I see this perspective, and indeed some people appear to be quitting even before I put these taxes on.
Consider also that the TECH mining, citizen mining, prevention card mining and Background mining aspects of the game are all maxed out at extremely small city sizes, with the exception perhaps of prevention card mining. Very modest sized cities can be mining a daily citizen and rocking a 25% tech mining chance - creativity and art galleries are some of the cheapest cards in the game relatively speaking.
Check out this set up I wrote about recently, and it looks like it still is paying out ~50% non-compounded APR even with zero SIM income. 😅
Well, last I checked, the market for selling Techs isn't that robust.
And yeah, $300 does seem more affordable than trying to enjoy more aspect of the game.
Prevention card mining would be too expensive even for many established players. It remains to be seem if people would be bothered to use them at all since taxes are so high, any amount of "penalty" is simply just part of the package and not really felt.
Back to the main point, how many people on this chain can actually shell out that money? I'm not talking about folks like you and me. I'm talking about the other thousands whose Hive earnings are literally living wages where they are from.
Ah good point that I hadn't considered, prevention cards are worthless with this set up! All in all you make some good points, which confirm that I shouldn't leave the taxes here for too long because the incentives get a bit wonky.
I think the idea of 'small players' and 'new players' is probably worthy of more in depth analysis, it really depends on how creative you get, the focus on only SIM as the profits of the game limits the playable choices. I published this set up more than 8 months ago, which costs less than 9 hive to set up right now and mines me a citizen card in more than 95% of days:
It's not about the facts, but the psychology.
A profit-driven/or determined person will find a way to make even that 9 HIVE investment stretch.
A hobbyist, on the other hand, will just turn elsewhere.