EVE General Discussion

And that's what you NEED the tools for.
To replace some or most of the need for trust with server-enforced action.
Tools to limit the previously unlimited (in both scope and breadth) powers of a CEO (and for most practical purposes directors), tools that allow collaboration without allowing any single individual to screw it all up unchecked, and so on and so forth.
You could still scam and steal and whatnot even with some of those tools in proper use, but it should be quite a bit harder and/or require some considerable collusion.


For what, the stockmarket, the central bank or the tools ?
The stockmarket should be pretty obvious (sell stocks like you sell any other goods in a specialized market where only stocks are listed) and with no safeguards of any kind needed. Alongside the usual graph depicting stock trade price you would ALSO get a separate graph showing dividends paid for that particular stock.

The central bank... bleh. No, thanks.

The tools... oh, there it gets mighty complicated. And quite frankly, I don't think we have any hope of CCP making it work any time soon, a lot more different pressing matters exist.
Some of them are actually partially common (the needed tools with the other more pressing matters), like for instance the complete revamp of the corporate roles system.
Say, stuff like, being able to give internal value to various items and limiting the value any individual can take away per day/week/month from any particular corp hangar, for starters. And many more along those lines.

More to the concept. I would like to see items like Insurance, a banking and a stock market be put in place as in-game systems / tools where players can assume control of these within certain, CONCORD mandated rules. The rest should be left to the sandbox.

E.g. you should be able to purchase standard Insurance as it is currently. However, players should be able to provide a competitive quote with higher payouts, etc. depending on the requesting players' risk profile.

Players / corporations should be able to bid for a banking license which will have a set fee. To obtain that license they will need to maintain a certain level of security, etc. and operate within a framework of rules. They could charge interest on loans, have deposits, etc. and be able to invest in stocks of other corporations. This should be done in such a way that it does not entirely remove the ability to setup a scambank. (Sounds like spermbank, but sexier)

Stock market. Well. Oysters and all that.

A few problems:

While there is the corp wallet and hangars, corps don't really own anything nor do they produce any value — players do (if they like) and then (hopefully) donate that stuff to the corp. Therefore, simply determining the value of a corp is tricky, and determining changes in value is even trickier. Just because you have a whole bunch of BPOs and 1,000 corp members doesn't mean that you'll have 1,000 people (minus overhead and management) producing things and selling them and feeding that ISK back into the corp. No matter how much you own, a corp's actual production capacity is zero… because there is no way to enforce production from those corpies — they are corp members, not workers.

Connected to this, there are no auditing or reporting tools, so even if someone decides to calculate their corp value somehow (eg. simply adding up asset market value and wallet size) and even if you run a tight ship where everyone pitches in and adds value, there is no way for the market to determine whether that value is even remotely accurate. There is no central reporting institution that keeps track of who has how much of what so you can know (or speculate) on the changing fortunes of a corp. And even if there was, there would be the question of what should actually count: how much is a POS worth? How much is a CSAA worth? Or, worse, how much is a corp member worth?

And then there's the issue of having mechanics for ruining any of these calculations: how do you punish workers who are not delivering or who are skimming your proceeds? Firing them doesn't really do anything because they don't particularly need the job to eat… How do you punish people who take the money and run? Putting them in jail doesn't really work, and following the money to their “offshore bank account” (read: alt who's now living the high life) requires information that only hardly even the GMs have access to (and even if you find them, then what?). At no point along the line is there even the tiniest shred of institutionalised and enforced trust to be had, and without that, the whole thing becomes next to impossible.

…and that's just (some of) the problems of determining what the stock is actually controlling and how much it's worth — we haven't even gotten to the actual request of trading stocks and derivatives, which you can't really do without this immense institution underpinning it.

There's also the problem that any such institution would require a whole lot of work from the corps and their members; it would require pushing that side of the game much further in the “actual work” direction, and I somewhat doubt that people would want that. An opt-in/opt-out system would just create an “industry PvP switch”, and that's just as bad as a combat-PvP switch.

Central banks operating as lenders of last resort are the ones who engineered the entire economic crisis and are the reason our money is now worthless so go **** yourself. That said, I'd really like to see a stock ticker and stocks finally put in EVE properly. it would make the game more immersive though I'm not sure about having a GOON ticker going across the screen with 1000+ points to its name being very interesting.

Maybe we could have our own stock commentator like Jim Cramer? I vote Mittani, he's loud, obnoxious and doesn't know what he's talking about most of the time so I say he fits the job description perfectly.

Um...the NYSE uses computers to automate much of the process.

