Higher sales taxes would just result in less volume moving and increased prices. The reduced volume would make the increased taxes a moot issue.

Not true in many instances. A much of the games items have inelastic demand.

Are taxes the sleeping giant when it comes to fixing the isk faucets?

More taxes are coming: Skip to 27:00 for more details.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MZD6-vGQms&feature=plcp&context=C4f10f15VDvjVQa1PpcFOEzQi5G2x0m0l32YE8I8CIMb3LQJfYC8w%3D

Question is... what's the best way the new taxes should be implemented? I for one would be in favor of

1. An increase in NPC corp taxes to 15% (from 11%)
2. A sales tax increase on all hi sec NPC stations to 10%.
3. A sales tax increase on all low sec NPC stations to 5%
4. A sales tax increase on all null sec NPC stations to 2%
3. Sales taxes at Alliance Outpost should be set by the alliance and goes into alliance/corp funds to motivate players to get out of highsec.

Never thought I'ld be proposing more taxess.... But its probably the easiest way to fix the sink/faucet imbalance in the game.

NPC tax doesn't affect mining & with the new WarDeck system I won't be surprised to see a few miners move into more NPC corps & keep there bounty alts in a 1 man corp
It'll be interesting to see how peeps start avoidingtaxes when it becomes too overbearing. Maybe anincrease in the use of contracts?

Another idea would be for faction ( and maybe officer ) drops to be encrypted BPCs rather than items. These items may de-coded at NPC station for a fee to made useable. [ hmmm this could be extend to all drops in an extreme case ].

Instead of more taxes, maybe more industries.

If productivity can keep pace with ISK, then the overall pricing should stay more or less the same. The more things there are to do, that can be profitable, that are not ISK generating activities, the less ISK generating there will be.

Ideas, some of them ancient and certainly not mine:

POS slot rental
Clone making
Implant making
New unpopulated space with no rats and totally new materials (WH would have done this almost exactly, except for blue loot, which made sense at the time, now with PI done on planets, blue loot seems less a necessity.)
High Sec POCO
Mini POS/Personal POS/Homesteads (winter 2012?)
Stocks/Bonds
WiS related things
Dust related things

More stuff to do, more stuff to spend ISK upon, more consumption - Spread player time out over a more broad economic landscape. Spread the ISK out upon a more broad economic landscape.

Those really just seem like ways of diversifying wealth and investments. Not an isk sink. All the isk bounties and NPC payouts input into the game will still be stacking up. Just changing hands a few more times. The only way to remove isk from the game is to either pay an NPC, frozen in cancelled accounts, or deleted punatively by the gamemasters.

More sales and broker taxes are a really bad idea. All it will do is make small single step outfits totally unprofitable. Instead, you will have to take something all the way from gathering inputs to final product since every step along the way adds cost. When taxes are low the cumulative additional cost isn't so terrible for a 5 step process, but if taxes were say 10% at each step it would be a 46% increase in cost from inputs to final product. It is impossible to compete when your costs are so out of line from big outfits who don't pay those costs.

Correct, it is not a sink. ISK spread over more production, more things for players to do other than shoot little red + signs and produce ISK. More things to trade, more markets to enter, more money going into the market - more money being removed via existing taxes and fees.

Less people shooting rats.

More sales and broker taxes are a really bad idea. All it will do is make small single step outfits totally unprofitable. Instead, you will have to take something all the way from gathering inputs to final product since every step along the way adds cost. When taxes are low the cumulative additional cost isn't so terrible for a 5 step process, but if taxes were say 10% at each step it would be a 46% increase in cost from inputs to final product. It is impossible to compete when your costs are so out of line from big outfits who don't pay those costs.

Trying to entice ratters to become manufacturers to decrease the amount coming in from the bounty faucet? Probably not going to be very effective. They will just rat *and* have something on the side as well. Probably no effect on the net flow of the bounty faucets. Taxes will be more effective.

Absolutely... peasants should always be taxed... repeatedly.

As for what KIND of taxes.... DOCKING FEEs... scaled against the size of ship docking... modified downwards (or upwards) by the Standings of the pilot versus the owner of the station.


Mook

What about some fees to use star gates. By some reasons they let us use them for free. Fee bases on ship size?

