Update about Planet Taxes

📰 HWS Announcements
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Hey @everyone

some of you already saw it:
we have improved the Tax feature.

Debts

One big change is that you can now have debts. (type eb:info)
This is a mix of “we can’t set all your unpaid structures to the HWS faction or do it manually” and again a lesson to be friendly to the performance of the game / server.
If you have debts you need obviously to pay it back first to be able to use your bank credits. With “pay back” I mean to just earn bank credits so it will be transferred automatically.

Improvements

One thing people tried to do or questioned: public structures can now be tracked and count also as taxed structures.
As we said often: it is not a good idea to set them to public.

Other than other few fixes this is it for now.

Since the 5.0 coming more closer I will start so collect some more feedback again so we can make an even better universe for 5.0 :slight_smile:

Thanks so far for all the feedback / suggestions / etc. Quite a lot on the line right now so I am lacking behind some TODOs. Sorry.

Your HWS Team

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The public structures do not show in my tax list and I am not being taxed for it according to my tax list. But I do get taxed for it? And if so, where can I find what structures are mine? For all we know we get taxed 1 million a day but it doesn’t show in the tax list. Could be dangerous.

Also private ones (from other faction members) do not show in the tax list for me (intended still?).

I kinda need to know this before we get like a million tax tomorrow. Because then I will move or destroy all public stuff on our planet today.

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The following might sound a little mean but it’s not meant that way, merely putting things into perspective.

So our faction, PKA, has paid 170 euros to get their own planet. Cool. It’s expected that a large faction will have quite a few bases/CV’s/SV’s. Yet now, if we want to park our vessels on the planet which we’ve bought with actual currency, we’ll end up paying loads of taxes to…who? Exactly? And why?

This is kind of going to force us to put everything in space anyway, to limit the cost of taxes. What’s the added value of having your own planet?

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More questions:

  • Will public structures count as private or as faction?
  • Will private structures still work as before? Or will the entire faction now be taxed for them?

I know you are super busy but I would really appreciate an answer before tomorrow morning when the taxes will hit.

@Crux
Sorry I disagree. Paying with real money should not give any advantages (they already do quite a bit). Would be way too unfair to other players and pay2win is apparently not even allowed for servers.

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yeah, but taxes that run into the millions, on a planet you’ve paid for with actual money doesn’t make sense either. It’s like crippling your own finances so you can have your own planet, while having paid 170 euros for it. In this case, I don’t see enough advantage. Perhaps a middle-ground? Lower taxation on faction planets?

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We are discussing it now in voice. But we NEED more information about the new taxes and how they will work because obviously the tax list does not reflect that or may be bugged.

Also the 170 euro is NOT a payment, it is a donation. Though the line is very thin here one could perhaps argue about it but officially it’s a donation.

Yes PKA may be hit by millions and millions of taxes per member tomorrow depending on how the new tax system works. If the public ones will count as private then PKA is good, if not, PKA is bankrupt tomorrow if nothing is done with most of their members being extremely deep into the negative. But thrust me I will move everything off the planet or multitool it if I have too. 98 cores… Imagine those taxes…

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Eh - the whole deal with the tax is that it’s meant to prevent overcrowding on SHARED planets.

If we get our own planet, who are we crowding out?

Really so far the best thing about having our own private planet is not needing to find our autominers in a giant pile of autominers or having to deal with some jackass who decided that it’d be really funny if they dug up a 40ft pit under all the autominers.

I don’t think donator planets should be taxed. I’ve said that before I had one.

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It’s not about server performance alone. It’s also about being fair to to non-paying-players (I live on a donator planet btw).
But then if you want to build a lot of PVE stuff, you area pretty much forced to ‘donate’ 170 euro with the public being gone (and public is very risky). Also to safely store your army of battleships, you would have to ‘donate’ a donator planet. That would be too unfair. And of course we get all the advantages you mentioned + some more.

Someone made a fun comment: “Let’s just multi-account and use that dummy account as the owner of all our stuff and let that account have infinite debt”. Lol. Rex must be like “Sigh…”. Don’t worry we wont’ do it. That would be a real exploit.

Yeah there should be a rule about digging on PVE deposits… At least not further than 10% (our planet rule) and no troll-holes. The alliance planet lost another 2 deposits last week when I was offlline… I consider fully depleting deposits on PVE a troll-act.

Btw PKA is firing up their multitools right now :smiley:

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I would be OK with a tax on CVs and none on BAs.

Living on donator worlds is awful anyway as the playfield goes down when you log - so you can’t run constructors.