As for the failsafes, look at it this way. It's one thing to lose at a honest poker game, it's another to lose due to a stacked deck. The failsafes level the playing field allowing participants an honest start. Whether you make or lose money in the process thought is another matter.

So you basically want them to implement a stock exchange into the game? So a Corp would join the exchange and be able to put shares up for sale which investors would then buy right? And what exactly would the Corporations be spending this investment money on? Well since there is no real R&D in Eve there's really only one thing, buying and selling in the market.

Hmm 500 different Corporations all doing the same thing.. well this is stupid already, but wait! It gets dumber!

So lets say Investor #1 one wants to make some easy isk. He opens up the stock interface and finds a nice corp to invest it, one that sets itself apart from the rest(not!) They offer 1% payout of all profits so he decides to invest a cool million and sits back.

Now suddenly Corp #1 sees his wallet flashing. Opening it up, he's happy to see that he has a million free dollars to spend. He quickly triples the money using his wise marketing skills and is quite pleased. When Corp #1 does it's payouts, Investor #1 is very pleased to see that he now have 1,070,000 isk. Not bad, free money is free right?

500 corps all doing this and all is good in the world of eve. Everyone's making money, but what happens when the market dries up? Cheap items are getting rarer and rarer as you have 500 different Corporations all competing for it, so as a Corporation manager what do you do? The only way you can make money is to keep buying but there's nothing left to buy. You have investors you have to pay back, what do you do? Well that's easy! You just need to raise the average price of the items on the market! So with all that investment money, you just BUY ******* EVERYTHING! And raise the price. Simple right?

But wait. That's just one corp. You have 499 other's all wanting a piece of the pie too, so they follow suit. Now Corp #1 and all it's investors are happy because Corp #2 bought all of their goods, Corp #2 and it's investors are happy because Corp #3 bought all of their goods.. see where I'm going with this? What we now have is a galactic sized pyramid scheme. Eve is rampant with inflation, the only ones that can afford to buy anything are the super corps, all anyone can do to make money is to invest more money and CCP is forced to reset the economy. And why?

Because of one stupid idea.

You see, in the real world you have research and development, which is what most investment money goes to. Eve doesn't have that kind of diversity. All the money goes to the same place. Buying and selling, the one place it can go, there is no money sink and that's just bound to fail. I hope you can see now why this is a bad idea. Besides all that, the profit margin after the first month would be so low it wouldn't even be worth the risk of investing. There's just not enough diversity for this to work.


Sorry for the late reply, I had to type all of this out twice as eves forums for whatever reason decided to screw with me.

Without a functional regulatory body, severe limits on biomassing alts, and even more restrictions on what trial accounts can / cannot do, there's no way that a stock market can work in EVE. Plus the issue of not being able to buy back shares (or claw them back from the owners via civil suits) causes other interesting problems.

Even with limits (not being able to biomass an alt that holds shares / open contracts / negative sec status / etc.) and not allowing trial account alts to participate in any market like that - any transaction worth more then the cost of a PLEX would still be easily scammed. (Create trial alt, invest PLEX to turn into full account - get into stock market, scam enough to pay for original PLEX + profit, send money to main, let alt account expire.)

But there already is the CONCORD central bank.

Here's how to make a withdrawal.

Get a ship, look up it's ship bonusses. Now do the opposite. Shield tank an abaddon, that sort of thing.
Click on your Journal, go to Incusrions Global Reports.
Travel in your abomination to that system.

x up in the WoW channel.

MAKE UNLIMITED WITHDRAWALS FROM THE BANCO DE CONCORDE.

Problem poor people?

Sure it can work, even in the land of trust no one. What it would need is good exposure of data. Such as, Total Capitalization, Shares Outstanding, Dividend History, Price History, the names and trade activity (of that equity) of anyone who has at least 5% of the outstanding shares, etc.

Scams will stand out pretty clearly with this sort of information. Also, initial offers would tend to be low. It is the secondary market that would add to the share prices, and then only if dividends were being paid or some large Eve event/change had an influence on the corp in question.

Scams would take a lot of time to develop, which is no different than the real world or the other big scams that have happened in Eve.

We also need a bond market, but that's a dif can of worms ...

Ummm no.

Any business can be operated in such a way that it fails so a selected party profits while investors lose.

In the real world we call this fraud. And we spend billions of dollars in a never ending fight against it in order to keep our stock markets viable.

In EVE we call this expected behavior.
There are NO controls and never can be.

Reputation doesnt matter in EVE and neither there is no legal system - there can be no stock market.