HS region is Sinq Laison at #10. Domain is #19, which is to say, barely any production happens in Amarr space proportional to how many systems there are. I argue this is because Amarr space is so far away from the only place where anyone actually buys or sells anything (Jita 4-4).
2. Total Market Trades By Region
Jita has 11 times more trade volume than the #2 system of Amarr. Dodixie, Rens and Hek are beaten by several nullsec hubs, thatâs how poorly theyâre doing. June 2017 is the oldest MER I could find, and there Jita has âonlyâ 8.5x the trade volume of Amarr. The trend therefore is towards increasing Jita centralization, even though itâs more difficult than ever to get there from the other empires.
Many many many years ago CCP turned Niarja from 0.4 to 0.5 to bring the 4 factions closer together. Because there was need to bring the four factions closer together. A decade later I saw a teaser trailer that showed a stargate being switched off. From that moment on I steadily made an exit from the game.
I took my time to make that exit, I have truly left the game behind now. This toon exists for no reason really. No isk, no SP, no assets. My last âactivityâ in the game was 02 Jul 2024 22:40 GMT, when I sat in jita with an Avalanche just for the hell of it. In the vain hope the interaction might reignite the spark. It failed. The problems were just too egregious at that point.
Or get together and create a new trade hub between the route from Jita to Amarr. That way you are halfway between two trade hubs no matter which side you are on. These things are made by players after all. CCP isnât going to do it for youâŚ
Jita wasnât always the de-facto main trade hub. It used to be Yulai. All you have to do is get enough players together, maybe along with the CSM, take a vote, and make a new trade hub. Ideally in a 1.0 or 0.9 system.
The last time players created a trade hub in the middle of empire space (Yulai), CCP literally removed gates from the game to stop it from existingâŚ
Jokes aside, there already is a trade hub at the halfway point between Jita and Amarr, which puts it around the center point of the highsec horseshoe. Itâs been there for quite a while, but it has never really prospered. You may have heard of it â itâs called Rens. Unfortunately Rens isnât even the biggest trade hub in Minmatar space (thatâs Hek).
It is impossible for any new trade hub to compete with Jita without mechanical changes to the game simply due to the sheer inertia Jita has. For most people it evidently doesnât make that much of a difference that the biggest trade hub happens to be in one of the farthest reaches of highsec. Non-highsec industry moves to trade hubs mostly via jump freighter, and for jump freighters the topography of highsec matters very little â it is at most an extra jump or two.
On the macro scale, however, it results in most of highsec being useless empty space that nobody really lives in. In the past CCP tried to incentivize living away from Jita via e.g. industry cost changes. These incentives evidently failed to really change anything, likely because shortly afterwards CCP made the geography changes this thread is about, which disincentivized living far away from Jita and counterbalanced the changes they made before.
It is time to admit that Jita is not going anywhere, and the rest of highsec being far away from it does nothing but make that distant highsec be worse off.
There needs to be one day out of the month, at random, where there is no Concord response in Jita. You never know when it will be. Either that or host Burn Jita like once a week.
