Market Discussions

Myself? No, I see no need for NPC corps to pay dividends at all. Others have a different view. As for any income that could come from this, it would be players buying and selling shares, which is no different than players buying and selling trit.




More player driven content, more tools for players, more facets, more layers to the economy. The sooner we can do away with NPCs the better. Removal of NPC influence and control has been an ongoing process in Eve, it will continue by all indications.



Have to disagree with you here. There are far too many resources in Eve that are functionally unlimited, we don't need more. Geographic Property (offices, moons, planets, solar systems) are not unlimited. Fighting over geographical space, and access to resources in those spaces, is what makes the Eve economy work.

By commoditizing office space, and allowing players to fight over it, in the markets, adds more Eve to Eve.

As for the ISK sink, this idea still has some rent, and the new taxes and fees consumed by the stock activity will mitigate that some what. To what degree would be a pure guess on my part, I can only say it would exist.

Do you have any idea how much your coallition makes on office rental? People in high-sec made nothing from office rental. That source of income is presently the exclusive domain of nullsec monopolies.

Granted, they built the stations... but if players were allowed to build offices (which do NOT need to be cheap to build) then you could build the same effect in with the exception that you could float office rental on an open market instead of reserving it for monopolies, as it is now.

You're right to point out that there is a need to compensate for the potential of a lost isk sink but I'm convinced that this problem could be tackled.

The 'magic hand' is probably an algorithm which comes into effect at downtime (?weekly ? daily). If there are no/few free offices at a station the rental fee goes up, and keeps going up on a weekly basis till offices get free. I read about this a while ago where someone had explained it much better, thus apologies for not doing justice to the explanation.

At the risk of being off topic: I love the way MD discusses and proposes these ideas, when we know that CCP will not even consider any market related changes till the 2017 winter expansion.

Edit: Observation of office rental costs at various stations, with (about) the same occupancy history, suggests that the overall economic activity at a station may relate positively to rent, and thus may be part of the algorithm.

New features are not always created to solve an existing problem. But if you must have a reason, this feature will add another step in the long quest of removing NPC influences and controls. More sand in the sand box.

The reason this is not a good idea is because that basically gives the npc assets to the players completely and thus removes the difference between null being truly player owned and hisec being npc owned.

With a shares based system you have many benefits, most have already been mentioned, like better price finding.

Why its a relevant feature is that it introduce the concept of shares, and puts a controlling stake in real estate with the players.

You cant own the office, but since the number of shares is in practice limited, when you buy into a share position you have the equivalent of ownership. When you buy in at 100.000 isk for an office and the shares goes up so the next person renting will need 200.000 isk, you can now sell that share on market at the increased price. If no players want to sell their shares and the theoretical point where no shares are available for sale on stock exchange that station and that npc corp can not be accessed anymore by new renters. This is highly unlikely, since if the price is high enough there would always be someone willing to sell.

The dividends aspect is important, because this system would not act like ceiling/floor mechanics to the economy, but more like walls of a sphere, and the isk remains bouncing between players. The 50% suggested sink part, would eventually be considerably higher than current sink, because of the increased dynamic cycle speed of the isk.

As mentioned in thsi thread the current npc services are limited by being pseudo-communistic in nature. There have been many of these around, and they have been removed as the playerbase grew to support the mechanics. Getting the remaining ones slowly handed to p2p activity will make the game and its economy even more resillient and more exciting to take part in..

For any player that dont see an interest in shares investment and speculating in real estate they are free to just pay exactly like things are now. What he wont know and care about is that his isk gets recycled into the system to the hands of players that do care.

This might seem like an AFK income, but in reality it is anything but. The needed work in calculation and market and demographics analysis alone makes up for the "afk" looking aspect. Also with something like this a lot better tweaking of the economy would become possible for ccp, since they would get a sort of micro-plex knob they could turn, and by adding backstory aspects these changes would make sense. Also a whole RP speculative game could develop, and with FW and Null activity etc some truly deep consequence game content would be the result.

