Player Features and Ideas Discussion

In a time when shares in EVE can be traded among players on some sort of stock exchange (I think CCP should get to work on this ASAP, its a cool feature) there are a few problems as far as i can tell. For example players who quit EVE would have shares that are paying out dividends. This is a problem because, well, the money is going into a black hole.

A solution to this "problem" could be that when dividends are paid out players would have to claim them. But there would have to be a timer on this claim. I was thinking what would be fair, but instead ended up thinking why dont the CEO set up the timer when he makes the dividend?

So when you payout the dividend, you also chose the time that people have to claim it. All the money gets reserved, and if there is any left over because people havent claimed it, it gets returned to the corp. This is useful for corps who want to do weekly or monthly or perhaps even daily dividends. It also gives corps an idea of how many shares are "active" and wether or not to create more etc. Its hard to say which timer people will prefer and it will be nice for players to have some flexibility here to experiment with.

The problem is there is no SEC in New Eden. There is absolutely nothing to prevent an unscrupulous CEO from pocketing your money - same as the scammers in Jita local. CCP Quant has floated the idea of game mechanics to support collateralized loans but it's unlikely we'll see any financial instruments in game unless they are secured by collateral held in escrow.

You are free to sell shares in your corporation or buy shares in someone elses but it's a trust based transaction.

Why is that a problem? Players would not buy shares unless they trusted the company. And those who buy shares without doing due diligence deserve to get rekt?



Depends on what you mean by free. At the moment buying and selling shares is poorly supported by game mechanics. The functionality to do it is very crude. I think there should be a stock exchange that made it easy for players to list, buy and sell shares. It could work just like the market browser, it has just the right amount of info/functionality. Volume, historic price and even a chart for visual representation of price movement etc.






Just because you dont like something does not mean its a bad idea. Besides, i am giving suggestions for how the game could be made more interesting for me. Perhaps you should do the same instead of complain? Do you understand what im saying? Where is your suggestion for how to make the game better? (Ddont post it here. its a rhetorical question.)

Because stock exchange needs modern world's law and regulation system to operate but EVE, in the middle age of space, has literally no laws. If you are really interested, take a look at the listing company manual at New York Stock Exchange and think about how to implement those rules in the game. They are prohibitively complicated for most players. In fact, they will need an army of lawyers and accountants to do that in real world.

The problem with "it's ok, nobody will buy shares of untrustworthy companies" is that 99.99999999999999999999% of companies in EVE are untrustworthy. Either they're running a scam from the beginning, or they'll take the money and run as soon as it becomes too tempting. So you're talking about spending development time on a feature that, like the current share system, will hardly ever be used.

First i must say.....wow manus something from you i do not entirely despise.

2nd.

Only way for a real stock exchange to work in my opinion is for the Dev's to create some sort of in game thing.
Maybe something along the lines of

1.) A corp's CEO may place up to 50% of total corp shares into some sort of NPC escrow thing.
2.) A re-work of how Corp taxes operate.
3.) Then allow for Corp Taxes to be accumulated into this escrow thing (as in half the taxes obviously)
3a.) mission reward/bounty taxes
3b.) corp tax applied to any contracts that places ISK in any corp wallet
3c.) corp tax applied to any of the structure fees that places ISK in a corp wallet.
4.) The shares placed in this escrow thing do not allow for corp voting, only for receiving dividends.
5.) have it setup that other players can see these shares and corps in some sort of list.
6.) must create a ranking system based on shares worth, based on amount of income(taxes) going into these shares, basically showing corporate activity fro players to judge whether or not to invest.
7.) investment funds of purchasing said shares go directly into a main corp wallet
8.) obviously the investment cost per share must be higher than any said dividend per share is currently paying out.

just some thoughts, but even following a semblance of what i said would probably be a monumental task.....and i am sure take some dev's away from other projects. You are not asking for something simple here.

You don't need an SEC. The SEC was founded in 1934, whereas the NYSE was founded in 1817.

What is needed is a way to enforce contracts between parties. For example, suppose I start a company. Suppose I am going to build a given tech 2 items, lets say 425mm Railgun IIs. I put up say, 5 billion of my own ISK and issue shares for say, annother 10 billion. Then I transfer all ISK to my character's wallet and shut down the corporation.

How do you get your ISK back?

You don't.

Trust is very, very important in an economy. As the example above shows, without some mechanism to enforce legal contracts then it all boils down to trust. And what is the basic motto in EVE aside from "Don't fly something you can't afford to lose"? "Trust no one." So even though the eve economy grows and is pretty impressive it is a pale comparison to what it would be like if there was such a legal structure in the game.

Further, it is not something players can create. The reasons are several, IMO. First, we are essentially immortal. You can pod me every day for a month, but it won't do anything to get your ISK back. Second, even if you could make my life with that character rather uncomfortable, I could extract all my SP, sell them or not, create a new character, transfer everything over to him, then biomass my embezzler. Inject the SP (yes, I'd lose some of the SP) and ta-da now I have a new character untainted by his previous embezzlement.

For players to create this death would have to be more meaningful...as in when you die, brand new character time with just starting SP. Also, all your stuff...gone. And no creating a new character while the current one is alive. You think players are risk averse now....with these changes the game would probably look very, very different.

In short, why don't we have a stock market? The same reason all attempts to start a bank end in that bank being nothing more than a giant scam.

With the new PLEX mechanism, is it not easier to allocate collateral for any high stakes trade?

If a company that owns shares places those in a prospectus, the counter offer would be in the form of PLEX as escrow. Any misdeed, and the PLEX is forfeit.

I believe the last time I saw someone from CCP respond to a question like this the answer was basically that Eve by nature doesn't have any of the mechanisms of enforcement that make a real life stock market work. The few times players have tried to set up something like this on any kind of scale it's taken anywhere between weeks and months before someone got greedy and ran off with the piggy bank.

IMO CCP just sees no reason to invest development time on something that would pretty much literally only be used for scams.

Merin's point there is no mechanism for this. With hauling contracts there is a built in mechanism. For lending there is not. I posted a link on how to do this you'd need to modify the current contract mechanics to allow for something like this.

As it stands right now, any attempt to use PLEX in this way will just means somebody is getting scammed.