I believe it was actually the other way around.
Yulai was where CCP thought the main trade hub should be.
Jita 4/4 sprung up as the players choice for a number of reasons.
There’s a level four mission agent there, an important source of early game income.
It’s also a classic crossroads, one jump from two other regions and two jumps from a third. Traders could quickly check regional prices and plan their buying or selling accordingly.
Interestingly, the Serenity server also has Jita as their main trade hub. I don’t know if this was due to cross over from TQ players or it evolved for the same reasons.
In any case, Jita is now so entrenched as the main trade hub, there would have to be some serious incentive for people to shift.
AFAIK: The long range gates in Yulai were removed when it was clear that the players preferred Jita.
No, the long range gates in Yulai were removed because the servers at the time couldn’t handle a market hub of that size, and probably also because having one big hub makes for a less interesting economy. The gates were removed with the intent of ending Yulai as a trade hub, which caused trade hubs to spring up around popular mission hubs (remember that this was at a time when level 4 missions were considered the ultimate endgame by most of the playerbase). Source: Decentralization of highway systems | EVE Online
Jita ended up being the biggest one because Caldari was the most popular faction due to their superior base stats (back when that mattered), which made skill training early on much less painful.
Fair enough.
Although ccp put those gate systems in with the intent they be the trade hubs.
In any case, it was long before my time and i appreciate the history lesson.
I actually like the long trade routes with the dangerous chokes. I can often make pretty good deals in Amarr, probably because Jita isn’t right around the corner.
However, I do believe that EVE would benefit from a more dynamic tax/fee system tho, so forsaken regions would offer a discount in sales tax and/or broker fee to motivate people to do business there.
I do not believe that bringing the hubs geographically closer to each other would solve anything. Instead people would proably even more often travel the few jumps more to get to Jita, where they now would go to another tradehub that saves them 25 jumps.
That argument is flawed. There is no point for a Jita-esque trade hub to go to Devoid or Derelik or Molden Heath because there is
- No demand there
- No goods are there (Jita is only successful because you get EVERYTHING there without having to sift through tons of places to cobble together your crap)
- No activity there that supports such a hub
- No connectivity to other places (getting to these areas, for instance, requires using very dodgy routes)
- No existing infrastructure (logistics endpoints mostly)
- No good auxiliary reasons to go there (no desirable missions, no desirable exploration, not really desirable space)
- and it is not a central location, easily accessible from lots of different places.
CCP already tried this with industry and no one moved out of The Forge. Why? Because it is way more convenient to do business there. You got everything you need in one place, you have tons of options, you are not cut off from reaching other parts of space. Even if Ammatar Mandate, Gallente Federation or Thukker PAID you to buy-order stuff in their regions, why would you go there? You cannot get all the things you need to build products there, you cannot get all the things you need for your fittings, you cannot get necessary logistics equipment.
Besides: This dynamic tax system actually punishes you for moving out of Jita in the long run. If you start selling more goods in weird locations and that place’s taxes catch up and rise, you then pay higher taxes again but have to invest more effort to get your goods sold. This worked out in Jita (the over 20% industry fees are ridiculous around that area) because Jita is convenient for EVERYONE. Similar fee volatility is poison for every other place because every other place LACKS this convenience.
There is one simple thing to get people to move away from Jita without crutches that ultimately turn toxic on the efforts: start creating big BULK sell order volumens of EVERYTHING in another location at Jita prices. If producers in Rens or Hek or Bosena can get ALL they need for their industry nearby, they don’t need to go to Jita. No tax incentives needed.
If you are a null block, you could, for instance, do something akin to OTEC of the past. Stop shipping your moon goo products to Jita and sell-order them in Amarr or Dodi for starters. You would have to organize with your surrounding peers to make this work and to significantly reduce the influx or some things into Jita, though. Apparently, someone tried this recently with Terahertz Metamaterials, which were gone completely for a time from Jita and Amarr. This way, you can corner the market into a particular hub/area.
That isn’t true, because I did run a industry empire in HS for many many years, running hundreds of jobs at each given time. And I moved away from Jita and relocated my structures to systems where the SCI was very low. And if I did it, surely others did it as well.
