Greedy Goblin

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Minipost: No, I still won't come back

There are news that broker fees and taxes won't be so steep as originally expected. But they are still disastrous.

At first, as I calculated, the February 5.9T broker fees were gained with an average 0.54% fee. With the same skills and standings, the new proposal will be 2.5% average, so about 20T/month extra will be pulled out of the economy. The 9.8T tax was on 0.9% average, with the new numbers it will be 1.4%, that's another 5T/month sinked out. This will turn the about 10T/month total ISK growth to -15T/month. Since people already stockpile, the "active" ISK will lose bigger percentage, causing hyper-deflation. You must understand that if speculators expect ISK shortage, they stockpile it, contributing the deflation. You can already see this at the drop of PLEX price (actually, the PLEX is the point of reference, the value of ISK goes up).

Secondly, people still don't understand that the bigger problem isn't the tax itself, people would learn to live with it with higher vertical integration and out of market trading (everyoney would know that Joe Veldspar is the guy to go to if you want to buy or sell lots of veld, trading is by contracts). The problem is that the broker fee can be hijacked by the owner of New Jita. If they set the broker fee to 1.5% to be competitive, they still grab about 15T/months. That's still half of the output of all ratters, totally passive. They would still be all-powerful.

Thirdly: even if this get fixed, the pure fact that anyone could even think of such nonsense proves an inacceptable level of corruption or incompetence. I mean, why play if some idiot or corrupted dev can destroy everything you worked for in the next patch.

Fourthly: even if they'd implement institutional checks and balances to make sure this nonsense won't ever happen, my personal "relationship" (we never ever chatted, just publicly defame each other) with CCP Falcon is so hostile that it's impossible for me to return (he would surely go after me and I'd never contribute to his salary by paying/luring in paying players).

Fiftly: even in the case of institutional checks and balances and firing Falcon I would be totally broke since I sent everything away. My 3-4B/hour needs about 1T assets to be rotated. Getting the first trillion would take at least 6-8 months intensive farming and trading. No thanks, I won't go over that again.

Sorry, my departure from EVE is final.

13 comments:

Luobote Kong said...

Neither will I. But only for your third reason.

Unknown said...

Third reason is my biggest problem with EVEs development currently. It's really hard to keep tolerating this shit after so many years.

Anonymous said...

I think #4 is enough. There is a saying "Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel." Player vs Dev is never going to be fair. In your presumably still upcoming Sugar article, you say "I know now that I should have left when Falcon jumped on me." and that is probably right.

CCP is not a MMO company now, it is a VR company. But they did say February was the highest revenue of any month ever for EVE. Clearly skill extractors are a very profitable idea.

Unknown said...

I dunno, unless you biomassed your characters, I still see you coming back in a few years. You are considering going back to WoW, afterall.

Gevlon said...

@S Riojas: biomass never stopped any player from coming back on new alt. Especially after injectors. However I left WoW out of boredom. I never hated WoW or considered them unfair. They just went a direction I didn't like.

Unknown said...

@Gevlon, true, if people want effectively re-pay for the time they had lost due to bio-massing, they could, but it is a sorry return on investment. I get you on your reason for leaving WoW, it bored me as well, but I plan to at least stick out the remaining time I have left on my sub (12 month sub that I had upped prior to learning about the broker fees passing to players) just to see what exactly happens.

I am looking forward to your next project... but please... don't let it be WoW, you'll just get bored again. I learned that lesson repeatedly.

Anonymous said...

I think that you are overreacting. Beating New Jita should be a good new project. I know you see New Jita as inevitable, but it's far from that. Jita mostly runs on the fact, that people are lazy and don't want to go to many different Stations just to complete a fit. And they're right, since that is time they can't spend making money. But moving to a player owned structure would have to mean that everything must be available there. Seeding that kind of diverse Inventory is the key to getting the customers to follow and only when they do will the independent business people join. And since they'd still have to move their Inventory they'd be vulnerable to a ganking campaign. Also a well placed spy could probably cause the Station to blow up.

Regarding your listed Reasons:

1) The Price of ISK has been dropping for ages now, so a period of deflation caters well for the casuals who want to PLEX their accounts.

2) Even with the enormous income of New Jita whoever has it isn't invulnerable. You already showed that an Empire can't buy off all the mercs, since some of them just want a good Fight, as long as they're supported. Meanwhile the King of the Hill will collect M&S and therefor make themselves ripe targets.

3) You sound a lot like the blobbing null players when their playstyle got nerfed. You can still be a trader, but now you will have trouble gaining such a huge advantage over other playstyles. I still expect you'd figure out the new optimum playstyle and use that instead. Meritocracy implies adaptability. Anyway I'm guessing the new best business is propping up local malls in High, where you can get your Mining and ratting supplies and get decent deals on your loot.

4) Bad blood between you and a dev is definitely a major disincentive. I'll give you that one.

5) You gave your money to socials. You can probably get some of it back to get started again. Sure 100B is not 1T, but it should cut the time to get to 1T by quite a bit.

With all that said I'm not asking you to return to Eve. It would be great for me as a reader, but if you're not having fun then you shouldn't do it. I just don't want you to justify your decision with false reasons.

Anonymous said...

"I mean, why play if some idiot or corrupted dev can destroy everything you worked for in the next patch."
That is why I stopped playing WoW - that happens there EVERY update. And on full purpose, too.
EVE is still miles better.

Anonymous said...

Not sure if you saw a group is looking to run 'New Jita' as a charitable endevour. all profits to go to CCP 'PLEX for good' campaigns.

it has some upsides.

the powerblocks wont be threatened by one of their enemies controlling it. so they wont tear it down.

the socials will defend it because its a good cause. similar to how Chribba's station was defended.

traders will support it. low taxes. planned central location. less risk than a powerblock run hub because of point 1.

i would be interested in your thoughts on it.

glenarvan said...

I know you'll like this:

goon's ping

=======================================

(0:42:42) directorbot: Hi. Please start stocking Saranen with corm fleet fits (see last broadcast about killing things in o1y for fits). Make them cheap, make them plentiful so fcs can have fun with them. These will not be on the reimbursement sheet but they cost about 5mil a ship so who cares. ^_^

~~~ This was a broadcast from dabigredboat to all

========================================

Anonymous said...

One flaw in your calculation about isk growth, it will not be -15, since the isk do not leave the economy, as it did when it was "npc" taxes.

Gevlon said...

It does leave the economy if players still use NPC jita. If they use New Jita, then of course the money gets to the owner.

Anonymous said...

I think people will still use Jita for quite some time. But the trade volume will decrease a lot. While people will probably import and export at similar rates, they will need to rely on direct sales a lot more, since the ability of traders to post buy and sell orders at a decent margin will be crippled.