You keep blaming Pochven for all of the world’s problems, but it isn’t actually that useful for travel, to the point where I’m not convinced you actually regularly use it yourself. Filaments aren’t guaranteed to take you to a Pochven system close to your destination HS region, so you typically have to take gates inside of Pochven to get to where you want to go. This makes it of limited use for moving anything valuable, and is very far from “perfect safety”. Furthermore, there are only two Pochven systems that will reliably take you to Amarr space, and the other (Raravoss) involves two in-Pochven gate jumps to get to a Jita-adjacent Pochven system and includes lowsec in its K-space connections, so really there’s only one such system (Harva). The third system that has any Amarr connections at all is Niarja, but that is a home system so the gates are not accessible without standings.
The ideal Jita–Amarr Pochven shortcut (Harva–Tunudan) also involves using the regional static wormholes, which requires scanning those wormholes down, which you may have to do from the K-space side because the Pochven side only spawns once someone activates the K-space hole. Without these wormholes the shortcut is very unreliable, because filamenting in has a good chance of putting you in the wrong system which means you have to take several very risky gates. If you scan the wormholes (and the Tunudan one doesn’t happen to connect to lowsec), the shortcut only involves one gate, which is reasonably safe to take in a DST, but not so much in e.g. a ratting battleship, and even a DST can get unlucky.
Pochven not being that useful for travel is evident from the fact that, among other things, almost nobody runs missions in Amarr space anymore. If travel were so easy, people would live in Amarr space to run missions and abyssals and what have you and benefit from fewer gankers. Instead travel is a massive pain in the arse and most people have abandoned Amarr space to live closer to Jita. I’m almost convinced the only thing keeping Amarr alive is wormholers, because like 50% of HS and LS wormholes connect to Amarr space due to Amarr having by far the most systems.
Hmmm. I am not sure I agree with you who is stocking tradehubs. In my opinion traders, those who are not station trading, are pretty much always buying elsewhere and bringing it to Jita. Its regular players and nullsec sellers who stock the tradehubs in my opinion. But maybe I am wrong.
Since I do not agree that the traders are reason for tradehubs be understocked I don’t believe this will help. But as I said, I am not against making Vecamia highsec. However I agree with @Syzygium it is already very easy to move the stuff between Jita and Amarr via lowsec. All you have to do is to be sart, like the Lor jump, watching stream and using cloaky or instawarp ship. And if you think it is too risky even with such ships, you can go through Vecamia, if there is even someone gatecamping it is lone wolf or small group without sub 2sec instalock or anti-cloaking setup around gate.
Thats nonsense. Sometimes it is offline, sometimes that scout alt is docked because pirates killed it (which means it is going to be bad idea to jump there), but thats it. If they caught you while the gates were clear on stream it is because they have cloaked scouts on both Hykkota and Shera side 24/7. And they have a Phobos or whole fleet on a safe near gate but not on the same grid aligned to the gate and because the stream is few seconds dealyed that is all they need to land just before the map loads and you are fukced if you don’t have instawarp or cloak. Sometimes they do the opposite with smartbombing battleships when they warp them to opposite gate you are going to (catching BRs or instawarp small ships), but that is easy to counter with ping over anything, and is players lazyness that he gets killed this way.
Even if I knew about this I wouldn’t take this opportunity to buy it at Jita and sell at Amarr because:
taxes and faction standing - don’t have so good standing with Amarr
not guaranteed demand, I am not sure I can sell
risk of being instantly undercut and then it won’t sell because I expect low demand as everyone just goes to buy it cheaper at Jita anyway
Also. Even if you are right in your assumptions and the long route is the culprit for all problems. I am not sure if this changes since everyone just moved to Caldari already and stage from there, lives there or waits for WH closer to there. And nullsec merchans with JFs don’t care where they trade, distance doesn’t matter for them.
I’m honestly not sure which area(s) are worse-off. I know Amarr space has been hit pretty hard (devastated?) just from my own experience, but I’ve hardly spent any time in Gallant or Minmatar space except occasionally passing through.
