Market Discussions

Alliances die because of lack of money. So they would borrow.

Current corporate mechanics are broken. Corporations are useless. Shares are useless. It may not seem important to you but let me assure you that you had not had enough experience playing this game to think that all is swell.

There is no reason to join a corporation, and there is no way to hire anybody. There is no reason for people to come together other than novelty of the game, and that wears out after you have to hold your space for a while or deal with little dictator ceo or don't have time.

With proper financial innovation you could reshape the whole game. I guess you don't see it.

What I am talking about is that Eve is a simulation of civilization, and we are sort of in dark ages stage in civilization development. Yes you can be Machiavelian and this could be your nadir but it could be so much better if we had stock and bond markets in place. That would upset the status quo and unseat inefficient alliances and CEOs so I am sure that there would be pushback from celebrities of this game. But this is why people eventually quit because they cant be arsed to trust any more.

If you had banking in game that would help the game.

Oh, good god almighty... not this asshattery ahhhhhhhhh-gain.

Absolutely.

In the ideal case both corp and non-corp groups will have the essential external infrastructure in place for themselves and this will make a great many corp and in-game features redundant. But I fully endorse CCP taking steps to lower the barriers to entry for newer players striking out with their own corp. Because CCP provides basic voice, forums, bulletin systems, messaging systems and a whole lot of other stuff that many corps are going to need, you don't neccessary have to lay on all that stuff yourself. Sure, the CCP implementations are all pretty rough, but in my eyes that's not an entirely bad thing. It means that a newer player can put together a corp and function to a reasonable degree from the outset while more developed organisations can put time, effort and money into providing better infrastructure that gives them an edge.

I've been involved with corps and alliances of all scales and I've seen extremes of how well and how badly organisation, leadership and infrastructure can be while still having a functioning and highly enjoyable group to play with. I don't claim or believe that any of this stuff is a must have or impossible to work around. But I am of the view (and CCP on a good day seems to share this view) that we need a broad selection of functional tools that allow us to do whatever it is we want to do and we shouldn't limit that by trying to decide in advance where the end user is going to take those tools. I think it's all a really important part of the sandbox.

Also, on the specific subject of bulletins: I like the ability to hotlink bookmarks and stuff in it and I haven't found an equivalent external tool.


Well, they aren't actually that much like personal hangars. Sure corp theft is a possibility (and an important feature) but it doesn't remove the benefits of role restricted shared storage.

Just speaking from personal experience:

Sniggerdly's corp fuel hangars are a massive benefit to me, not just a quality of life improvement but something that allows us (PL as a whole) to achieve much of what we do.

Bring Me Sunshine simply wouldn't exist without corp hangars, it's entire purpose would be gutted by the lack of them.

The Dirty Rotten Scoundrels has had, at various times, a fairly extensive corp hangar infrastructure which was never stolen from (to my knowledge). That tells quite a story given that the corp is peopled entirely by pirates, scammers and thieves.

I could easily go on to give more examples of past corps I've been in where corp hangars have been a major positive feature.


Yeah, the same goes for wallets.


Yes, that part is very usefull and they aren't restricted to a limited group either.


Yes, but that's the pattern with what you've said here. You are dismissing stuff that you do not find personally useful.

The sandbox demands that many features are entirely useless to many players, but the existance of those features can allow some players to achieve great things that would be impossible without them.

..I for one think that a bank in Eve is a great idea!

Well you know it is like Wittgenstein's ruler. Either my idea is bad and you are a great judge of it or my idea is good and you are a terrible judge of it. You know anything is possible.

I would like to borrow all your isk against my corporation.

By the way, I do not know anything about your corporation. However, does your corporation benefit from any kind of synergies from a group of players or is your corporation de facto run on slave labor or inefficient?

If your corporation is a pvp corporation then clearly there is synergy from outnumbering people, although I always thought that if 8 people are looking for me and cannot kill me then I am winning because my corporation of 1 person is wasting less time than my enemy's corporation that is wasting 8 times as much time as me.

But let's say you go mining and you have like 8 members doing a mining op, which is completely unprofitable when compared to other possible activities, and then you have to do profit sharing which means that most productive players subsidize least productive players. How does that really give you an advantage in efficiency over my corporation of 1?

There's an additional and never mentioned factor.

An EvE bank cannot "print money", therefore the amount they could pay as interest is going to be capped to the revenue of:

Total capital
- unused capital
- immobilized capital
- reserve for customers withdrawals (there could be more "minuses" but I am so in a hurry I can't think).

This means that - as you said - a bank has great difficulty even just to pay an interest vaguely comparable to a collateralized (read: low interest) loan. This automatically makes the bank less competitive for retail users who are immediately enticed to just do their own loans.

A way to partly counter it is enabling fractional banking by being able to emit second order fiat money: be it bank "bonds" or whatever. If it was possible to gain enough prestige and trust, then the bank would suddenly stop being able to rely and invest on say just 60% of its capital but on 60% * 5+ and thus be able to compete and even beat the loans market.

However I know all of maybe 2 guys in EvE who could pull such a bank and have people trust in their own emitted securities.

TBH it's not even that difficult to implement, it's an extension to something I have done in the past, but I CBA to do it again.

Edit: yes I have left out an important co-factor that applies to EvE, I am sure BB will spot it immediately.

Pupils?

I could lend money to you. It depends on the terms. How much you are willing to pay, and how much your competition is willing to pay.

Listen I am just saying that there is a lot of idle isk sitting around, and the overall economy will benefit if this isk is deployed rather than sitting idly. But which corporation gets it depends on which corporation makes most sense. A corporation that makes a lot of sense could have virtually unlimited funding and conquer all of Eve. If your corporation is good and you are good at fighting then you could be backed up financially by people who have a lot of isk and who are not even members of your corp or aliance. I am not your enemy. I want to bet on you or someone like you provided that I think that you know what you are doing. However there is no mechanism in place to allow for this. This is my point. If Eve is simulation of real life then there should be this option.

If people like me get control of your POSs if you fail to pay out on debt then this would be an improvement to the game. Not so much that I would gain control, but that you would lose control and that would bother you.

On second thought, since there are already shares in the game, perhaps the easier way to proceed would be to make shares of various classes or forget shares and make it possible for corporations to issue bonds. If for example you could issue shares of class b, which are different from your existing shares, but which pay a mandatory dividend every month or week or whatever period of time, then you could sell such shares and get isk, provided that they were backed up by your POSs, I think. Or you could allow corporations to issue bonds, which would do basically the same thing as described before but may be harder to program.