I get your complaint about Pay 2 Win - but I also think there should be SOME benefit for paying 170 EU.
$10 gets you 8mil credits worth of OCD upgrades AND 10 BP spawns AND 10 mineral packages containing rare ores.
Pay 17 times that and you get to not have to look for your faction’s autominers.

Fact is that if we were going to build a base - we would do it on pirate world so that our constructors would run. In short the 170 EU planet is WORSE than the faction planet. So much for pay 2 win…

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I like that idea!

[quote=“Mordgier, post:10, topic:2460”]
Pay 17 times that and you get to not have to look for your faction’s autominers.
[/quote] Place them in a odd way and you always find them. I find mine almost instantly every time by placing them oddly. But the devs should just color your own autominers differently. Seriously they should do this.

[quote=“Mordgier, post:10, topic:2460”]
I get your complaint about Pay 2 Win - but I also think there should be SOME benefit for paying 170 EU.
[/quote]You donate you do not ‘pay’ :wink: But I understand your point as well.

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If we had to do it again we would - but when we came to Pirate Planet we were absolutely the first there for days - so our autominers are in the center of the deposit and are now totally surrounded by those of other factions.

And if we get a new member having them place an autominer is pointless as it’d be nowhere near the existing ones…

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Getting off-topic but an alternative idea: they can just spawn one large autominer on a deposit when the first person puts it there and then other people who want to mine there put their autominer inside the big one and then everybody interacts with the big miner. This way depleted deposits do not set back newer players, cleaner and drains less FPS for clients.

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Because we still do not have any info on this, and because the tax list is either very very very slow or does simply not work properly and because the taxes probably hit tomorrow, I assume worst case. Namely that they will be counted as a faction asset starting tomorrow. Meaning I’m gonna start an internal vote to move or destroy public structures from others to prevent insane taxes to prevent a 7-8 figure tax tomorrow morning with 98 cores.

People might get pissed but, we don’t have the info we need and I believe this is better than bankrupting an entire faction because of some random ships like flying bananas, toilet ducks, kitchen-ships like toasters and other nonsense I’m finding :smiley:

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Ohhh. 98 cores on a FACTION planet…
U must be a huge faction, if not time to down size then.

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We just verified that the new tax system does not work at all or is not yet activated. The tax list (w/o public structures) this morning was the one used to tax us all. Well, better safe than sorry. Imagine an entire faction with like 50 million debt each lol.

@Dr_Dasslock
We are, but most are inactive, show up only once a week or something, etc. The amount of ACTIVE players in our faction is not that much. But the faction size is. But those players still have old structures and ships everywhere that we had to clean up now. Couldn’t risk faction-wide-bankruptcy.

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Let me make some points clear (again)

  • [quote=“TinyDewDrop, post:3, topic:2460”]
    The public structures do not show in my tax list
    [/quote]

The update was one day live before you even responded. It is working as it should after checking different players, different scenarios.

It depends. If the ship was before set to private and you make it public it counts as private (we know who changed it, so it will be in YOUR tax list). If the ship was before to faction and you change it to public then it will be in the tax list for everybody in the faction.

Welcome back Crux. As this was discussed a lot before and always brings up the p2w discussion and some hidden hate here and there again:

  1. a donation is voluntary!

This for example is 100% false and sounds to me like spreading hate. You just need to realize that if you wanna build a lot of stuff than sorry, the game is not ready for it. Wait for better performance, for a coming HWS surprise soon or play Minecraft. You are - NEVER EVER - forced to let real money by us.
People who do, have or should have the support in first mind because it is maybe quite a burden for us to do all of this in our spare time with over 450 dollar per months knocking on our door…

Because again we never thought people would buy a planet, show us such a big support, we either increase the planet price a lot or/and will implement a smart way to boost it in 5.0 a bit. For example taxes only on CVs.

So to sum it up again:
Taxes were an idea by me to get rid of Peacekeepers. Peacekeepers where permanent PvE playfields in HWS 1-3. These playfields got full after some time over and over again and we had to implement new Peacekeeper playfields over and over again. That caused more and more problems because currently Empyrion works like this:
100 people in ONE playfield = cool
30 people in DIFFERENT playfields = dead
So in HWS 4.0 I wanted to test this and sensitize people once again that Empyrion is NOT “Minecraft” (it is an acronym for me to explain too massive hang for building stuff)
It would be the same as if we hadn’t implemented tax in HWS 4.0 but we would say you only have 4 Peacekeeper Planets and some people will be wiped from there after some time. But this wouldn’t be so cool you can imagine.

Last but not least the Tax system has a lot more potential. For example a faction bank, event based tax payments, transfer taxes etc. It is just the beginning and supports overall the role play character I was looking for (trading, pirating, defending, etc.)

