There are too many chokepoints, gate camps (etc.) In combination with doubling (or more) the distance between Jita and the other trade hubs it’s effectively killing high-sec outside of Caldari space. But hey, we have to keep the multi boxing gankers happy, right?
It was one thing when players had to form large fleets. Now we just have a handful of 24x7 gankers multi boxing 20+ ships.
It is. There is new connection via Ingrus, however it is same number of jumps as the previous route via Balle/Aufay/Deltole/Bei/Uttindar, so route planner sometimes chooses that.
Same as sometimes i leads you from Uedama to Jita via Haatomo->Suroken–>Kusomonmon sometiems via Juunigaishi->Suroken>Kusomonmon and sometimes via Juunigaishi>Antirri>Sirppala.
The systems I named must be flew through, at least in 50% cases. That makes them chokepoints even if there is multiple of them next to each other.
Gankers profit from the OP suggestion. If there is opposition to this, it will be from Ahbazon campers 
.
I love this idea, we discussed it before at some point, but it won’t work because of Jump Freighters.
Yes highsec route from Jita to Amarr is super long right now. But it didn’t really change anything. Dodixie, Hek, Rens distance from Jita was not altered, yet these tradehubs are dying anyway.
I believe there are two factors causing this.
It is not so hard to get there actually. Even if player lives in Amarr, he can take Sunesis and go to Jita via Ahbazon and bring a lot of stuff back, lowsec campers can’t catch this ship and while they do sometimes have the sub 2sec instalock setup, the system is under 24/47 surveilance from this intel bot Uedama Scout so anyone can check whats going on there before making a jump. I actually have seen a random freighter jumping ito Ahbazon n from Hykkota in “off hours” and getting away with it. And majority of traders have already skilled JF and can afford few alt accounts to multiox so they can get there easily from anywhere.
Because the highsec is open, it is just far too easy to buy all cheap stuff from Dodixie/Hek/Rens/Amarr and haul it to Jita. You can see armies of freigters on AP flying to/from Jita all the time and they are 99% safe since they know that they just need to keep the cargo under 2b and they will never be target of gankers. Same with DSTs - just don’t haul more than 1b and you can AP it while you are at work. And there is BR for smaller volumes. That can be also AP with 95% likelihoodness of getting it to Jita without being ganked because cargo scan immunity and gankers thinking that “he is autopilotting iin BR, so he won’t have anything anyway”. For super expensive stuff there is Sunesis or t3d or shuttle, nobody in highsec can targetlock and scan them, so if the player uses instaundock/instadock it is 100% safe. Hell I used to do it myself.
Problem is, even if highsec are islands, JFs bypass this restriction and can still buy whole volume of cheap stuff from minor tradehub and take it to Jita to resell for more. There is no solution for this, although perhaps it wouldn’t be as bad as now, hard to say. Well I don!t think it work, but I still think it is worth to do it. (But I know it won’t happen.)
I can’t think of any system other than forbidding to sell other racial stuff that would work. If something is cheap elsewhere, the first thing that players to is to buy it all and haul it to Jita to resell for profit… And then there is no volume for actual buyers and they have to go to Jita themselves. Or buy for more than Jita, because when there is no volume players will overprice.
Hell, station tradrs could just buy all volume of significantly cheaper stuff in Amarr and put it back for Jita price, there is nothing that prevents or discourages them to do it. Even if it is cheaper to produce the stuff there, why would anyone sell it for significantly less than is Jita price?
i believe @Syzygium point is that Jita is the main trade Hub for Caldari space, it should not be the main trade hub for the ENTIRE game…there are 4 main Empires, each should have their own main trade hub that is just as good as Jita.
The main reason why all other hubs have suffered is the Pochven Highway imho.
Being able to freely select your exit point is a huge mistake.
@Vokan_Narkar what you describe doesn’t happen for all goods. Thas why you can find good deals in Amarr on a regular basis. Some are just unproftable to haul in significant numbers. Also the sales tax / broker fees prevents this reselling if the price difference is too low. And nobody suggested you should sell in Amarr for 80% of the Jita price.
Wait, so you find a good deal in Amarr. What do you do with it then? Buy all and haul to Jita or buy all and put back for more, no?