Yeah, thats the point he didn’t understand. Nobody would use the Pochven Highway to move supplies between Amarr and Jita (and thats it why all his wall of text is irrelevant).
People from deep Nullsec can load a DST full of P4 PI mats or Compressed Ores or Blingmods or produced T2 Items, literally squeezing billions of value into that 65.000m³ (or using a BR for smaller sizes/higher value Items like officer mods). One Filament brings them into Pochven a 100% safe, just jump in and cloak up. Now use a scout to check the few jumps within Pochven that would be required to get into a system that guarantees you a close-to-Jita Extraction-Jump and voilá. All you need is to have a proper BR/DST Fit and to know how to cloak/MWD. If there isn’t a real hardcore camp with litter and instalockers and de-cloaking-ceptors you are close to be uncatchable due to the combination of cloak, nullification and additional warp core strength. Which means you can pick an exit to get all your stuff into a HS system near Jita. If you know what you are doing and don’t mess up badly, it’s almost impossible to die this way. And since the effort to do this is the same for all trade hubs of course people pick Jita here.
BEFORE Pochven geography played a huge role, because Nullsec used close by Lowsec systems as exit point for the JFs and then did go into HS and obviously picked the closest Trade Hub for the majority of their business instead of doing a 30 Jumps in HS back and forth in a 10b+ JF. Of course they could have tried to do a “long jump route” bringing them closer to Jita, but that would add a LOT of additional effort, time and fuel costs. So the smaller hubs actually benefited from the geography that Pochen completely eliminates.
And thats not the only shortcut, as we also have Thera (eve-scout anyone?) that offers very good HS → Thera → HS connections multiple times a week. And again a simple scout and a well fitted T2 Transporter is making that trip incredibly safe. On top of that, all people living in WH space more or less have the free choice where to exit since rolling holes has become incredibly fast and professional over time.
All those little changes over time that (each one) reduced the “real distance” between the trade hubs made Jita stronger and the other hubs less interesting. And the only way to revert that is to either artificially increase the distance/risk of travel and trade between these hubs OR to give other hubs financial benefits over trading in Jita, so there is another layer of decision making besides just convenience. If there is more profit to make, more people will chose other hubs to offer their goods. Which will automatically lead to them being more attractive to buyers as well, increasing population, again creating a demand over time. Of course nothing of that will have an instant effect, but it can and will have over years, like the changes of the past had into the other direction.
From my observation it seems Minmatar is worst. Gallente is quite populated. Amarr actually too, problem is that Amarr is absolutely huge and has too many regions and systems. So it looks like wasteland but the tradehub is decent.
So Minmatar (despite 2 trade hubs) is more or less a lost cause with a declining population, Gallente has a horrible trade hub despite a high population and Amarr has the best trade hub outside of Jita but is still seeing a decline in population as well. That about summarize it?
This is what I see as I camp them all . Might be wrong of course.
Minmatar specifically. Hek has decent number of players in the system, but the prices are horrible. Rens has better prices but it is ghosttown and there are barely and players. There also used to be one citadel-tradehub in Molden Heat, but I think it ended some time ago.
The decline of the trade hubs (10-30%+) that was detailed earlier isn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination, and when I was operating in Amarr space six months back you couldn’t even find so much as a Fedo floating around. Pricing/availability at Amarr was horrible.
Yeah, and a noticable tax/fee discount would be a step to diminish that issue. :).
I mean, the whole discussion is just ridiculous. We only need to push it to an extreme to see if lowering or increasing the distance would strengthen or weaken Jita: WHAT IF Amarr, Rens, Dodixie and Hek were JUST 1 JUMP out of Jita? Right. They would simply go away, nobody would use them, everyone would just use Jita. And from that point, it’s just an almost linear relation, the further away a hub is from Jita (measured in real effort, risk and time, including all available shortcuts), the better it is for this hub.
Taking DSTs through Pochven and Ahbazon may work for you, a single player who does it occasionally during off-peak hours, but what do you think would happen if it became the way for most of the playerbase to move a large portion of the game’s goods around? Suddenly those gates would see a lot more camping activity.
