Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hey guys.

As you know corporate shares are basically useless. They can vote on a CEO, WARDEC or the CEO can pay dividends to the share holders.

I would like to see shares able to be given out to people in the same alliance as the corporation. I would also like to see instant dividends paid to the share holders in the form of corporate tax. For example, someone repairs a ship in a corp owned station and that money is automatically split to the shareholders. People who sell stuff at a station, people who rat also pay a corporate tax and that too should be paid into dividends.

Why do I want this change?

Many corporations who are apart of big alliances have to pay rent every month. Sometimes due to RL circumstances they are short and cannot afford to pay their rent. It would be nice if I would finance their rent, in exchange for shares in the corporation. This way, I am guaranteed to make some of my ISK back. If the corp continues to be deliquescent and cannot pay their rent for another month, i can use the shares to take over the corp, or seize their assets.

While I don't give a **** about your reasoning, and I don't like the specific methodology, I've always thought corporate shares could use a facelift to enably more automated payroll and public trading structures.

A better system for shares would be simply setting a self-imposed "dividends" bill that ticks over every week. Setting up that dividends bill would give a real ISK value to every share, that would reflect the corp's dividends bill and number of existing shares owned by entities that are not the corp.

So, for instance, if you have 2000 shares, 500 of those shares are owned by members, and 1500 are owned by the corp, and your dividends are set to 5,000,000 ISK, then every share would be worth 10,000 ISK a week. if the corp bought some shares back, the dividends payout would remain unchanged, but each share would be worth more since the money is split off in to less shares. If the corp creates/sells more shares, the value of those shares drop as the dividends are split up more.

CEOs could also have the opportunity to determine if the corp is publicly or privately traded. If public, shares can be sold/transferred to people and other corporations outside the corp. If private shares can only be traded to people inside the corp or the corp itself. If you own shares as a member of a privately traded corp, those shares are forfeited to the corp upon your exit with no compensation.

Changing the dividends billing amount and changing from private/public trade would require a vote (and remember votes function by the number of shareholders) Additionally, corps can not return their corp to privately traded status unless all shares are owned by the corp.

Shares could be directly contracted like any other assets, but have no mass or cargo space, so the transfer would be instantaneous.

Failing to have enough ISK in the main corp wallet to pay dividends immediately impounds all corporate assets and offices, and prevents all non-deposit corp transactions. As well, if your corp is effectively "in the red" the CEO and all directors can not step down and must remain with the corp until the debt is cleared.

Since the shares now have a real ISK value that can't be gamed because it it built in to the system, it could function as the backbone of a working public investment system, used more effecitvely for payroll purposes, and be much more resistant to investment scams due to built in ISK value clearly displayed in all shares.

The overall use of shares would remain unchanged for any corporation who chooses not to pay dividends, but it would effectively allow corps to make an attempt at public investment or private granular profit sharing.

In this instance you could more easily collect rent as well, by simply requiring your renting corps to set public trade and transfer a corresponding number of shares at an agreed upon value to the alliance's holding corp. The bill would be paid automatically, and the system would, by its very nature, immediately lock down their assets should the fail to make payments while allowing them to internally determine who and how much gets donated to the corp bank or how much they need to adjust their taxes to make that bill.

It's not a pool, it's a bill. A recurring bill that the corp has to pay each week. Because people buying shares are ALSO getting votes, it requires a vote to change that bill. That doesn't mean you can't set up a scam, but it does mean that potential investors have a risk limiting factor. They know how many shares the corp owns, how many shares are owned by other investors.

If you choose to invest heavily in shares for a corp that owns its own majority for voting, that's on you. Investing, after all, is a trust based relationship.

It's also why I wouldn't reccommend such a system be made mandatory, but in stead absolutely optional. The entire purpose of dividends is, like real life, to scrounge up capital by selling shares for a promise of future dividends. Shares don't exist to make the corp money directly in this system or reality. They exist because you can upfront sell off small pieces of the company as a promise of long term return over time, or pay employees witch stock options rather than direct money.

The value of shares in this system, like reality, is potentially volitile. You'd likely only be willing to buy public shares if you had reason to believe that they would retain their value in terms of dividends, of if you could upsell them later to someone else. Playing such a market, like any market, is risky and requires research. You usually aren't selling those shares every day though. Generally you sell them when your corp needs the funds, and they exist in the wild. From there, depending on the amount of shares avaliable, people are trading them around based on their value.

Ideally you don't sell a 10k share for 10k, you'd sell a 10k share for a million, or five million, or whatever, as the entire reason you're selling shares in the first place (or using them as payment for employees/trade deals in place of liquid ISK) is to get or save a large sum of immediate cash based on your projected ability to absorb a long term dividends payout. Whether you intend to do that, or have the ability is, like real world markets, uncertain. It's up to you to convince the people you're selling the shares to that it's worth the risk. What you DO know as an investor, however, is that you can reliably expect that 10k to hit your wallet every week, and if its value changes you always have the option to just dump it. You also know that if you buy a LOT of shares you have a potential controlling vote in whether or not new shares can be created, or dividends can be adjusted, that would lower the value of those shares.

Usually if a publicly traded entity does well, their first instinct is to buy back all their shares. The same is true here. If you get to a point where you want to grab back majority control of your company so you can tank the dividends payout, thus crashing your stock and enticing people to sell it back to you before the vote ends that's a very natural thing. However, if you sold enough shares that the market, rather than your corp owns the majority of the company... well you may not have that option. I don't see that happenning quite as much in EVE, but then again that's why sing shares in this manner is completely optional.

You're not scamming youself out of money, you're putting aside a portion of your corp's income to pay out people over a long time scale that gave you start up capital in exchange for a portion of those profits. Whether people want to invest in your shares, and whether you actually intend to make good on that long term investment is all about public perception of your corp. Obviously if you gain a rep for scamming people with investment schemes, or are a complete unknown, people are going to be not all that likely to invest in you.

Overall it closely mirrors the way real markets work, but unlike real markets, there are no antitrust laws in EVE, so it's going to be a much riskier market. Your goal as an investor is to make more money in the long term than you spend on the shares, either through dividends or by reselling the share to someone else. If you think you can do that, you buy the shares. If you don't think you can do that, you don't.

I can think of several corps I would invest in if I could get a good price on the stocks. Several smaller industrial corps, service related entities like red frog, etc. They're entities I'd love to own a piece of that I'm fairly sure aren't going to cut and run, with a reliable income profile that could support stock sales for a reasonable amount of time before they'd feel compelled to buy back the shares.

Additionally, I'd love to have it for private trade shares in my own corp, as it would seriously cut down the amount of time I have to spend processing my industrial payroll.