Yes amarrian ships are not very haulable to Jita so they have better prices for those, that is pretty much it…
Yes this is how I was escorting faction battlleships from systems like Podion or Misaba. But I have seen that CCP nerfed this with that deploy timer. Not sure I will risk that anymore, there are other ways.
No. If you don’t need it, you do ‘nothing’ with it.
Again, we aren’t talking about a 20% here. You don’t want to tell me you buy stuff for 92,9 ISK in Amarr to haul it to Jita and sell it for 94,6 ISK there…
No, but I imagined something else than slightly cheaper stuff when you wrote “good deal”.
Stuff on other tradehubs often is cheaper than Jita. Production around has lower taxes so they can make the stuff cheaper. However, anytime someone puts something significantly cheaper it is instantly bought and haul to Jita to resell. So eventually, unless the price isn’t that much different from Jita, prices are worse than Jita which leads buyers to Jita. A vicious cycle really.
Not everything is overpriced, but that one item that is cheaper will not offset the rest of the fit you are buying…
The problem is that most traders are in Jita, thus most shopping players go to Jita, therefore most traders are in Jita.
It’s a vicious cycle that solidifies the place of Jita as main and almost only trade hub.
To break this cycle there should be more incentives to trade, buy and produce away from the biggest tradehub.
Broker fee was one of the reasons trading outside major trade hubs became more of a risk. Filaments made it easier to start and finish a null sec roam back at Jita.
Ovee the years CCP has made many changes like that for convenience that solidified Jita as main trade hub.
What we need now are some small changes with the opposite goal: to nudge people away from Jita.
Lower trade taxes outside Jita could be one good change to move some traders elsewhere with better flipping opportunities.
It could even be a good idea to dynamically adjust the broker fee based on the trade volume in the region: lower broker fees for low-trade regions to make it easier to set up shop in a more empty region with much lower financial risk.
And another good change could be for example industrial bonuses for producing Amarr-related weapons and ships in Amarr space and Gallente-related items in Gallente space, which would move some industrialists elsewhere.
It currently is hardly worth it to trade outside Jita and this shows, because Jita is getting more and more popular through this vicious cycle.
I think these are great ideas - and nothing massive, as you suggest - but some small changes to nudge things in the right direction. I think trade taxes should be eliminated outside of the five major trading hubs entirely and taxes on player-owned structures should also be slashed significantly. So your options would be:
• Jita (highest tax, no change)
• Amarr, Dodixie, Ren, Hek (half the Jita tax rate)
• Player-owned structures (one quarter the Jita tax rate)
• All other NPC stations (zero tax)
This would allow players to build and expand their own markets in NPC stations (as was the case in the not so distant past) and groups to establish their own player-owned trade hubs in specific areas (albeit with more associated risk).
Ah yes, you are right. Filaments and instanced content anywhere also deepened the problem.
So back to the OP’s proposal - I don’t think switching one 0.4 system to a 0.5 system to reduce the number of jumps between Amarr and Jita is a deal breaker - no?
I guess so, but thats not how it works. Lower taxes/fees enable sellers to either get higher profit margins or to untercut a competing market and still making at least the same profits.
Lets say I have 10B (Jita price) of goods and I don’t need the ISK back instantly. Now imagine we had 10% tax and 5% brokerfee in Jita (for the simplicity reasons). So I put my stuff into the market and what I get to my wallet will be 8.5B.
Now imagine in Amarr I would only have 5% tax and 2% broker fee. Thats 9.3B to my wallet. If I sell for the exact same price. I could even afford to undercut Jita (hoping to sell faster) and put in all the stuff for 9.5B, still getting more ISK to my wallet than selling it for 10B in Jita.
Now, you could say "yeah but someone will just buy my stuff for 9.5B and sell it in Jita for 10B! Well, he won’t make profit from that, because he has to pay the Jita taxes/fees if he tried. So, he obtains Items that are worth 10B in Jita prices for 9.5B, but still would only get 8.5B (as seen above) after taxes and fees. Nobody would do that.
And now imagine further I would want to bring back Ammo, FuelBlocks and some Fittingmods back into my WH. Guess where I would buy it, considering the price difference is +/-5%? Right, directly in Amarr, I wouldn’t even bother to make a second trip to Jita. That again creates demand. Demand motivates sellers. It is indeed a circle, but one working for the hub with the lower taxes and fees.
