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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The PI tax whine fest

The thin of skin may want to avoid the Science and Industry channel on the EVE-O forums for a bit.  We need some cheese and crackers to go with that whine.

Some observations:

1) this game needed some more isk sinks and reduced faucets.

     1a) The high sec tax increases on PI are part of the more isk sinks,

     1b) The removal of insurance payout on concord ganking is part of the reduced faucet.

2) There needs to be a balance between risk and reward.

     2a) you are taking little to no risk doing PI in high sec. - you shouldn't get as much reward as 0.0 or low sec.

     2b) there are 3 choices for more risk:  work with a 0.0 alliance, work with a low sec corp/alliance, work with a wormhole corp/alliance.  The people putting up the gantries get to control the tax rates.  Find one you can work with or create a corp that can do so and you can control that.  That's the reward for the risk of putting out the gantry and getting a customs office in place.

someone's going to need to run a detailed break even analysis on the amount of time it takes for a gantry/CO to make back it's investment cost in high sec tax equivalent.

Let's do some back of the envelope calculations:

a gantry takes a bpc (25mil)  71 P4's (using the 1350000 average that works out to 95.85mil (some are used for the gantry and some are used for the upgrade) and a capital construction part (say 5 mil to be safe with current mineral volatility) that works out to a CO costing you 125.85 mil (or probably slightly higher).  Say you arrange a P1 producing planet to make you on average 8-10k P1's a day.  Exporting that each day will cost you 400k to 500k in taxes (More - much more for a production planet where you have to import most stuff and export the end product).  based on some calcualtions I did for production planets they effectively earn twice the taxes (import materials followed by export finished goods - the volumes are such that it effectively doubles the taxes or close enough not to matter) so, let's say 800k to 1mil per day (as a conservative number). 

so if you have a virgin planet in 0.0 space you're effectively "breaking even" on your investment in about 4 months for a production planet and 8 month for an extraction planet.  If you need to replace the 17% interbus ones a production planet CO only has to survive 2 months and an extraction planet CO only 4 months IF only one character is using it.  Remember a gantry benefits EACH character that uses it.

Say you have a planet where your corp as between 5-10 characters doing PI on it? well you "break even" on your costs about 5-10 times faster .  Let's take an example of what I mean:  The gantry benefits say 5 characters and you slap it on a production planet in 0.0.  3 of the dudes use the planet as a production planet, 2 use it as an extraction planet.  That means that you should break even on that planet in about 7-8 days and that's low long the gantry has to survive to pay for itself.

Moral of the story: if you like to work alone you're screwed.  A corp with enough characters doing PI on the planets they slap gantries on should be able to justify the purchase and installation of the gantries in about a week to two weeks depending on the use of the planet involved.

Personally, if I was a CEO in a corp that has enough characters doing PI, I'd use corp cash to slap gantries up, put an 8% tax until the initial investment is payed off then reduce it down to 2-4% to pile up cash for replacement gantries (for those lost to ganking and what not)

This is hardly the end of the world people.

5 comments:

Stephen McMurtry said...

These people are hilarious. Wuvin' them tearz.

Diametrix said...

I agree that is some serious complaining. The only issue I have with it going on and on is that I'm not certain how CCP's management is doing at the moment.

It seems clear that PI and POCOs and DUST are a HUGE evolutionary step for EVE. If rolled out as (it appears) planned, then the game will have depth, diversity and complexity beyond any game on the market.

But if CCP are gunshy about carebear popularity and subscription retention I worry they could balk at the whinage.

They need to stick to thier guns here. And people like Letrange, Jack Dant (or whatever his name) PMCHEN (that goon who contributed to the POCO talk) and the rest of us need to contribute counterarguments to the mindless sheeples complaining on the forums.

Keep explaining to them how stupid they are! They need to hear it. Keep the comments reasonable and accurate so we can stay on message.

I'll kick in when I get off work. No direct EVE forumn access. Thank you Chribba for a window to the world.

Toldain said...

I'm of the opinion that when the dust settles, the higher tax costs will be mostly passed on to the fuel (and capital ship) buyers.

Which, in my opinion, is good.

Latro said...

Ditto what Toldain said. Like any RL production business, higher taxes = higher costs that will be passed on to consumers. Granted its early in the usual expansion market adjustment phase, but PI product prices have already doubled. They'll most likely settle down to incorporate the new tax costs and consumers will have to pay the increases, i.e. sink hitting those at the high end, where most of the ISK is anyway.

Letrange said...

Well it won't be passed on to the capital ship buyers since capital ships are mainly minerals - not PI. But it will be passed on to tower owners (both as part of making a tower and as part of the fuel for a tower) and T2 manufacturers (quite a few T2 items use PI components).