Originally by: CCP Greyscale

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Morning all,

Just wanted to drop a few points to think about in here now that I've had some sleep. I'm still mulling over the arguments presented, just wanted to add in some things to the discussion here so our though processes are more closely aligned.

- Assuming the same pilots-per-anom ratio, increasing the number of good anoms in a given area has no impact on the average ISK per pilot. It does affect the carrying capacity of a given system, and it does make it more cost-effective to ensure your space isn't over-saturated, but if a given alliance already has sufficient capacity for their players, then short of a major recruiting drive this change is just going to save them a bit of money at the alliance level by allowing them to pay for a smaller number of systems. Other than that it doesn't really have an effect on their income.

- Historically it's extremely rare that space will stand empty for any extended period ("claimed wastelands" have historically and AFAIAA been highly correlated with the presence of high-value moons, which is a separate issue). People live in Outer Ring. The population density/carrying capacity of low-value space can be affected, but I would not expect any area of space to be truly empty for long.

- Related to this, the current concern about low-value space as it relates to new alliances is that, because it can be upgraded to be almost as good as anywhere else in the game, there's little incentive to move along once you're there. Dominion worked well with getting these regions more useful and more occupied, but we're concerned that unless the current tenants have a good reason to want to leave behind the infrastructure they've built up and move on to better areas, the next crop of prospective alliances are going to find they have nowhere to go.

I think there was another point but I've forgotten what it was; I'll come back later if I remember.

{edit} Oh yes, I remember:

- Absolute sec status counts are somewhat misleading in this context, because with the proposed changes you only need a few good systems to balance out a lot of bad ones. Two upgraded -0.9 or lower systems are equivalent to a fully-upgraded constellation under the current mechanics. The thing we were looking at most when evaluating numbers for this was how many "good" systems a region had. If a region is 80% dross but you can support your entire alliances from the remaining 20%, then you're in a pretty decent place.

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