WH PI was not addressed in the blog directly. All customs offices will remain until destroyed correct?

"You did not account for all or even most of the feedback to the first thread"
We acted on the feedback that we agreed with and that was feasible within the time frame. Many ideas were excellent but too grand.

Regards
Omen

WH PI was not addressed in the blog directly. All customs offices will remain until destroyed correct?

Just to check - will the Interbus customs offices have a reinforcement cycle? if so will it be random or will they be able to be destroyed straight off the bat?

@CCP:

I'm still missing an explanation why (for example) the Amarr Empire would just
- let a (form their perspective) terrorist organisation like Ushra'khan destroy an Interbus customs office
- and then let same terrorists tariff Amarr-built products
- even let them restrict POCO use to terrorists
on a populated planet under Amarrian Sovereignty for free!

Is this (plausibility) not a concern to you at all?

Great work CCP - I'm starting to get quite concerned about this patch - has there been some sort of invasion of the body snatchers, everything is too perfect and it's making me suspicious.

Just to check - will the Interbus customs offices have a reinforcement cycle? if so will it be random or will they be able to be destroyed straight off the bat?

One idea that was not too grand and very feasible.

Cancel this completely. Job done.

For the same reasons they don't go into lowsec to enforce or punish anything else that goes on there.

I'm guessing that idea failed the "that we agreed with" test.

[quote=Ethanole]
So really, not that far off.

Yes, clearly.

So we are back to the "Do what we want and dont listen" mode then.... sigh

But they do - there is a difference between lowsec and NPC nullsec, you know? And even so, they may turn a blind eye to capsuleers, but it would be enormously against their own interests if Empires just let anyone who wants run their own planets.

Hi, I haven't gone through all the replies here yet, though I will in a minute... I just wanted to ask a short (silly?) question, for a bit of clarification...

Q --- Does the tax rate setting for 'Neutral' standings also work properly; so that it acts as the tax rate for 'No standings'...?

[i]User Interface not good enough
Not enough flexibility at setting taxes for the different standing levels. Player suggestion here.
Timestamp of tax collection in corp wallet could be used to collect intel on people doing PI.
Tax management bad for large entities, necessary to include alliance level also.
Finding GÇ£suitableGÇ¥ PCOs without going from system to system near impossible.
Advertising tax rate for PCO and checking for competitors extremely difficult.


Lowsec changes caters only griefing
Lowsec will get devastated since every random group can bust PCOs without drawback
Risk/Reward in Lowsec is completely wrong, no good enough profit from PI in Lowsec.

Nullsec changes only good for blobs and large groups
Shuts out small groups from 0.0 as they canGÇÖt compete with big blobs
Large 0.0 alliances will never allow independent small groups (as seen in the past)
PCO owners wonGÇÖt allow access of neutrals, this encourages only big blobs
Supercap blob heaven shooting up those defenceless structures



Bad effects on other industries
PI prices will increase drastically, affecting POS owners heavily, making it more difficult for the small/new people

Pricelevels are off, PCOs will be unprofitable
PCOs will be unprofitable and not worth the invested time and especially ISK
Income from PCOs will be too low to justify the build costs and risk deploying them
Taxrate will be either near 0 or near 100
Taxes in Highsec for P4 products too high

Worries about general mechanics
Only one PCO per planet is not good enough and hinders competition.
Too big changes with not enough thoughts being put into the resulting effects on the sandbox as whole
Defenceless PCOs are bad and encourage random griefing and no GÇÿconstructiveGÇÖ destruction
Transport rocket from player surface is not large enough to prevent being locked out prom planets
P4 producers are especially hit hard when no PCO is around, rocket wonGÇÖt help here

Change of playstyle to more blobbing and griefing, hurting small people
Encourages blobbing
Discourages small gang warfare
Hurts the small people most, benefits large blobs most
Encourages griefing a lot as there is no risk in attacking PCOs
Easy griefing PCOs discourages constructive gameplay
Giving away control to people who do not really care about it GÇô heavy grief play results.
Lowsec/Nullsec exclusively for corps and alliances only now
More boring structure shooting and grinding
Extremely asymmetric , catering to the attackers and griefers
Forces people into corporations if they want to do PCO, big change of playstyle

Bad for casual gameplay
Hurts the casual player since they normally wonGÇÖt get the required corp roles to deploy PCOs
PI changes from low risk, low income to high risk, very boring, medium income
Why roles at all for POCs? That only hurts casual games without roles

link
GÇóShooting at stationary structures is boring
GùªSee: Starbase warfare, Dominion sov warfare. Even the good fights that do happen around such objectives could be improved by having better objectives.
GùªShooting at things with hitpoints scales very efficiently with fleet size, which encourages lag-producing behavior

GÇóHaving to spend significant amounts of effort defeating an enemy which isn't even fighting back is really boring
GùªSee: Starbase warfare, Dominion sov warfare. See in particular how long it took to clear IT Alliance's ownership out of Delve, as a recent example

GÇóWaking up every morning and having to clean up the mess made while you were asleep is boring
GùªSee: station ping-pong pre-sov, repairing station services. Having to do something tedious every day before you can actually play the game is not cool

GÇóDoing something just "because it would be cool/neat/awesome" is always a bad idea and will come back to bite you later
GùªSee: Jump bridges, cyno jammers, Sov 4, AoE doomsdays, titans in general, supercarrier boost... Note that we should still obviously strive to make everything cool/neat/awesome, but when we start off with an awesome idea rather than an actual problem we want to fix or a feature that has a clear, functional and necessary goal, it generally requires painful fixes further down the road

GÇóCost is a useful variable to tune but an unwise thing to rely on to enforce scarcity or balance - players will always be richer than you think
GùªSee: outposts, titans, supercarriers

GÇóMaking something tedious will not stop players doing it if it's very clearly the best option. They'll do it, and they'll hate it
GùªSee: everything involving starbases. As a counterpoint though, things like the one-per-corp-per-system-per-day starbase rule demonstrate that if something doesn't make a big difference but is sufficiently awkward to do, then any theoretical "exploit" scenarios tend to fall out of favor quickly as they're just not worth the effort.

I've been thinking about this, too.

At current market prices, a POCO will be 85-90m ISK in total to set up. P4 items currently cost 50k ISK in export task per unit (5%). Assuming 15% tax rate, this will be 150k ISK per P4 item. Each P4 also requires 18 P3 items to be imported. At 600 ISK p.u. currently, that would be another 600*18*3 = 32.4k ISK tax per P4 item. Or 182.4k ISK total. That is, you need to produce 494 P4 items on a planet to make the POCO pay off. That's a bit under 50k m3.

At full capacity, that would be under a week.

This is a bit off, as no one will pay 15% tax for a pure production planet if they can just pay 10% in much safer high-sec, but it should give a rough idea. It's difficult to calculate profit for extraction, as I do not know extraction numbers in low-sec.

Yes any existing NPC customs offices that are on TQ when this update lands will remain until they are destroyed.

I think the #1 change that needs to be made to the UI is to do away with the percentage signs. They are going to cause endless confusion about how the import/export fees are calculated. A lot of people are going to assume that "10%" means 10% of market value and not 10% of some internal tariff value.