Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So when I made my first step into corporate management I was fascinated by the idea of having SHARES! That you could sell them to raise capital, buy shares of other corps, and use them to spread the wealth in your own corp.

It was my first time ever being a corp leader, prior to that I had done many things with many toons, and now I've become hardened and cynical like most eve CEOs end up, but I still have a soft spot for the poor broken shares system, so I think we should try and make them work in this crazy messed up universe of EVE...

The way I see it the Shares system has 2 major issues that need to be resolved:
1 - there needs to be a way to set a value to the shares
2 - there needs to be a place to sell and buy shares (a stock market of sorts)

1 - How do we assign a value to a corporation in EVE?
An EVE corp is many things; a social group, a team of workers, and a unit devised to establish more and more profit for the individual players. How do you assign value to a corp? An Audit.

Lets say "Superduper funtime inc" wants to sell itself publicly to raise isk to buy some blueprints cause they wanna get into the building game, Superduper Funtime Inc goes to the mysterious "Stock Market" tab that exists for this scenario and list that they want to sell 490 of their 1000 shares. When they click the button that says "audit value" several hamsters begin crunching numbers. The numbers are the combined total assets of the CEO and the corporation itself.

Once the hamsters are done (Since hamsters are quite good at math I suppose this will take no longer than loading up a large can) a baseline value is crapped out next to the shares and a "per share" rate is established. Our intrepid CEO can now list his shares on the market for whatever he thinks people will pay for them, but everyone can see the "actual isk value" of the corporation. This is where "The investors" come in, the CEO has the option of offering these shares with a monthly dividend to try and snag higher prices on their shares, a corporations longevity will help establish more reliable groups, and therefore may earn higher isk totals. A final point a CEO might make to court potential buyers is putting forward a "plan of action" talking about how they want to buy mining ships or this is funding a new IHUB or Freighter, POCOs, WH expansion, you name it.

Now shelling out this information has its risks and its rewards; reward being someone might help finance you 4 billion isk purchase of some blueprints, risk being someone might see that you are trying to buy blueprints, wait until you've got them bought, and pounce on your with wardecs.

The system also gives investors a risk-reward program: if the corporation flourishes, you get dividends, you can sell your shares for profit, and you, in general, have helped something grow. If the corporation is run into the ground or the CEO takes the money and runs, you're out your ISK. Like all aspects of eve, everyone takes a risk, but now there's a system to help you risk SMARTER.

The linchpin of this is if a corp decides to issue a dividend, they need to be BOUND to that as long as the shares are issued.

2 - The Stockmarket
Now here comes that mysterious stockmarket I spoke of above,

The stockmarket would be a new window or added to the traditional market window and have 2 tabs: Sell and Buy. Selling would be simple; it would have the list a shares you own, their quantity, and what you'd want to sell them for, and if you wanted the shares to be public, private, to your corp, or to your alliance, similar to a contract. If you are selling them as a corp you would list if you're going to offer a regular dividend and what that dividend would be. Then click submit. The shares are immediately sent to the market for sale.

The buy tab would look similar to a market feed, except for locations it would have corp tickers:
Quantity: Price: Corporation: Dividend: Seller:
490 Shares 1,000,000 isk Superduper funtime inc. 1.5% Corporation
221 Shares 750,000 isk Franks Mining Inc. 2.0% Investor

And so on and so forth. Investors can click on the item, click "buy" and purchase shares, and the isk goes right into the corporate wallet of the seller.


This is a random idea I've had forever and I am fairly certain it would need significant work, but we basically have this broken feature sitting around that we could use! So... lets use it!

CCP really needs to change the name of shares to stop this kind of post

I don't know if I agree with the above statement

Corporations need a lot of love. Then again the whole group activities in EVE need a ton of attention.
Shares are the least of it.
With the new structures - some change will have to happen.

But when it comes to corporations change needs to happen on
- declaring what purpose the corp has - not every corp should be like Samsung, making anything and everything.
Each point of the corp should cost some fee for start up. You can add/remove as needed with a cool down.
- shares should be split - member shares for voting and investment shares.
- roles and management need a good look and clearified on purpose.
- allow joint operations in industrial production
- and many more little things that deal with other parts of the game like markets and fitting.

Fleets need a good change to them as well. Maybe reduce their size, and figure out a way for fleets to create armadas (where two or more fleets can join together - ether merge numbers or allow easier joint function. I.e. Fleet A is combat/logi fleet B is e-war and bombers.

Now that doc is mostly out of the way. CCP does need to step up their game for "polishing" other game mechanics. Not so much in adding totally new features.

to address one point,

Lets go with the original summary ida of the OP.

If the the said audit determines your shares are valued at X.
Then when you go to put some on market, that minmum value should automatically deduct the cash from corp funds.
Holding it in escrow like a reverse of the margin trading skill. So a default on the corporations side for what ever reason, an investor can simply sell their shares back to the general market at that price value.

Otherwise, my corp uses the shares system, we pay out dividends every month. Those dividends are beholden upon my corp to produce and sell things, discover clients and customers....literally the fun for the officers is pretending to actually run a business, wierd roleplay i know, but it works for us and we are involved in the game in many different ways.

Getting rid of the shares system, would reduce us to only being able to get investors by some long dragged out tit for tat loan collateral system, so far our current line of investors seem to enjoy our dividend payouts.

Putting shares up for sale wouldn't raise a lot of cash unless the corporation had a name already.

Nobody is going to invest in a noname corp for more than a few million, even with a full API key from one of those private chat recruitment investor sitdowns.