With the Fall of the TTT What Comes Next for Perimeter and Player Markets?

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While the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter has been destroyed, there is still an extended denouement that needs to play out. 

The TTT in its final moments before it blew up

There are the other structures run by the TTC that have been reinforced, the structures run by IChooseYou Alliance (like this now dead Sotiyo) to be considered, and Goonswarm Federation has a Sotiyo in Ashab in Domain that a few people are upset about, though that really feels like the usual suspects who always need something to be mad about.

And the underlying conspiracies will continue to flow, like who knew what when and did leaks from the CSM influence the behaviors of any of the participants in this drama.  Vily publicly suggested that the Imperium’s actions must have driven by advanced knowledge, while he himself was pushing for the TTC to drop more XL structures suspiciously close to the time of the patch.  Brisc keeps telling people that discussions about removing XL structures from high sec had been going on for ages, but that the CSM only learned about the patch change a few days before it hit, leaving scant room for any master plan to come together.  But, as we know, some people will not allow facts to get in the way of their pet conspiracy.

Eventually though, this too shall pass, and somebody else will come along and think that having a market next to Jita would be a good money making opportunity, and Perimeter will come to mind again.  It is one of the four systems one jump from Jita that is in the same region, so shares the same regional market window.  It also used to be on the Jita-Amarr trade route, probably has the easiest name to deal with, and now has a reputation for being a market system.

Jita and the seven sisters

And then somebody will drop a Fortizar and try to set up a market and chaos will ensue.  We know this because we have been through this before.  Somebody jumped on the idea almost immediately, but eventually the larger powers started to get involved.

PanFam Secured isn’t the insurance you think it is

The lesson drawn from the pre-Keepstar attempts was that no single power is capable holding off any potential attackers on its own.

The TTT became a thing… as Gevlon predicted, though his financial estimates were, as usual, wildly inflated… but he was never good with numbers… because it was a way to escape the chaos and competing efforts to set up a market in the face of violent opposition.

Oh man, everybody is horning in on this action now…

The TTT had two things going for it.  First, being a Keepstar, it had a level of assumed invincibility that no mere Fortizar could achieve at that point.  Even this past week there was some level of skepticism that the Imperium could blow it up in the face of an active defense.

I am not sure we know the answer to that even now, given how the armor timer went for the defenders.

Still, being built on the foundation of a high sec Keepstar made it at least feel symbolically safe.

The Keepstar going up in Perimeter back in 2019

And then there was the fact that the major null sec powers of the time agreed to protect it together and split the profits… and pay off any threats.

One aspect of the TTC was that they would cut in anybody who might be poised to attack them… anybody who posed a credible threat at least… bribing them with ISK to just let things be.

So the first question is whether or not somebody can pull together sufficient forces to make that sort of situation viable again, where they can defend if they must, and pay off when they can.

And the second ought to be whether or not enough people will trust any new entity sufficiently to set up shop in their structure.

Again, a high sec Keepstar was felt to be, if not impossible to destroy, at least difficult, with many challenges to overcome.  That the TTT went down on the first try will surely have dispelled that idea.

With any replacement likely to be a Fortizar, that sense of invulnerability will no longer be there.  A faction Fortizar might be tougher to kill, but nowhere as tough as a Keepstar with five armor plates, as the TTT had.  That and faction Fortizars are in limited supply.  There were a lot of them, but there will never be any more, so each one that gets blown up makes the rest more valuable.

Somebody will try, of course.  I would bet somebody is planning it right now… and wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Fortizar already being deployed.  I haven’t bothered to check.  How it will play out remains to be seen.

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