Nobody said people should or would begin selling in remote stations out of the blue. But if you pay only half the sales tax in Amarr that you would pay in Jita, more people would be willing to sell their stuff there. Everyone? No. The “majority”? Probably not. Some? Definitely! How do I know? Because I often do the calculation where to sell my stuff. Jita or Dodi? Jita or Amarr? Jita or Hek? And depending on the price difference, it’s regulary “not Jita” in the end.
You people should stop thinking in just black and white. No single change has the goal to offer a “perfect solution”, it’s all tiny pieces of a larger picture. Tax discount would definitely shift some trade from Jita to the other alread existing hubs. Be it more, be it less, it doesn’t matter. It’s a small step into the right direction.
And that is why all the rest of your made-up “selling random stuff in weird places won’t work” theory is irrelevant. Because no one ever suggested that you should do.
“Out of Jita” means out of the Forge or at least the nearest vicinity of Jita. You can of course move just a few systems away from Jita but you still stay nearby to sell there, you are not moving away from Jita.
When Niarja was still available, I used to do Industry in Kor-Azor to sell in Amarr, because it was feasible to export all the things from Jita with relative ease. This is moving away from Jita. Not your few systems to still sell in Jita.
I think in realistic terms. “Some” people are already selling and buying in Amarr, for instance. That is why Amarr is still the second-strongest trade hub in the game by a big margin. Your dynamic taxes, however, would increase taxes in Amarr to an unhealthy level that does not warrant that extra effort anymore.
Tax discounts would not move any meaningful amount of Trade from Jita to anywhere else because Trade REQUIRES things to be in ONE place for optimal trading. There is no reason to start selling things for production or fitting in another place just because you pay half the taxes there if your buyers pay more in transport fees to go there to get the things, additional time, more effort than they would pay for in Jita.
What your dynamic system WILL do, however, is to discourage people from spreading out because their extra effort results in increasing taxes over a short period of time (industry fees change in a matter of days, for instance), which lowers their profits and undermines the extra effort.
This is why your estranged fairytales about tax incentives to get people to spread out falls apart.
Interesting, so I suggest to have lower taxes in Amarr than in Jita, to motivate people to rather trade there and your argument is that taxes would increase? Thats a weird way to make a point, really.
And all the rest is, like in your previous reply, just made up assumptions covered in a wall of text that simply has nothing to do with what I said.
No, not your imagined additional trade increases the taxes. The already existing trade does. This makes it less viable to trade in Amarr than in Jita because the extra effort to sell things there coupled with similarly high taxes as in Jita removes any positive advantage from Amarr. It really is a point that you don’t seem to understand.
Dyver, I have the impression that Syzygium is suggesting that Amarr would have lower taxes than Jita.
Can you explain how such a change in taxes would disincentivize trading in Amarr? To me it seems pretty obvious that lower taxes in Amarr would incentivize trading there, at least more than it does today.
He does not suggest that Amarr has lower taxes. He suggests that taxes are dynamically calculated based on the amount of trade.
Fixed lower taxes make no sense as they would unfairly favor one region over another for no good reason. They would have to be manually adjusted by CCP based on trade to keep the dynamic up and not punish regions for being successful and play CCP favoritism for certain regions.
Hence, a dynamic system like the industry indexes would be implemented, which over time increases taxes in Amarr just like they go up in Jita. You’d end up with the same high amount of taxes in Amarr in a short amount of time as in Jita. Then you are not only back at square one, you are also worse off because you now have goods in a place where based your income on lower taxes, which is not the case anymore; sales are also not as good; and ever increasing taxes lower supply of other goods that you need so that your market items make sense to be bought in the first place.
‘Dynamically calculated’ can mean any relation. He didn’t specify how, and the details are not relevant either.
The part that is relevant is that he means that Amarr with a lower amount of trades gets lower taxes than Jita.
This encourages trade outside Jita.
That’s how CCP thinks features and mechanics through. I am not a fan of wishful fairytale thinking. Amarr’s trade is substantial, and the lower taxes would not remain lower than Jita for any amount of time.
