Originally by: Ishkur

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Some initial thoughts as I sit staring into the darkness of space (very dark... completely black in fact...).

So what makes the highway systems busy? Is it, as the name might suggest, that people are bottlenecked passing through them? Or are there other reasons?

All of the major hub systems (what I call "the strip" -- Yulai, Pator, New Caldari, Luminaire, Nonni) have lots of stations with factories and reprocessing plants. Stations without these services are pretty much ghost towns -- not just in these systems, but everywhere in EVE. Such is the way things are.

In EVE, as in real life, demand centers around supply. People don't plan vacations to Des Moines, Iowa because they want to get some power shopping done, do they? There's a reason for that.

Tourism/travel are quite frequently centered around busy industrial and retail hubs. Thus, we see huge cities like New York, Chicago, London, Paris, Berlin, etc.

One could argue that it is because these cities are large that they have lots of industry or retail services, but one would be putting the cart before the horse. In short, one would be wrong. Like all cities, the ones that grew large did so because they had something that others didn't, like access to waterways for trade and commerce.

In EVE, we don't have rivers. Big cities in EVE spring up because of their location around central hub systems. And the hub systems are busy, not only because they are the only way to travel, but because they have lots of "stuff" in them which makes them attractive.

So CCP decides, rightly, that the highway systems need less people. So they make the highways longer, "wider" if you will, to accomodate more traffic.

Will their scheme work?

Unlikely, says I. While quickly scouting these new highway systems, I found a common theme -- they were barren. Some of them have no stations at all. The ones that do are just as likely to lack any factories, labs, or even reprocessing facilities.

If CCP thinks that there will be less people in Yulai because those people will be spread out in the new hotspots, I think they are misguided.

So these new highway systems, with no factories and/or no stations -- they will be dead. Sure, there will be people travelling through them, but that's it. And where will they be travelling to, you ask?

Yulai, of course.

As long as there is no alternatives to Yulai, then people will continue to flock to Yulai.

And Yulai will therefore continue to be packed with people, and will cause problems.

What CCP needs to do (IMHO) is beef up the surrounding systems; add factories and stations and reprocessing plants and laboratories; and give us more options.

People *like* the busy streets of New York and London. They *like* the busy stations in Yulai!

Rather than try to reprogram the players to do something else (social engineering is a difficult task, and is unlikely to work in this situation), it seems to me to make better sense for CCP to adapt to the social order and facilitate real alternatives to these systems.

I'm not a big fan of entering a system with 800 people in it, anymore than the next guy. But if CCP doesn't give me some other options, what is the point?

I suppose this will take some time to "play out", but my initial impression is that the only thing that will change here is that it will take people 3 more jumps to get into Yulai than it did before. How does this solve anything at all?

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