EVE New Citizens Q&A

Afternoon all.

I have just started my very first corp for myself.

Question being, what do shares in eve do?

Should i allocate them all to me as the founder, or divvy them out as rewards?

What powers do shares give you, and how do you make money off them?

Cheers lads.

In the situation you have described shares are useless. I would advise you to transfer them all to your main character because they can be used to force the replacement of the current CEO, so you need to keep control of them when other players join the corporation. Not going to happen? Do it anyway, you might change your mind in a year or two and forget that you have left the shares sitting in the corporation wallet where any director can pick them up.

I think CCP intended shares to form another mini game within Eve that mimic'd RL stock trading. However, they needed to do more than just bung the option to create shares in the corporation and a corporation voting functionality to make that happen. The simple fact is that there is just too many ways to make isk in this game that CEOs and Directors never have to jepardise control of their corporation because they need the money. Corporations do not have to audit themselves and provide a yearly report - enforceable in game for both accuracy and timeliness. There isn't actually a way to safely trade shares in game either. You are reliant on one player handing the shares over and the other making a player donation to transfer the money in a seperate transaction. There is no stock market. You can't put them on the normal market and you can't put them in a contract. Finally there are no real tangible assets to base the stock price on. Even large 0.0 Sov holding corporations can be swept away and fail cascade. The real value of any corporation is in the players within it's ranks. It is like trying to value a RL fruit packing company who's only asset is 1000 Illegal Immigrants that it employs at one quarter minimum wage. Let's say it made a £1M profit last year, it would be a bargain if you could buy all the shares for £1M - you'd get all your money back in a year right? Oh and you need to send the money to this bank account ### and once the cheque has cleared I'll send the shares out to you.

The fact is shares in Eve corporations have never been considered tradable assets worth significant amounts of Isk. A few corporations do spread them around a few trusted members for the purpose to replacing the CEO in the event that he goes /afk unexpectantly. Some multi player startups will spread the shares out at creation time. Some High Sec Merc/Griefing corps use shares to allow members a voice in voting for wardecs. Most corps have 100% of them sitting in the CEO wallet gathering dust.

I think it could be in interesting and valuable mini game, but CCP need to do a lot of work to make it so. A stock market, some Corporation reporting and profiling tools to enable stock valuations to name but a few. I wish they had put the work into this area instead of WiS.

Hello Burning Furry,

You already got good advice in this thread, so I have nothing much to add.

• Shareholders will see all ongoing votings, thus they will also see when (expensive) blueprints are getting locked down and where. Sometimes this sort of information can be important.
• Shareholders can vote for a new CEO and can kick out the current CEO if they have more than 51 percent of the total votes.

I would like to point you to our EVElopedia that contains a vast amount of useful articles: Shares, CEO replacement and Votes.

Quote from http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Votes:

"In order to take part in a vote, you require at least one share in the corporation."

To be able to vote you need to have shares, even if you are assigned director role.

EDIT: I think you mean the following, Directors and CEO's can make votes (even without shares). So a director without shares can make for instance a vote to assign a new CEO or ask a vote to wardec Corp X although he can't actively vote himself.