Because, I don't want to ruin Utari's thread, and derail it from his CSM topic, I decided to start a new thread to address some issues brought up in it.
I simply couldn't disagree more with Nieyli's position on this. I have been a Director, then later CEO of Zaratha Zarati (at the time a LS Pirate group), and a Director of Pyre Falcon Defence and Security, and now Cofounder of #2LC a Minmatar FW coalition, Alliance leader for Of Questionable Repute and CEO of Khushakor clan. So needless to say I have been involved on many levels with corporation and alliance funding.
Bottom up funding, is incredibly important to corporations between 15-100 in size, that aren't part of a major alliance or coalition. Smaller corporations very regularly put taxes on line members, and during my time (on an alt) in Skulldogs. which was in Red.Overlord we even went to 100% taxes during CTAs. This was very normal. The vast majority of corporations do this sort of funding system. It has been provided by CCP so that corporations can grow.
In Faction Warfare, you have a large amount of new people coming in, with very little in the way of funding, and even less knowledge of doctrine fittings, and likely without logistic alts of their own. This compounds the problem dramatically for newer and smaller corporations, which many times struggle to grow and find their way, while not being a very big roadblock for very large corps/alliance or for very small groups that don't have very many needs.
There are several problems with the assertions made in that other thread. The assumption is Corps use funds for SRP, while many corps do use a form of SRP and my own does SRP in the form of giving out fit ships for doctrines or to newer players, But Capital investments and heavy assets (Like those JFs for the services mentioned in the other thread) are the biggest reasons corporations need these income sources. In small corps, being able to fund a dread might be difficult on the players level, but in a nullsec corp, it isn't very difficult at all, and it is all the funding method. Large corporations and alliance can protect moons, but smaller ones simply cannot.
Also, many people simply don't have the gametime to run FW missions, and they can be very difficult for the solo player in the current state of Minmatar or Caldari Faction warfare due to the recent changes that were made. While it is still possible for a older player to run those missions in a bomber, for newer players this isn't very viable, combined with the fact that in low tiers it isn't terribly profitable. Also it exposes people, especially newer players to a great deal of risk when done solo. But, in proper mission fleets they have to contribute a great deal of time to it. Running plexes also pays very little in tier 1 and not enough to support higher end ships in tier 2.
To say that there shouldn't be bottom up funding methods available to Faction Warfare corporations is very elitist and hurts those new players who aren't self sufficient yet. My alliance has had over 9 Billion isk lost so far this month, not to mention about 4 billion in investments and 1.2 billion in heavy assets. So, who if not the members collectively should share the burden of that? Should we have to get Sov, and upgrade a system, just so that we can get a way to provide isk that can be properly taxed so that the corporation can have isk? For the Record, that is exactly what we had to do. We also had to get moons in order to keep this up, and guess what Snuff Box has just RFed one of our moons, does my 70 person alliance have any chance at keeping that moon? No, no we don't, but we shouldn't even have to be getting into that sort of thing, incursion corps don't have to, nullsec corps don't have to, mission runners don't have to, etc.
In my opinion, all denying bottom up funding methods does is allow large moon and sov holding entities to farm their space with impunity, while preventing smaller groups from being able to compete in a reasonable fashion.
