Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The loan shark and the borrower agree on a loan amount, an interest rate, and a deadline for when it needs to be repaid. Corrupt Concord agents act as middle men and receive a small percentage of the interest rate. If the borrower fails to pay back the loan by the agreed upon date, the corrupt Concord agents give the loan shark a kill right on the borrower and turn a blind eye.

Of course players who are already KoS due to low sec status, those who live in low/null, and traders who never undock couldn't care less about a kill right against them. And people can create a char just to borrow money and biomass it afterwards. But these and similar scenarios need to be taken into account by the loan shark when deciding who to loan money to.

Don't know if this idea would actually work or not, but I figured I'd throw it out there.

That defeats the purpose, though, since you have to pay for a dec, or pay for the ships you lose in the suicide gank, or pay to hire others to do it for you. As a loan shark, you're trying to make money, not spend even more for not being repaid.

But you have already poked holes in your idea with the original post.
Fine, let's do a simple fun scenario:

I borrow x hundred million, because I'm not ambitious and don't want to be suspect. I transfer all of it to an alt, and fly for a month in t1 crapfit ships waiting to be popped, at which point all is forgiven? A fool and his/her isk...

Or is it that you want a perpetual kill right?

You essentially paid to kill me, and gotten the short end of the stick, with NPC assistance. Profit? Mine.
Your options now are to grief without concords blessing or pay others to do it, unless you just accept the losses and try loaning again.

Any way you look at it, you lose, and will never have any kind of protections or refunds. The idea as you have presented it will not work, all it does is give the loanshark in game paperwork and everyone else the joy taking the sharks isk.

Ed: the eddie Lambert ponzi scheme that ended with a 1 trillion isk rip off of some 4000(or so it is reported) players was never refunded to my knowledge. AFAIK CCP lets the playerbase get away with most financial scandals, saving rmt. It generates headlines and brings in sub's.

Actually, I was thinking about that and I don't know if it would be perpetual kill right or not. I'm kind of thinking it would be, but again I'm not sure.

And yes, you described a scenario that I pointed out in my original post. The loan shark would have to do his homework: is it a highsec player that regularly missions, hauls, rats, etc? If so, that's someone you would more likely loan to, since it would disrupt their gameplay if they didn't repay the loan.

You're right, though: they could just fly a crappy ship until you get tired of popping them. Then again, plenty of people follishly continue to do their regular activities -- missioning, mining, whatever -- even during a wardec.

It's also true that they may just abandon that character; but there are also people who illegally buy ISK, end up with a negative wallet, but continue to play on that char because they've invested so much time and energy into it, they don't want to give it up.

I realize this idea may not work. But it doesn't hurt to bring it up and get feedback. Maybe it'll spur some ideas and others will come up with better alternatives.

As far as the NPC portion of it, I brought that into it for two reasons: (1) CCP likes collecting taxes and fees on various things, so this would be another (albeit small) isk sink for them; and (2) it provides a back story of why loan sharks would be able to get kill rights on borrowers. The same way wardecs are allows (the wardec fee is a bribe to corrupt Concord officials to look the other way, if I'm not mistaken).

You don't have to do this all the time. Just make high-profile examples of certain people to set a precedent and create an aura of fear.

CODE does this pretty well in high-sec with its protection racket.
There is no way they can possibly kill ALL the high-sec miners and haulers who don't pay for "mining/hauling permits"... but they kill enough (at their expense) and make it high-profile enough that others are scared enough to actually pay (even though they realistically have no reason to).

Sometimes you have to spend a little extra to make something profitable.


edit: and again... you make it sound like "loan sharking" doesn't already happen. I can assure you... it does. In exactly the way I described (players hire other players to kill the defaulter repeatedly).

Fly a small, cheap ship
Make isk
Buy a bigger, better ship
Make more isk

Rinse, repeat.
-1 as this idea is not needed. Don't lend isk to people you don't know. Rather, give isk to people that need it so that they may get better and you can kill them later.

I dread the ccp fix this threads to be spammed after. You know, like we get with trade window and bounty. 2 things people would be best to avoid using in the first place to make life so much better, but don't. They use then whine here. Way too often lol.