Poetic Stanziel discussed alternative means of alliance wide income in Eve Online
Poetic Discourse: Bottom-Up Taxation – The Tools Already Exist
OTEC alliances want bottom-up income generation. Actually, every alliance would love bottom-up income generation. Along with the ability to tax that income at a more granular level. Nerfing passive and top-down income would be coupled with an increase in income from nullsec-based missions, industry, incursions, ratting and deadspace. This income increase can either be direct or indirect (via nerfing corresponding highsec incomes.)
In my criticisms of the OTEC complaints over the loss of some of their massive tech income, I’ve never been against CCP implementing these sorts of bottom-up features. Unfortunately, there’s no strong sign that this sort of feature set is even on CCP’s development radar. It certainly doesn’t seem to be anything that CSM7 is pushing for. The current CSM’s two most active nullsec members (Seleene and Elise Randolph) are in Pandemic Legion, a group that makes technetium ISK hand-over-fist, yet has none of the overhead (or headache) of actually holding sovereignty. There’s really no reason why CSM7 would bother pushing this sort of feature. As for the Russian and Test Alliance representatives (UAxDEATH, Greene Lee and Dovinian), they’ve been mostly MIA through the CSM7 term.
My argument has been that tech income could not (and should not) continue unabated while these bottom-up features are being debated between the big nullsec powerblocs, some future CSM, and CCP. That the alchemy additions to include technetium production will be good for the game overall.
But, why do organizations, like Goonswarm Federation, have to wait for CCP to implement these new taxation features? Aren’t some of the tools already in place to start tracking their employee income already?
The information that can pulled from the API is reasonably extensive. Income sources can certainly already be tracked. And where a specific income might not be available, there’s enough circumstantial information to draw reasonably accurate inferences on those other sources of income.
From what I hear, Goonswarm’s API tracking software is already quite complex and extensive. It’s hard to say how much modification and extensions would be required to have it track all their employee incomes accurately, and then to spit out monthly earning reports on each employee, but it’s probably safe to say their software is already a good way developed in that direction.
Even if employees try to hide income via out-of-alliance alts, said income has to eventually make its way back to the employee. It’s fairly trivial to connect alts to mains via ISK and contract trades. (There are ways to hide these transfers, but they are very much a time-consuming pain in the ass.) If any organization is expert at sussing out these connections between characters, it’s most certainly Goonswarm Federation.
But then, once Goonswarm can reasonably track employee income, how do they send out tax bills and then track whether those bills are paid. The contract system would be one method. If a character owes 16M ISK in taxes, contract a single veldspar for the amount owing.
Of course, dealing with a few thousand contracts per month is an extraordinary undertaking of manual labour. But maybe this is where bots can be utilized. Seems that would be a reasonable use of botting software, even if CCP might argue it’s still an illegal use. CREST (the upcoming read/write API) might solve this problem. If the new API infrastructure allows 3rd party applications to create contracts, the entire process of taxation can be automated, start to finish.
And if the software ends up working like a charm, perhaps another revenue stream becomes available. Selling the software to other organizations. 50-100B ISK for something like this might not be an unreasonable sum to pay. Maybe even an initial lower fee and then some sort of ongoing licensing fee (payable in ISK, of course.)
So, yeah, tools already exist for any organization to calculate taxes on their employee revenue streams. None of this would solve the complaint that income generation in nullsec should be more lucrative than corresponding income sources in highsec and lowsec. Until those issues are sorted out through some future CSM with CCP, building out the software to tax further what’s already being earned should be a viable avenue of investigation by the large powers that have the talent to develop it.
I like your blog but I'm just going to flat out say it – stupid idea.
The idea that alliances need to create some sort of manual tax revenue process is just nonsense.
took the words right out of my mouth
Agreed, this is not realistic.
Also you didn't address the lack of value in nullsec. Half of the point CFC is making about tech is that without it holding sov and actually LIVING in 0.0 is not really worth it.
Also if you start taxing income that's already less than empire income… well, you get the point.
agree its not feasable to do it manualy
if they are to do it with INGAME TOOLS then we are talking on another scale
if they at the same time give Nullsec a isk boost then im for it.
that may even promote some ninja ratting (if you only get taxed in own systems) i mean more target = more kills = more fun for minor roams
No thanks! I already have to spend hours doing my actual taxes. Fuck if im going to do it also for a game i PAY for. Tax the alliance, not the player.
Honestly, this blog post is so ridiculously stupid that it seems offensive. You should apologize to Goonswarm for trying to suggest it to them, and likewise apologize to everyone who read this.