I hope I made some points clear now.

RexXxuS

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Lets just simply stop talking about our planet as a donator planet.,

I have donated close to 400 to this server and i am happy to do it. Ofc i like having a planet and some npc traders and other donator stuff but mostly i am happy to help devs out with the cost of running things.

I dont have any problems with taxes due to these facts…

1: It keeps the cash flow down overall.
2: It make most people leave pve.

I would ofc change the system so a faction can have a faction house that a faction bank pays for and so on but we never know what J & R brings us in the next update.

Peace

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… Godd*mn I don’t want to write yet another book but fine here we go I must defend myself once again against an admin…

Until this tax change, we could play as much minecraft as we wanted. We just had to use a donator planet for it and set it all to public (which you allowed). PKA is the living evidence of this, this has been proven!
BUT you were REQUIRED to donate a private PVE donater planet for it to work to prevent other players from taking your public stuff (building huge BA’s around it is not ideal). It’s your free choice yes, but if you wanted to minecraft, this was the only viable way to go until now and dodge ALL taxes legally & within the rules.

On top of that the sentence you quoted was my response to someone else having an idea of “no (or lower) taxes for donator planets ONLY”. So if this would actually be implemented, then playing minecraft on HWS would only be possible through the 170 euro by (partially/entirely) dodging taxes because this would reinstate the old (imo broken) mechanic again for paying players.

On top of that I’m the one saying that it is “‘donating’” and not “paying”… And I’m the one that knows that the game is not ready for it, but some other players apparently do not… And I know about your burdens like I told you in that other drama.

If you still believe I’m spreading hate, then please PM me and explain to me. On top of that everything I said is true (we even proved it, our planet was full of public cores and docked ships and one morning (check it) the taxes went as low as just 1k for the faction). The only thing I start to see is you hating me. What I say is true and has been proven already.

I feel like you are hating me… First that odd punishment and labeling me as “major exploiter”. Fine you apologized in the end and so did I for overreacting to that. But now directly accusing me of spreading hidden hate? [no words for this]

If you however feel that perhaps you were wrong about me, then I would also appreciate a PM you telling me that if you can find the time for it.

[quote=“RexXxuS, post:17, topic:2460”]
It is working as it should
[/quote]Weird… The tax list was not including any public properties of mine that were private before I set them to public (like the motorbike tunnel) and the tax list had plenty of time to update itself.
I’m very sure that it does not fully work as intended but if you say it does, then I must be wrong. So I’ll shut up again and take it to my advantage. I’m not gonna report these things as broken anymore and will instead promote more imbalances like some other players do and just use them because I only get punished for reporting stuff anyway or hated for or accused or whatever will come after that next… And being honest = more punishment for stuff you didn’t know. Nothing like that is appreciated on this server, at least so it feels lately.

[quote=“RexXxuS, post:17, topic:2460”]
The update was one day live before you even responded.
[/quote]Then we got super super lucky or we would be bankrupt ‘forever’ (unless the cb:reset also clears our debt) because we had so much stuff there on public.

[quote=“RexXxuS, post:17, topic:2460”]
Last but not least the Tax system has a lot more potential. For example a faction bank, event based tax payments, transfer taxes etc. It is just the beginning and supports overall the role play character I was looking for (trading, pirating, defending, etc.)

I hope I made some points clear now.
[/quote]Thanks that clarified it all. And if I weren’t mad AGAIN I would be looking forward to it. But I did not like your accusation.

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I PMed you as requested.

And once again here: I am sorry that you went mad even though it was not an accusation about you but against the overall spread of things which are not fully understood by people.
One guy even said he leaves HWS because of the tax. I can’t help these people anymore. They completely don’t understand the idea behind it and then I can only say goodbye.

Maybe it is not 100% working even though my partial tests say it does. But then again, don’t bring the madness to me, bring it to Jascha. I do the same as you, pulling his attention to it.

And because you did and complaining about bankrupt it says to me very clear that also you didn’t understand the philosophy behind the taxes. Only because you could why on hell you wanna do it? I mean sure, it is cool to build a lot of stuff [you don’t actually need to be able to survive in a survival game] but it isn’t our intentions and trust me, if your ship is gone because a bug, Xerult Orbits needs to be wiped or the whole server lags, maybe you realize why this stupid idiot RexXxuS wants to create taxes, hate, madness or whatever to maybe reduce all this alpha game problems to grant fun for everyone. Donator or not.

I don’t know. I’m resigned. No matter what I do hate is everywhere.

All my ideas don’t looking good for 5.0 to be implemented… maybe in 6.0 where I try again to make everyone happy but someday I am to my end too.

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