Charging for Hubspace

Miradamian wrote: Also, GM's pointed out early, when hubs came live, that they were temporarily invulnerable to thieving. I thought they would make the hubs vulnerable sooner, but I suspect it is still in their plans since they havent.

it may also be true that they're not sure how to address it. they had planned a peaceful side of BL, after all, until they realised there were no good ways to make it happen.

It would probably be easier to just give each hub its own value against theft, possibly with modifiers to race, and just let some of them be more secure than others (maybe based on standing or tax rate?).

building on the suggestions of others here, i wonder if this would be playable.
1)  allow thieves to be sent to and quartered at hubs as caravans and traders can be now, from the Trade Hub Orders screen.
2)  count all thieves in residence at the trade hub from all players (see the caveat at 4 below) together as the hub's defence against theft.
3)  allow thieves to be sent to steal from the hub. if successful, select the victim at random. each attempt can only affect one account's assets at the hub (but never the sending player's assets).
4)  one's own thieves in residence do not count against attacks by one's own thieves.
5)  players supplying thieves to secure the hub would gain a bonus their faction standing while the thieves are in place.
6)  players caught attempting to rob the hub would suffer a penalty to their faction standing.
7)  optionally, a new Guard tab could be created for the Trade Hub page logging thieves executed and, if made to confess, the players sending them. this would allow trade-oriented players visibility to any players making repeated attempts on a hub and allow them to take justice into their own hands if the situation calls for it.

to my mind, this would make the security of the hub largely a player affair, allow the hub to take advantage of mutual interest in its own defence, and make well-used hubs like Centrum very secure while keeping hubs on the perimeter of the map feeling much more like the frontier trading posts they most resemble.

Demolish all faction hubs, and make an option for alliance's trade hubs.

Albatross wrote: The trick is finding something simple and understandable. Here's a mechanism that's not quite simple enough: For quantities over: • 2m basic, • 500k advanced and basic harvestables, and • 25k others ...require that a holding fee be paid, by quantity, from Hub-stored gold. "Keep up payments, or we'll bin it" Monthly bidding for large amounts of space above these quantities seems like an additional dimension. Hubs have a defined limit for this.

Those numbers are chump change for those of us who trade and gather. 2M res can be saved up in a few days, if I only had 500k adv. and basic harvestables i'd petition the game and tell them to find my missing millions! and 25k for others? I have 50k+ of a lot of rare minerals, herbs and animal parts hoping they'll be worth something one day.

No way is this game going to penalize players who actually play it.


Edited by Epidemic - 11 Aug 2014 at 09:00