Trixxy
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Posted - 2003.10.03 13:34:00 -
[1]
Edited by: Trixxy on 03/10/2003 13:45:11
I reckon the toll option provides the best solution. It makes the highway very much akin to air travel. You have convenience, at a price. But the price for any sort of mass-haulage is prohibitive.
Yes, it will affect the ease with which small items (blueprints, or small high-value cargo) can travel across the galaxy. But at the end of the day, blueprints and small valuable items will still find their way across the galaxy, so taking away the highways (or restricting only to cargo-less shuttles) is simply delaying the inevetable as far as those types of items are concerned.
I think the ideal answer actually lies in regional economic control through taxes, local interest rates (which don't exist in Eve) and customs and excise. After all, the real world economy was opened up in the same way through the introduction of mass-shipping. It's relatively easy and cheap in the real world to transport large quantities of product from one end to the other. It's more the restrictions on trade placed by local governments than anything else that keeps the regional markets alive.
I can accept, however, that this would be difficult/impossible to implement in-game in a reasonable or sensible way. So mass-related tolls would have to do as a compromise.
(Interestingly, the Internet is introducing a similar problem in the information market. It enables the ability of cheap intellectual resource in 3rd World countries to provide services in 1st world countries at prices with which the local intellectual markets cannot compete. This is naturally killing entire career lines in the first world countries and causing high levels of white-collar unemployment. Again, the only way a government can protect its own market in these areas is to start restricting or taxing 'imported' intellectual work. A tough end to achieve. Notice, however, that the option of removing the internet is NOT coming up as a valid solution to that particular problem, although it was the Internet that 'created' the problem in the first place.)
So, yes, the highway (introduced to take away a problem) has introduced another one. But take it away, and the original problem returns, which still doesn't help the game. So something needs to be done to address BOTH problems. I think a toll adequately does this.
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