So what needs to be done is:
What drove sales in Amarr when it was healthy was the fact that buyers do not want to travel to get their stuff where they need it. If I’m doing industry or running missions in Amarr space or my wormhole opens next to Amarr, why would I burn 11 or 25 or 46 jumps back and forth to get my stuff from Jita when I can get it from Amarr? This was the case even back when Amarr was very close to Jita via Niarja.
The problem with Amarr now is that it’s severely understocked, because traders do not want to burn 46 jumps in one direction to stock it from Jita. It’s very common that you literally cannot fit a ship in Amarr because some modules are out of stock. For example I’ve had situations where I wanted to buy a T3 cruiser but there weren’t any subsystems on the market, and if your fit has any deadspace modules you can just straight up forget it.
As a result, I don’t even bother checking and just go straight to Jita most of the time now. This is a luxury I have as a wormholer, but evidently many other kinds of players are doing the same thing. For example, looking at the Loyalty Points statistics on the MER shows that barely anyone runs missions in Amarr space anymore.
All that’s needed to fix this is to make the Jita trip shorter so that more traders will bother to stock Amarr, and that consumers can more easily travel to Jita when Amarr’s stocks fail them (which would encourage people to actually live in Amarr space). No tax incentives are needed for this — the fact that Amarr has an untapped market of customers and less undercutting is incentive enough.
It’s actually very common to have issues fitting out a ship in Amarr. It’s one reason I pulled up stakes and moved everything back to Caldari space.
Increasing the jump distance between Jita and Amarr and bottlenecking it has been the worst things to happen for players.
It’s not that bad. Use a blockade runner with Ascendencies. Takes 15 to 20 minutes to get from Amarr to Jita.
It used to take less than half that, so yeah - it is. Especially when you consider the adverse effect it’s had on trading hubs (not just the major ones).
Cannot confirm that, really. I agree only when it comes to deadspace mods, right. But everything that can be produced rarely is out of stock in Amarr in my experience. And even if, for trading modules or subsystems, the real distance between Jita and Amarr is simply 11 jumps.
Ok, no, it’s actually 12 jumps because you will use Lor instead of Shera to jump into Ahbazon. That gate is almost never camped. And you will use pings for your warps to get to the Stargates from behind. It’s literally failsave.
So, if any trader would want to supply the Amarr Market with Modules and Subs, the distance actually isn’t an issue at all. On top of that you have a free Ahbazon Stream almost round the clock, telling you if the route is safe. Which means Module/Sub Trade between those two hubs is 99.9% safe and extremly quick. I fail to see distance being an argument for Amarr being undersupplied. Any trader can literally squeeze billions over billions in modules into a single Blockade Runner, not really risking anything.
The problem is the jump into Ahbazon from Jita side. You only have the Hykkota gate to choose from, that gate is frequently camped, and for some reason CCP has surrounded it with statues that are close enough to the gate to stop you from cloaking if you’re unlucky. Almost no one regularly does trade runs through Ahbazon and for a good reason. Also, Uedamascout isn’t reliable; his business model is taking bribes from gatecampers to play looped video of an empty gate.
It’s pretty easy to see that distance is one of the major factors here because we have a before/after to compare with.
Must be very unlucky, because even while I take this route multiple times per week, it never happened to me. And lets be honest, every trader with the will and measures to move billions of ISK in a cloakhauler can simply bring his own scout if the believes Uedamascout stream to be “unreliable” or “bribed” (which I also haven’t experienced once in years, so from my perspective that is just hearsay/badmouthing).
Not even counted the fact that even the greediest trader is not forced to jump in if there is indeed a camp. The gate is clear usually many hours per day and it’s not very hard to find out when. No puzzle a trader can’t solve. As said: some probably do, because I never experienced the situation that I couldn’t buy a regular fit in Amarr. Yes, there are maybe situatin where you can’t something special, I don’t doubt that. But the average player buying a normal ship and fit won’t feel the difference between Jita or Amarr market, except for the pricetag wich will usually be a bit higher in Amarr for the complete ship (Hull+Modules+Rigs+Ammo+Paste+Boosters etc…).
What we have is primarily a before and after the pochven highway, so people can deliberately chose to teleport from anywhere to close to Jita in almost perfect safety. And if there is such an easy choice, of course they will use it.