I like the idea of real estate and I like the idea of NPC corp shares, but I am not sure if they should be connected like this and I agree with much of the criticism in this thread.

I would like to raise another problem: The ISK flow. Today ISK is leaving the game through office rent but as the proposal call for only a nominal rent after the share requirement have been met, this ISK sink will be much smaller than it used to be. Add in the proposed interest from the shares and you'll have an net inflow of ISK.

I don't know how big an ISK sink office rent is and how much it would influence the economy, but it will create at least some inflation.

Right. My bad. However, your proposal still remove the office rent ISK sink, as the money is now recycled as dividend instead of being ejected from the game. It can be addressed by emissions or by other means by CCP, but they would have to be very careful (if the office rent is in fact a major ISK sink).

I still don't think that combining offices and shares are a good idea. A counter proposal would be to 1). Make offices auctionable and 2). Create time-limited (*) shares in NPC corps without any (direct) links between the two. This will increase the ISK sink problem, though.

*) Time-limited shares => You don't "buy" a share. You rent a share for maybe a month or a year before it goes back into the pool.

It is a valid point, but to what degree things would change we simply have no way of knowing with much accuracy. Taxes and fees collected due to new activity generated by the shares would likely not match current rental fees. It takes 50 trillion of market activity, with perfect standings and skills, to match the sink created by rental fees for Jita alone, assuming I did the math right.

Edit: Think I forgot taxes on the sell transaction side there, so 50 would be closer to 25 ... I think. Early morning and math do not mix

What would be the price of these shares, high enough to generate enough of a sink to meet the rental fees? I have no way to know, no one does until the market discovers the price.

Net Gain in ISK, to the economy on a monthly basis. is 20 to 30 trillion, as shown in the recent FanFest Econ presentation. I'm going to guess that a 3-5 trillion upward change, assuming a quite generous number placed on rental fees, isn't going to change the inflation picture too much.

I would still like to point out that the rental isk sink would still be very active in a system like the one mentioned.

I dont think your number crunching is correct Adunh. Currently the rent in Jita 4-4 is between 2-3b per month, and there are 24 in each station. That only sums up to 50b?

With the shares based system this sink would eventually grow to be the same, but not in Jita 4-4, but as a global sum. This would be from the general price finding sensitivity and the buying of npc shares available. When players buy shares from each other and thus increase the value. It is also vital to consider that when trading shares there would ofc still be broker fees and tax, just like trading any other type of product. This alone would grow into a considerable isk sink.

However ideally in a near future these income/profits of npcs should also go into the shares system. Also expenditures and losses would potentially be calculated in the npc dynamic budgets. So the winning FW or the most active npc mission activity would be possible to integrate into this type of feature. This is ofc quite far into the future, because first the npc shares system would need to prove itself, as a viable game mechanic.

Also worth noting that the concept of starbase charters being made part of null SOV mechanics would be a related topic.
So basically shares and charters would be represented and utilized in very similar ways for npc and player null entities.

The charters would be needed to run POS in SOV space, just like in empire.

The shares of player corps would be tradable on the exchange just like npc shares, and with a similar option to rental of office space in null. So you could set standing limit, shares minimum limit, and prices on rental, and ofc discounts etc. The important thing would be that stations are ofc corp managed and corp must be part of the Alliance SOV holder, but launching a station on behalf of individuals should really be considered an option, just like launching POS and custom office should be allowed on personal level, thus the asset would follow the person from corp to corp and alliance to alliance.

So the charters are created by Alliances and used in "fuel" for POS, and Stations. They would be a BPO that would only have isk cost and maybe some commodity like reports to produce. Thus being a minor isk sink.

Also the Shares would be corp level Unique BPO and the total global number in existance would always show in corp info, with relevant NAV estimate and an entry for links to recent financial reports (player generated).

Just to mention a few of the resulting options when these things get momentum..

Was merely pointing out where things might trend.

Also Seagull did say we should/might be getting player billing in a not too far future. Considering how minor a feature this is code-wise, and how much can and will develop from it, I think we will have a good year with many pleasant surprises..