Again, trade outside Jita already happens and it is already very well possible, feasible and practical. You could already start improving Amarr, for instance, by dropping all kinds of things there if you live in the south instead of going to Jita. You would save fuel cost, cyno cost, per jump fees, time and effort. This is already a indirect tax cut over Jita.
The reason why people don’t do it is because it lacks convenience. No one will go to Keberz to get their SE quadrant exclusive moongoo materials just because Goons start dropping that stuff off there because of -10% taxes on sales. All this talk about “spreading out trade” really means that these advocates want to make the gameplay experience more convoluted, frustrating, time consuming aand less enjoyable.
That entirely depends on the implementation of ‘dynamically calculated’.
If for example the taxes were linearly proportional to the amount of daily trades, Amarr taxes would never catch up to Jita taxes unless the amount of trades is exactly the same.
Now that’s a silly example, but I hope it makes clear that CCP could easily make dynamic taxes in such a way that there always is a small pressure from taxes to trade outside major trade hubs like Jita.
Discussing the fine details of dynamix taxes is pointless now though, the focus is that dynamic taxes could be additional encouragement to trade outside Jita, a form of encouragement that currently doesn’t exist.
I do not think that this is pointless at all. It puts stupid claims and problematic ideas into the correct perspective.
There will be a balance between people who look for opportunities and people who look for lazy sales.
I for example love lazy sales, but see the value of spreading out trade so that there are more opportunities for people to trade outside Jita so that I can also have lazy sales elsewhere than just in Jita.
You’re trying to force a red herring in this discussion.
Syzygium says lower taxes in Amarr leads to more sales in Amarr.
Simple as that.
I agree with him.
I don’t see how anyone could say that what Syzygium said there is wrong, but for some reason you claim that the taxes are in fact ‘higher’ because dynamic taxes won’t work unless you know exactly how they’re implemented? It’s wrong and mostly irrelevant what you say. Talking about ‘the correct perspective’ of saying that the details of dynamic taxes are relevant doesn’t refute that cheaper taxes in Amarr leads to more sales in Amarr.
That’s an overly simplistic way of seeing this, and in this simplistic way the argument is true. But only in the simplistic way. That’s how CCP keeps getting their features and mechanics wrong all the time with utter reliability.
Simplifying problems is a skill.
Now if we can agree that this simplified example is true then we can discuss how exactly dynamic taxes could be implemented in such a way that trade outside Jita is slightly cheaper based on the amount of trades.
But frankly I don’t care about those details at this point. All I know is that it’s possible whether it’s a linear relation between trades and tax or something else. Probably because of the way amount of trades in Jita is of many magnitudes higher than in most other stations it could be nice to include a logarithm of the amount of trades, but who cares.
Fine details are irrelevant at this stage, because we’re not finalizing the mechanics but are merely suggesting dynamic taxes to boost trade outside Jita.
And I agree with Syzygium: dynamic taxes could boost trade outside Jita.
Thank you @Gerard_Amatin. I could only browse on phone the whole day and arguing against windmills is just annoying this way. You seem to understand it.
And of course, simplicity is key. I didn’t say anything that the system should work like the SCI (the opposite is true: I think this SCI mechanic is inherently wrong and counterintuitive design. I agree with their intention, but not with the way they have done it).
Related to the topic, I believe that having some distance between the hubs is essential and good, to give local industrialists a noticable benefit over those who just trade and haul. I also believe that dangers (aka opportunity for combat) on the route between them is nessessary and good. The key is to reward those willing to overcome those difficulties with better profit margins. Going the other way like the OP suggests, by making it a lot easier to trade between the hubs, isn’t going to fix any problem. Tbh, the dominance of Jita isn’t anything that needs to be “fixed” completely anyway. It would just be good to go many different tiny steps into a direction where trading outside of the main market hub is benefitial and rewarding, so more people find various reasons to do so. Lower taxes/fees is one part of that.
And there should be many others as part of a larger picture that actively supports and rewards industrial activity outside the most crowded areas.
There is more value and texture added to the game by having an event change topography of space. Than there is by having high sec be an immutable unchanging place. What point is there in playing a sandbox where your actions don’t matter