Nestor the Chronicled

…everywhere a world world. Just under 40 days to go until Tyrannis. Undoubtedly, devs are scrambling to finish up the last sprints, drop everything in place, and fiddle with things until they work, fueled by caffeine and the knowledge that more shiny things are always better.

Meanwhile, we in the community sit back, wait, and ponder. This isn’t Exodus, though; no scrabbling together bits of speculation from half-baked sources, all held together by wishes and unicorns. No, we’ve got a highly formalized rumour mill, led by millmaster CrazyKinux. His latest command whips our brains in gear, inviting us to furiously consider the ramifications of Tyrannis in all of its planetary glory.

In the real estate business, they say “location, location, location.” I’m tempted to say “decentralization, decentralization, decentralization,” except that’s a mighty powerful tongue-twister, so I’ll just say it once:

Decentralization.

EvE is a huge place, but it’s remarkably centralized. Some of this is quite natural—nullsec choke points—but some of it, such as the triumphant rise of Jita, is not. Asteroids and gas fields are scattered pretty much everywhere; in fact, highsec mining is, in the scheme of things, relatively poor. Big hauls—and big profits—are to be made on the rim. Still, though, everything ends up hauled back to Jita, or one of a half-dozen major trade hubs. It’s entirely possible to run a healthy little trade economy outside the clutches of the major systems, but profits work best with volume, and there’s only a few places where that happens.

Planets, on the other hand, are everywhere. Only a relative handful of people will be able to adequately exploit a planet, and there are only a few of those per system. (At first, everyone and their grandpa will be throwing down command centers, but the rush will taper off, and only the sufficiently dedicated will survive.)

However, who wants to share a planet? There’ll be plenty of people willing to take a hike and find their own little corner of the universe—and all those people living in WS are undoubtedly salivating at the stuff they can wring out of their own private solar system.

All over the galaxy there will be a relatively even distribution of planets. If they just produced, the net effect wouldn’t be any different from mining: the goods would be shunted back to the trade hubs for consumption. Unlike rocks in space, planets consume as well: that relatively equal distribution of points of production now also become little markets. (And, unlike a surplus of, say, cruisers, planets don’t just up and move.) Even the dullest of traders will be quick to notice that it’s a whole lot more efficient to take your stuff a few jumps away rather than a few dozen jumps to Empire space. Plus, it’s constant: say you’ve got a neighboring planet who produces a bunch of good A and needs B, while you produce a bunch of B and need A. Much quicker and easier to barter directly with that person, keeping the goods in-system, rather than jump them to wherever and trade.

Point is, planetary interaction will create a vast, distributed network of markets for totally new stuff. (Perhaps not entirely: it would be quite cool if PI used, among other things, items currently classified under the catchall “trade goods” category. Perhaps you could, for instance, staff a factory with humans instead of automation; it might produce more efficiently, but you might have to keep it supplied with food to keep the workers happy. Or maybe all those Militants that randomly drop in missions would be useful: ship them to a planet and use them to sabotage someone else’s factory. Maybe even in conjunction with DUST 514: a shipment of Militants might act as a NPC squad, or confer some other advantage on ground troops. Endless permutations!)

Right, distributed network. If people are trading PI goods with their neighbours anyway, why not start trading regular goods as well? Suddenly, the decentralized framework created for PI becomes the groundwork for a decentralized ‘normal’ market. After all, in order to interface with the extant economy, PI will have to produce non-PI goods. Combined with mining, there’s now a pretty convincing reason to keep things local—you’re trading with your neighbors anyway. Sure, it will centralize to some extent, probably driven by corp/alliance influence, but the permanently decentralized nature of planetary demand would seem to ensure that the market for goods can never fully centralize. The major trade hubs drain, Jita becomes a lag-free wasteland, tumbleweeds rolling across the lanes—

Well, a man can dream.

My prediction remains one of decentralization. In the beginning, the decentralized NPC corps seeded items on the market at a whole bunch of locations; when the player economy took off, CCP removed NPC goods, and the market has been centralizing ever since. Planetary interaction could very well affect that, providing good incentives to operate in a decentralized market, at least for some goods. It will certainly be interesting to watch, particularly when the next few Quarterly Economic Newsletters come out, with all sorts of fancy graphs and numbers.