CCP Ytterbium posted a devblog on reddit how broker fees will be calculated. Short version: with perfect skills and standings you'll have 3.5% broker fee. He didn't clarify how the +1% on transaction tax will work, will that mean that the current max skill 0.75% transaction tax becomes 1.75% or (1.5+1)/2 = 1.25%, but let's count with the second for now.First question: how much broker fees people pay now? The February economy report says that people spent 9.8T on taxes and 5.9T on broker fees. Let's assume that the average sale was done with has Accounting 4. This is reasonable, since max-skilled traders are responsible for most sales and training Accounting to 3-4 isn't hard. This means 0.9% average tax. With that, the average broker fee was 0.54%.These numbers mean that after the patch the same people will pay 1.5% transaction tax and 4.15%!!! broker fee. If it wouldn't affect traded volumes (it obviously will),Let me put these numbers in perspective: the total ratting was 33.9T and the total faucets were 71.5T. You see that paying such money is impossible. The only explanation is that CCP means it to be impossible to force people to trade in citadels. Citadel owners can set any broker fee and that fee is not an ISK sink, since it goes to the owner. If everyone would trade on citadels, the new tax wouldn't be much more than current tax+broker fee.About 90% of trading is done in Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek (see market value by region graph). Since the trade hub citadel must be competitive for max-skilled traders, the player-set broker fee can't be more than 3%. Assuming someone would set such citadels and divert trading to them, his income would be 32.8T. Again:Of course if some guy would try it, his citadel would be instantly besieged by literally everybody. This applies to strong alliances or even coalitions. Not even the Imperium would stand a chance holding such ISK print as everyone else would unite to take it from them or at least deny this income. Doing anything else would be suicide as the owner could SRP a full titan fleet every month.There is only one way to create these ISK print citadels and I have no doubt that this way is being formulated as we speak: ifBig powers formed OTEC and than BoTLord for 10% of the trade hub citadel income. Do you think that they would throw away more money than all ratters together make, just for the sake of fighting? No way. The day citadels go online, they will announce that all significant powers agreed in an eternal peace to run the new highsec trading hubs. Sure that doesn't disallow fun roams, but clearly mean no significant fighting as someone losing power would allow the others to eject him from the citadel coalition and no longer give him share. So any serious attack would be seen an existential threat and would immediately break the coalition as the rest of the members could be afraid that they'll be next, so immediately unite against the disturber of peace. The spice must flow!So there won't be any serious wars. Ever. The members be damned as their combined ratting with 100% ratting tax worth less than the income from the citadels. Do you remember whining over "top-down" income because of moons? Imagine something 10x bigger, without siphons, without having to fuel towers, without hauling, without even logging in! So anyone saying "damn the income, let's go fight" will be told "damn you, off you go to lowsec!" Sure, there will be a few rebels, but way too few. Remember that if you can RMT 1B for $7, the trade citadels net you $200K per month. You don't choose playing a video game over getting such money. Every major alliance leader and FC will agree to keep the peace and stomp on anyone trying to disturb it.Such peace will obviously mean the end of EVE. What can CCP do to prevent it? The obvious solution would be not elevating the broker fees, but they clearly want to push people to citadels. However they could force the broker fee in the citadels to be more than the minimum NPC fee (3.5% with current proposal). This fee would still go to the owner, so a corp/alliance would be better off setting up its trading citadel, telling the members to trade there, since this helps the corp coffers. But strangers would not use it much, so it wouldn't keep printing ISK. The randoms would keep using highsec NPC stations, paying the fees to an ISK sink, instead of a super-BotLord.PS: this is already posted on reddit (thanks) and there is an EVE-O post too.