Lots of (OTEC) alliances have already been doing this for months. Even the 'smaller' OTEC alliances (FA, SMA, FCON, TNT, etc) are regularly looking at costs of 80bn in SRP alone. Add to that sov bills and fuel bills and suddenly that endless tech font isn't so endless. As a result most of these have done exactly what this thread is talking about (albeit at a corp level; it's easier to process a dozen APIs than a thousand) and are taxing their members. Alliances are already diversifying their income with this, POCOs, and other means. Tech is still extremely good and ought to be nerfed as part of changes to the whole tech 2 building system – but I think you're exaggerating top down income here; some alliances like ncdot and PL have for a long one held a huge amount of tech relative to their size and yes, these are filthy rich and very much depend on top down income, but your average CFC alliance already has a pretty diverse income.
Someone does not understand this is suppose to be a game..
"If the new API infrastructure allows 3rd party applications to create contracts"
It doesn't yet. The only thing CCP are planning for the release of the CREST API is the ability to adjust standings. They're going to be very cautious about what they open up, and how they allow access, particularly when it comes to access to ISK (scam risk).
and yet, the effectiveness of this effort hinges on employee willingness to perform tasks (in a game) that are charged the lowest tax rate. This is something that I do not believe will occur in enough of a volume to make the effort worthwhile.
Otherwise, whats the point?
Why not just use the corp tax option that exists in game already? Future iteration could then simply add on an Alliance tax element to the overall tax burden of each transaction. No need for complex API calls and far easier to manage if the tax is payed as the member earns vOv
This is my thought.
A corp taxes 15% of your ratting/bounty/mission money, and gets 1 mililon isk…
The alliance has a tax rate of 10% and takes 100,000 isk from that.
So just like happens now with a players wallet, the corp wallet would show.
-100,000
+1,000,000
Pretty simple.
Tax not me, tax not thee, tax the man behind the tree. Fuck that. It should all be bottom up. People say Eve is a game about space PVP. Or space industry. Or space whatever. It's not. It's all those and then some. It's about space society. And society, at the corp level, alliance level, or coalition level is about harnessing the power of each individual pilot/player to the benefit of the whole while still allowing for individual game play. It's a microcosm of the real world in many contexts. The majority of income should be derived from the players.
Wow – just… wow.
No. Don't do this… PLEASE. It's enough of a struggle for some people just to show up for ops and point their ship in the right direction. Let the big brains figure out the big brain stuff.
Let the alliance grunts be grunts.
Kuz being grunt iz FUN!
Let's break this down. Goonswarm Federation has 9436 members according to Dotlan. Assuming than fully half of these (a vast overestimation) are non-moneymaking alts, this would leave the lucky goon finance team over four and a half thousand accounts which they would need to manually track monthly income and whether or not they had paid. It's already a huge pain in the ass just to make sure all 9k goons get access to mumble, the forums and have a valid API on file. Every single member of the finance team would quit or commit suicide. Even if they didn't it would be really hard to tax income. I just sold 100 million isk worth of market orders in highsec, is that taxed?
Then let's look at it from the line member's perspective. This sucks. IF it absolutely had to be done, a flat fee per character would be much easier. But goons have long prided themselves on not shitting on their membership, and such a move would reverse years of resistance about this. Alts would start to move out of alliance to avoid taxes. It would be huge clusterfuck that nobody would like.
Its either automatic (% taken from bounties missions and shit) or its useless.
Roams in an area, with non-alliance non-member killing x value in rats, would disrupt tax gathering by a %, increasing until you have negated his income in the constellation. This disruption naturally goes down with time (within 1 hour or so). Rats killed out of the alliance area would pay no alliance tax.
Then just set neighbouring systems you control to 80% tax and make your guys go over to their place to ruin things.
Alliances need a CTA button that will put all taxes to a predefined rate (100% or whatever they wish) for the duration. This would be a role that could also be granted to some persons below director level, such as top FCs.
The tax rates would need to be granular, defined in general, then region and system only if wanted. This would allow alliance leaders to discourage ratting in an area or encourage in another.
PETS need to be formally defined. With contracts. This will also end the "we're not pets" crap. A % of the tax would be a part of the pet contract.
time for all the nullies to start opening accounts in the cayman islands….
Sov costs plus nerfed anoms, (that allready have a bounty reduction compared with belt rats). Makes for a lack of a draw or resource in nullsec better than empire level 4s.
It is possible to exist without tech, but thats not to say it is good in its current form. I will believe nullsec has a decent resource to replace tech when I see it, not when others talk about pipe dreams.
What do you not understand about simple economics?
Every credit not recorded and taxed and registered is lost.
Loss is not conducive to growth.
I left some spaces to throw in some big words.