Nullsec industrialists still do most of their logistics via JF, for one because lots of things don’t feasibly fit into DSTs, but mostly because what you described only gets them one way, when typically they also want to, you know, return home, preferably with cargo.
Pochven also isn’t as safe as you seem to think it is. You don’t need an instalocking gatecamp to catch DSTs, all you need is a roaming gang of about 30 pilots around the gate (very common in Pochven) and suddenly there’s a very good chance the DST spawns next to someone and is unable to cloak.
Not only is Thera a system inhabited exclusively by obnoxiously active PvPers, those Thera connections have very low total mass. They’re only good for the occasional individual pilot taking a shortcut, and the entire thing would fall apart if more than half a dozen people in all of Eve actually used them.
You have obviously never lived in a WH or rolled a wormhole in your entire life. Absolutely nothing has changed for rolling low-class holes for ten years since the Higgs Anchor rig was added, and finding a good Jita connection is far from easy unless you have a highsec static (and even with a highsec static you may spend an hour or two rolling it before you get one). And once you do find a Jita connection, you better hope it’s not too close to Jita because otherwise there’s a good chance it’ll be camped by one of the multiple groups whose main activity is scanning down wormholes from the Jita side and camping them for fights and DST kills.
A lot of the time you can of course just wait until eventually you randomly find a good Jita route, because most hauling into and out of wormholes isn’t that urgent. But trust me, no one would be more happy than wormholers to see Amarr resurrected as a trade hub.
It is a while since I used Pochven filaments to haul stuff (typically expensive battleships from permacamped lowsec areas) but ever since they nerfed that Overseer site or what was it called, the whole region turned into ghost town. I could barely see any player at any gate and I passed several systems. Maybe it changed again, I don’t know, as I said, wasn’t there for some time.
And mainly they recently nerfed filaments so there is deployment delay, that makes this strategy no longer 100% safe although the chances to get caught are still very low. And if you see combat probes you can just run away and try in different system or later.
Anyway, you don’t even need to jump any gates in Pochven, at least I didn’t. Sure sometimes it threw me out in some lowsec, but how often anyone camps gates from deeper lowsec, especially in forgotten lowsecs like Uuna? Yeah never. At worst, I repeated the procedure.
But honestly, right now I wouldn’t even bother with Pochven, would go through Ahbazon. With right ship, if you know what you are doing it is 99% safe.
Well it isn’t for a Freighter. Even if the wh handles it, that is obviously too risky. But I used this a lot when the Solitude was still an actual island (now it is easy and fast to get there through Placid) and the wormholes are camped rarely. But obviously when jumping in, you want to get probes on the ship so you won!t get stranded. It is very rarely camped and if they camp it then thexy camp the wh from highsec. But as I said, it is very rare and do you know why? Because you spawn 6km away from wh, and you can jump I think from something like 4km? So the only time I jumped there from highsec and it was camped, I aligned back overheated ab, activated it and despite there were 20 of them I made it back safely and flew to different highsec-Thera conection (which had no campers).
Yeah, at this point we can stop this utterly stupid discussion, since it cannot get more absurd. Because I live full time in WHs for many years and have obviously rolled some-thousand holes over the last years. Getting a good close-to-Jita hole is absolutely easy-peasy for an active group, actually we get one (or multiple) almost daily, rare exceptions. And if you let yourself getting killed there, learn how to play.
Or at this point (because I earlier said, as you like to ignore, that any competent player moving around billions will use a scout that checks for exact this scenario). People moving billions in a Hauler without scouting the area are just stupid and I don’t use them as example in a honest discussion.
Or at this point. Because the discussion was the lack of some modules and subsystems in Amarr, not “nullsec bloc logistics”. The JF vs Shortcuts example was just one example how trade has changed with the step by step incoming geographical shortcuts. And it has, especially for small m³ items like modules.
