Market Discussions

Yes, you need to send me a 2b isk security deposit, then you can open your trading account on New Eden's premiere stock exchange.

No and even when it was done no CEO in his right mind handed out shares of his actual corp. Instead, alt corps were created for share distribution which left investors with no leverage at all.

inb4 Block

(general problem is that if you perform worse than a fixed-rate bond people will hate and if you perform better you will hate yourself. share offerings can be useful for rep grinding and can be legitimately justified if your business does not depend much on your personal effort.)

There is also the issue of people becoming inactive. Imagine half your corp shares stuck in limbo. Any dividend paid out using shares will disappear into limbo as well.

Why does there need to be a mechanic for accountability? Investors should do due diligence. Why would an investment be guaranteed a return?

You think this would be a deterrent?

Zappity, due diligence is a term applied to double checking the accounting of a company that is being taken over. The objective is to make sure that what the company reported about it's finances is the truth (or close enough).

What I think you mean is that the responsibility for not being scammed should be put onto the buyer of the bond and conversely that if the buyer gets scammed that it is somehow their own fault and they should just suck it up.

I think in a game like EVE online where scamming is commonplace and completely free of consequences that if you DIDN'T implement some way to deter potential issuers of bonds from scamming investors that issuers of bonds would soon begin to see the bond market as a mechanism for taking proveribial isk flavoured candy from idiot investor babies.

I do believe that the idea of a bond market has a lot of potential and once again, I see a big need. When I was running my first corp in EVE I would have LOVED to have been able to to borrow 10 bil isk to get things like a corp rorqual, a freighter, some BPO's and a POS and then amortize that loan over a 12 month period while we jump started our industry arm.

There is a big need. There are a lot of people ready to invest .... but without a mechnism to put the pain for scamming on the scammer the conditions for making such an idea float simply aren't there. Investors would be crazy to invest if the attitude is that they have to eat the sour apple whenever someone decides that they don't want to pay back their loan.

As for putting the pain on.... You could imagine a scenario where the shareholders of a corp are held personally responsible. For example, if the corp wallet is empty when it's time for a payment a "CONCORD COLLECTIONS AGENCY" could be scripted to start deleting things out of corp hangars, then deleting assets in space and then emptying the wallets of shareholders and then deleting shareholder assets until the amount in arears has been met based on "base value" and the payment can be made.

The problem you encounter, however, is that scammers will simply transfer all assets to an alt and biomass. In real life, you can't do that (at least not without more severe and permanent consequences to your person).

Another possible scenario is to script a "CONCORD INVESTMENT INSURANCE AGENCY" that checks that bonds can only be issued by a corp in an alliance with SOV and sufficient funds in the holding to act as benefactors for the loan. This would requrie an alliance exectutive to underwrite the loan by clicking on something at which time the bond is created and the corp can get it's money from investors. In this case a default would go not to the corp but to the alliance that underwrote the loan. In that case, I would be comfortable with a certain degree of "caveat emptor" for investors because there would be consequences. If the alliance couldn't cover a defaulted loan then they will also fail to make their SOV payments, which would become hysterical enough that the investor probably wouldn't feel too bad about losing their money.

So while this would create a slightly safer climate for investors it wouldn't really open up the bond markets to the small fish, which is where the biggest need really is... but at least it would be a start.

You'd have to have people on the "supply" side who were just as interested, which is (I feel) probably just as much of a niche as people interested in investing in it and playing stock trader.

I also don't really see where you're coming from with the idea of "take down alliances overnight" and such. If someone crashes a company's stock IRL, well, they already have the money from their original offering. It might hurt their ability to do further offerings but that's about it. And if it were possible to do that it would remain a tiny niche feature because no one would want to use it.

Functioning shares and stocks "as we know them in RL" are not going to happen because of EvE's philosophy.


EvE is made to keep "superior gods" / "big cops" / jail etc away from players (Concord being somewhat a tangential exception, as they still don't prevent crimes, just revenge them), in order to foster player interactions.

This has the effect to force players into having to trust into each other and we know it often does not end well...


Imagine CCP implemented *1* enforced contract. That'd be equivalent to injecting a virus, because once *1* enforceable something exists, they'd use it to control other players behaviors even for things not tied to it.

I.e. an enforced repayment bond would create all sorts of obligations because one party would impose the other the bond for everything and use it as big collateral and / or big gun at their head.

So no, it's not going to happen.

Character sales are enforceable. Yet eve hasn't collapsed.

A deterrent for some, certainly not all. Making that judgement would be on you, the investor. Mega 0.0 alliance that already has 10 wars against it ... doubt they'd care one way or the other. Billy Bob Noob and his 10 buddies from the Tuna Cannery down the road, yeah, they'd probably not like their play time interrupted by being blown to bits every time they undocked.

As for Concord, no, keep NPCs out of it. They do too much as it is.


Edit:

I'll see if I can dig up that old thread for ya, some of these same arguments were made, and some of them by me. I was convinced, by others, that players need to be the ones that manage things as much as possible.


there it is -> http://eve-search.com/thread/1524146-0/page/1

Plain NO..

We need player billings and public standings. Consequences in pvp should alway be pvp only. As mentioned above you risk your money at your own peril. npc/ccp should not protect your investments in any way at all.

If someone defaults or goes bankrupt its up to each investor to decide what consequences he wants to create.

This would go for unpaids bills (rentals etc) and for bonds or shares, and you would need to decide on allaince, corp or personal levels. The important feature we are missing is a public standing option, so we can see if someone is already in bad standing from someone else publically.

Funny how we got bounties that cant be cleared, regardless of how high our security status is, and ccp considers that working as intended, but we still have no public standing system that could actually be used as a vital metagame tool... /facepalm..