Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Everyone knows the corp shares are pretty much useless because of the risk involved with allowing people outside of corp to have votes. I suggest creating a share system that has two different types of shares; Executive shares (Voting Shares), and Investor shares (Profit Shares).

The executive shares are pretty much the current type that we have in game, allowing CEO to make votes, and share holders vote. The only change I suggest to the Executive shares must remain in corp.

The Investor shares are what most people will want, and the type that should be traded, the price of corp shares will vary depending on how well the corp is doing in EVE. Now this feature can also introduce the Stock market and NPC stock brokers.

Feel free to add to this topic if it interests you, I am pressed on time and wanted to post this idea before I forget... again.

Thank you for the technical terms, I only deal with the RL stock market as a hobby (I know I'm lame) I would love to see short selling to come into effect, would provide a element of danger in the current eve market, and honestly this could be accomplished using contracts, thus boosting both concepts of the game.

And for the EVE Stock market, I did mean it to be a single entity, and not separate as I made it sound like sorry for the mix up.

Dividends, Idk if you could impliment this part of the stock market feature mainly because you only need 1 million isk to start a corp. However you could have alliance stocks to pay dividends.

I don't know the effects of having financial data published, but I must also admit at this point I'm at my limit of knowledge in this subject, so if anyone can add more please feel free to.

The only problem I see with that Havak is that people will never let go of those shares, and end up with players going inactive. In my opinion I think that only corp members have a say in the corp. (btw this was how the first major alliance was disbanded, by having too many shares out in the public)

They can publish it all. Then liquidate it all while shareholders are offline.

It's not so much a matter of regulations as a basic lack of enforceable punishment for scams. This will never work unless something drastic is involved - character biomass, account deletion, additional charges on your credit card... lol.

I never understood why corporation shares are not tradeable like any standard item in the game via the market. Nobody is forced to sell the shares and nobody is forced to buy the shares so why not just give it a try. Even though I am pretty sure this might create a lot of tear drops it might work here and there for a limited period of time, so why not?

I have often thought about this. So +1 in that regard. I just worry about the implementation of it. Like was said previously with no actual regulations it would be pure chaos.

I'm not a financial wiz and granted my knowledge of it is somewhat limited to what I've read online, in newspapers and on TV. But the problem of players going inactive with shares in corps is a problem. Would they forfeit all their shares when they unsub?

Then you might get a situation where a very successful corp or alliance becomes vulnerable when a group of players intent on it's financial downfall buy a bunch of shares and all unsub for a day a week a month. Thus causing a run on that corp/alliance. Hell with amount of liquid isk floating around nowadays they don't even need to unsub they just buy up all the shares and sell them off. And the corp/alliance really can't do anything about it since the shares are publicly sold. Short of buying all the stock themselves.

But that is the risk vs reward of EVE I suppose. I still like the idea it just needs a whole lot of thought. I also like the idea of dividends. I was in a corp at the beginning of my EVE career that tried to do this to no avail. On the downside I can just see the ads for those entities. "Join us now and never grind another isk again". It would be even harder for smaller entities to recruit or even gain a foothold since the lure of joining a wealthy entity and just living off the supplementary income would be so great. Unfortunately with the way the EVE economy is right now it wouldn't scale. I'm sure there are ways around this though.

I'm probably completely off on my assumptions and feel free to let me know. Gotta learn sometime.

That it sort of true and sort of not true. It depends on how shares are implemented. Suppose that a corp could pay a dividend, and that divided history was public. It would be no trouble to calculate an interest rate based on the price of shares and the expected dividend payments. In that sense, they are no term bonds.

As for the fraud, as an investor, don't buy shares that don't have a good track record of dividend payments. Idiots will invest in stocks that have no history, people that want to take a risk will invest in new shares/corp that are issued at a reasonable price in the hopes that they will pay off in the long run. As more short term scams are done, new issue prices will need to go down to reduce perceived risk.

Some other data that will help mitigate scams are, how many total share holders there are - how widely held. How many of the share holders are in the corp, who the largest share holders are, how many shares are outstanding and total market value of all outstanding shares.

With out going into each, some more obvious than others, it'll be pretty easy to spot a scam attempt.

I think an ingame stock market sounds nifty... but frist there should be some tool to force dividen payouts:

Currently, there is no tools to enforce dividen payments, so buying shares has no form of garaunteed payback. Additionally, once people own enough shares, they can become problematic through takeovers, etc. Here's how you could change the system to add isk value to the dividens:

Have corps declare dividens for a future time period - (example, on the first of every month, a 1% "dividen tax," applied to all corp income, to be payed to the stock holders.) Dividen payout history, number of shares, dividen tax, current payout date, etc, should be easily found in the corp information screen.

As income comes into the corp wallet, it's immediately taxed by the payout percentage. This tax is put into escrow until the end of the payout period. At the end of the time period, the total quantity in escrow is payed out to each stock holder based on their stocks.

It would be cool if the type of income to be taxed could be specified (donations, bounties, market orders, contracts, etc), although having all incoming isk taxed would be the best insurance for shareholders.

A check-and-balance might be to require a shareholders vote to accept a change in dividen tax rate or payout period.

Now corps can sell shares to their memebers to generate corp investment isk. If they need a new CSAR, they create and sell 1000 shares to their members at 2m isk each to generate the capital. In return the CEO promises 1% return based on corp income, payed on the 5th of every month.

Holding sov can become an intricate part of this system. In order to pay sov costs, money has to come into the corp. If all avenues for bringing money into the corp are taxed by the dividen tax, then there will be a dividened as long as the corp holds sov.

Then allow the trading of shares on the market....

Finally, let the corp itself buy its own shares (and others). This way, they can wheel shares back in, and then lock them down like BP's.

+1 for the idea,

I'd love to be able to play with EVEs stock market whilst I study Accountancy :D

I just found the old thread http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1209816 However I think you guys added more content then ever before, great ideas and awesome counter arguments keep them coming the only way to work out the problems with an idea is by criticism.

I like your idea FlinchingNinja Kishunuba about adding a tax on all corp members abandoning corp (to counter scams)