And anyone can see that the lack of modules in Amarr compared to Jita Market is sometimes happening but this problem can be solved by a single DST getting exactly those modules (by the hundreds) from Jita in a single trip. Which is 99% safe AND pretty short using Ahbazon. Which was all we were talking about. Too much distance using the pure highsec route simply isn’t the issue.
Oh, my bad! In that case I think evidently you’re not just a loudmouth talking beyond his expertise, but rather deliberately trying to derail the discussion by misrepresenting the truth. Because anyone living in wormholes will know the pain of trying to find a Jita route when you need one and instead just scanning up endless Amarr holes for hours. Not to mention the part where nothing about rolling has changed for a long, long time — rolling now is just as fast as it was in 2014 when the Higgs rig came out.
Scouting with an alt doesn’t make you perfectly safe in Pochven. You might, for example, scout the gate ahead, only to find your DST landing on it at the same time with a roaming gang that warped in from the other gate.
You specifically talked about nullsec industrialists filamenting into Pochven to bring their goods to Jita, so the discussion was obviously about nullsec logistics. The funny thing is that you wouldn’t even have had to bring up such a contrived example, because jump freighters alone make it easy enough to just haul to Jita over any of the other trade hubs regardless of where you live. Even from the NS regions furthest away from Jita, hauling to Jita instead of Amarr is only 1-2 extra JF jumps.
Anyway, let us take at face value your argument that there’s no shortage of very easy methods of going to Jita. In that case, adding a new 26-jump HS route between Jita and Amarr certainly cannot hurt the situation, because that route would still be more difficult than all these easy shortcuts you’ve described that everyone is already using.
I should also say that this isn’t mutually exclusive with your tax breaks idea. Tax breaks would encourage people to trade at Amarr even if it was literally one jump from Jita, so shortening the distance certainly cannot hurt.
I really don’t know what difference it makes - high-sec is dying outside of Caldari space. It may even be too late to try and turn things around for the other high-sec regions.
And when they go the surrounding low-sec regions will feel the impact as well.
It would just be another step into the wrong direction, because no real problem would be solved. Shortage of modules in the other hubs is NOT because the distance to Jita is too high, simple as that. If you find any module or rig or subsystem that isn’t in the Amarr market (or extremely overpriced there), it literally takes less than 30 minutes to get a 100 of these modules/rigs/items from Jita in 99.9% safety. So, if THAT easy solution won’t fix the problem, a shorter route wouldn’t either. The exact opposite is the case: The shorter the route is, the less people would use other trade hubs.
You can see it in very easy examples:
Imagine Amarr would only be 5 Jumps from Jita. It would be dead. People would go directly to Jita instead.
Dodixie is only 15j from Jita. Hek is 19. Rens is 25. And they are all even less populated and often have less orders for the various items.
Why? Because the close distance doesn’t matter. It only makes Jita more attractive. You need a reason to use a different trade hub than Jita and the most motivating reasons are:
saving money
saving time
lower risks
Bingo. Lets adress those motivators:
Money: Lower taxes/fees rewards people who trade there with higher profit margins (if they match other markets they will have higher profits) or faster sales (if they undercut other markets and still can make profits). These markets also become more attractive for all customers who want to sell “instantly” for a price that is fixed by default (Redloot, Blueloot, Overseer Boxes etc…), luring more people into these regions. → finanical motivation increases, it cannot be doubted that this would strengthen the other hubs
Time: more important geography (aka longer routes between the hubs) increase the amount of time you save if you juse Hub XYZ over taking that longer route to Jita → motivation to use that hub increases
Risks: Adding travel risks (like the Pochven Filament Timers, which are a long overdue change) but also lowsec gaps that can be gatecamped or 0.5/0.6 systems that could be used for ganking ambushes are GOOD because the nearest hub becomes more attractive (aka a lot less risk going there) than doing a long and risky travel to Jita. And this means: Routes between the hubs that are long+dangerous are GOOD for the individual hubs because they can finally soak up the business around them instead of losing all that business to an easy-to-reach omnipresent Jita 4-4
. Might be wrong of course.