What about some kind of jump bride system in high sec owned my the factions or CONCORD.Issue is how/if this should be integraded with low and nullsec traveling in any way.

As things are now:

-NPC corp taxes apply to NPC payouts like bounties. Increasing this tax will decrease the amount of isk coming in from NPC corp missioners.
-Station taxes apply to sell orders.

There will be an initial price shift to as suppliers and manufacters adjust, but then so will the end price of the product that manufactures will sell to market (the cost will be handed down to the cusumer). Of course moving to lower sec space will have its advantages for manufactures (more incentive to move to low sec / null sec and reap the benefits). Also, having a unmitigated isk faucet by some theories of inflation is a major contributor to inflation which drives up the price of supplies as well (current inflation rates are completely out of control). Efforts to decrease the isk faucet/sink ratio will potentially help stabilize prices, even if there is an initial price adjustment from the taxes.

If I understand you correctly you are saying station trade taxes will be passed on to the consumer. The whole point of my post was to point out that it will NOT be passed on. Instead, big operations will simply build things from top to bottom tax free (vertical integration) while the small guys will be forced out of the market due to loses from taxes.

I highly doubt NPC corp mission runners account for a large portion of the isk faucets from bounties. It seems much more likely that 0.0 bots, complexes, anomalies, and ratters are the ones who take the lions share of bounties.

The massive printing of isk is totally unbalanced and undoubtedly a major cause of inflation. However, station trade taxes are a terrible isk sink. The most obvious solution is to hack bounties and isk faucets in general across the board until they match isk sinks. The isk can be replace with materials or something else (monocles? ).

Well, to be the concerned citizen of New Eden that I am, what am I getting for my taxes being increased other than my hard worked for iskies taken away for no apparent reason?

Universe Health Care??????

One the things that would help the isk faucet is more aggressive Bot Bannings. Have you seen the stats on the Eve Presentation?

Skip to 18:45 for the proof
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG13u9KKtzE&feature=BFa&list=PLDDA989F65CD6E98A&lf=plpp_video

There was a 30% drop in isk bounties with each bot bannding! Get these guys out of the game!

It works totally opposite. Don't get me wrong, I am against botting, but the mining bots kept the mineral prices low.

Problems are Hulkmageddon, PI instead of NPC POS fuel supply, reduced drop (which increases the mineral / module prices), removing the drone minerals (which will make miners to mine other ores, AND increase ISK supply from bounties).

If we consider this, we can see that CCP is making everything to increase inflation, as there is less and less ISK faucets... (the only two things they did was reducing bounties and removing insurance for suicide gankers).

Why not just decrease the amount of raw ISK generated by missions, bounties and incursions, balancing it with an increase in salvage and/or item drops. Dropping them down to maybe a third and increasing the amount of items dropped on average to accommodate should do it, or even only halving it.

Another thought is tax on direct ISK transfers between characters. This could be in around the 7-8% margin and be applied to the sender when the ISK is transferred.

Place odd ball item on market in isolated station, set price to X, pay less tax.

Are taxes the sleeping giant when it comes to fixing the isk faucets?

More taxes are coming: Skip to 27:00 for more details.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MZD6-vGQms&feature=plcp&context=C4f10f15VDvjVQa1PpcFOEzQi5G2x0m0l32YE8I8CIMb3LQJfYC8w%3D

Question is... what's the best way the new taxes should be implemented? I for one would be in favor of

1. An increase in NPC corp taxes to 15% (from 11%)
2. A sales tax increase on all hi sec NPC stations to 8%.
3. A sales tax increase on all low sec NPC stations to 3%
4. A sales tax increase on all null sec NPC stations to 2%
3. Sales taxes at Alliance Outpost should be set by the alliance and goes into alliance/corp funds to motivate players to get out of highsec.

Never thought I'ld be proposing more taxess.... But its probably the easiest way to fix the sink/faucet imbalance in the game.

Doesn't surprise me that there are ways around it easily thought of, but I don't think that is really a concern. Tax evasion is possible in rl; why not in a game?

Creating needless hoops and busy work for customers, is not a good idea.

President Obama, you play Eve?

Completely agree with the OP and Scrapyard Bob. Industry slot cost and market order change fees are scandalously low. Taxes and fees should generally be a lot high in high sec than in low or null.

It's just rebalancing the other taxes like they did with PI importing/exporting

Another possibility would be to charge a monthly fee for alliance / corporation registration with the authorities. Maybe even a per-member tariff and per-corp tariff. The problem with that is "how do you enforce it?". Do you require the monthly fee to be paid in order to keep your station offices open? What happens if the fee is not paid? Disbanding the corp/alliance?

No new item should have been introduced in the past few years which depend on a single material source (such as "only minerals" or "only PI inputs").

If the problem CCP wants to solve is monetary inflation, then solve that problem by whacking the problem at its source, the generation of ISK. Attempting to play all these other hidden tax and fee games is quite honestly foolish.

See post #34

and ofcourse it's the best way because you said it is.

Mmm, impact of corp/alliance bills on a monthly basis:

- A flat per-month fee per corp would ensure that long-dead corps get disbanded and their tickers get recycled.
- A per-month fee for the alliance would do the same for alliance tickers.
- It would act as an additional ISK sink.

Per-corp fees could be as low as 100-500k/mo. Alliance fees in the range of 10-20M/mo. Maybe alliances pay 2M ISK/mo per member corp. Maybe corps pay a fee of 1k ISK/member each month to buy membership capacity.

(shrugs) It's probably a horrid idea.

All the reprocessing should be done by reprocessing slots, requiring an ISK fee and time

Then for all slots (industry, research and reprocessing) the fee goes up 5% if more then 75% of the slots are are occupied throughout the week. And every week less then 25% are occupied, the prices drop 5%. Then cut all fees according to standings, so excellent standings gets you a competitive edge

Carebears will hate it, but it will improve the health of empire by a lot. POS also become more viable as alternatives.

Whatever the new taxes are they need to be progressive taxes. The more isk in your wallet the higher your tax rate. That way new players wont have to grind out even more crappy low level missions while they train the skills for more lucrative endeavors.

Whatever the new taxes are they need to be progressive taxes. The more isk in your wallet the higher your tax rate. That way new players wont have to grind out even more crappy low level missions while they train the skills for more lucrative endeavors.

Taxes are dull, they are IRL they are ingame. If you figure increasing the taxes will fix the economy, think again.
Those measures really only work when the money is genuinely going somewhere. Since we have one currency, one economy and also no government there is little use to implementing higher taxes but for only the sake of discouraging transactions.


TL;RD: No.

Aren't you forgetting that while this game has one currency, it is completely artificial and can undergo drastic changes over just a day whether through expansions or just market activity and that the faucets must be balanced with the sinks. I agree taxes are boring - at least in the way they are implemented now. I have trade skills pretty high to reduce taxes but those are mostly not needed because they are so low. Higher taxes would allow these skills to be more useful but then in the end all you have are more "essential" skills that everyone trains for and then once training is complete nothing else changes, back to square one. (remember our old learning skills that everyone trained and made new characters pointless for several months before CCP just removed them?)

One of the interesting things mentioned earlier was a transaction tax on regional gates or something of the like. Seems interesting, forces people to fine tune courier and transport to reduce costs. Not a great idea but it is a good example of a tax that can be implemented to affect gameplay in a more positive manner and encourage innovation and thinking outside the box instead of just flat taxing and forcing people to train skills to drop it.

Another "tax" that could be cool is a tax to fund some sort of consumer financial regulator group, probably would have to be NPC, that would manage the credit of pod pilots to make player corps have a reference for loans, stocks, investment, etc. which is something I know a lot of us tycoons want - more business flexibility. Or maybe a cost to hold inventory for homogeneous items (prevent someone stockpiling huge amounts of morphite or tech for instance and increase costs to hold in inventory, just like the real world)

All are half baked ideas that I just came up with here but the point I wanted to make was if you are going to tax or create sinks, do it in a way to encourage innovative gameplay and give the players something else to play with or work with, not just a flat tax sink.

If you introduce artificial wealth 'taxes' then players will game the tax system, just like real life.

Recognise this and make the 'tax' rules promote the game vision.

The obvious example is extend the effects of standing on taxes and fees.

Gate & Docking fees based on Ship (+cargo) Mass * Security.

More Office with Rent based on standing.

Extend the contract system, e.g. Reverse Auctions for Courier contracts.

we need more taxes to remove all the tech isk form the game.