Market Discussions

It was not "insanity and genius". It was an escamotage to make players beta test the engine for another MMO that - akin to its theme - was bloodsucking off EvE teams and capital.

Insanity and genius were some of Steve Job's ideas. Incredibly "stupid, little things" that can change your everyday's life. Not a long term corporate plan you beta test for, otherwise you are shown "the door".

WHs were more of an insanity and genius idea. They did not exist, yet they perfectly fit the needs of a portion of playerbase and "snapped in" into the game like a natural contribution. They were the unexpected *pats the forefront*, "why haven't I thought about these before".

Incarna was expected, was overhyped and under-delivered and added a clunky, unnatural appendix to something that works perfectly without it.

Hope this shows the thin, yet big difference.

While I whole-heatedly agree with your assessment of incarna being all the wrong things, you cannot suggest it was not "creative," by textbook definition. They went in a completely unexpected direction pushing the walking in stations crap that were loosely related at best to the game thus far. They went "outside the box," so to speak.

All I'm trying to point out is, what constitutes great out-there creative design plans for the future is subjective. Supposing CCP rolled out an expansive plan to really invest time and effort over an 18 month (heh) period just to add depth to the markets. How popular do you think that would be with the general player base?

My guess is we'd have the same statue-shooting up-in-arms response because such a scheme would detract from the aforementioned fixing of existing game issues that everyone is now on about (rightly so). So before you go being too critical of CCP for loosing the magic, just remember that they're playing catch-up for years of misguided "creativity," already.

I am curious if you could expand on your feelings towards the uncollateralized bond and trust market. I know you feel that, as a whole, it invites instances of devastating scamming such as Bad Bobby or Cosmoray, but it has also been a source of a good deal of success stories in terms of uncollateralized trust-based investing. How can someone build up a reputation without being trusted with uncollateralized debts in the first place? I basically am questioning this idea of "the good guys" and "the bad guys." Bad Bobby, Cosmoray, and Ricdic were some of the biggest good guys on MD at one point in time, so it cannot really be that there is just a group at the top that cannot scam. It seems more likely that uncollateralized loans incurs a great deal of risk as a whole, but that it is not a rotten apple through and through. There are plenty of people that are trustworthy. It is just a bit like playing a glorified game of minesweeper.

Edit: You should have been dishonest as to not invite ambiguity.

Edit 2: RAW23 is such a silly, silly goose. Nothing could possibly go wrong with me making this post.

There's nothing to expand on. It's a stupid idea that has created far more "harm" than "good" (using the inherent values someone concerned with this issue would apply to them).

That said, what you want to do is build relationships with people, and then trust flows from that. I give you 5 isk, you give me ten isk is not a relationship. However, us working together on something, getting to know each other on a personal level where pixel spacemonies no longer matter, then I'll happily consider entering into trust based interactions.

The vast majority of successful public transactions of this sort are just people building up to a bigger scam or someone jerking themselves off about how (unnecessarily) "good" they are in a spaceships game (they ofthen get tired of this "goodness" then try "badness" and scam). I will admit that a small percentage actually use the money as leverage to build a base of capital then they move on having got all they need to their own and their lenders' benefit, but this percentage is so utterly tiny and invites so much other **** with it, that its practice is actually "bad" if you're not ignorant of the associated harm you're creating.

Again, I personally don't deal with the terms "good" and "bad" within the confines of the tos and eula, but those who do should consider the wider impact of their actions, even if those actions aren't inherently "bad" themselves. Fortunately the entire topic is moot, as unsecured loans have gone from rare to almost non-existent over the last few months, and are soon to be completely phased out as an institution as the last legacy borrowers disappear.

In summary, to paraphrase;

"Anything that carries risk is bad. Taking a risk is stupid. Taking a risk and having it turn out good is bad too, because that makes other people think that taking a risk isn't stupid."

I'd hazard to guess that your idea of a good MD is one where the only possible activity is fully collateralized bonds.

FFS Jake! I had work to do.



There were 35 new characters starting bonds in the 12 months Oct. 2009 - Sept. 2010 (including yourself but I opted to leave out Curzon, although including him doesn't change the figures much). So, an average of just under 3 per month. What's the current rate? I found two new starts on the first few pages, so ...

The other stuff ... well, I should try not to completely sabotage my week's work so I'll try my hardest to leave that.

...I was just about to say the same thing about you.

The True State of Banking in Eve

Why are you doing this?

If you're undertaking a huge project for ridiculous and unrealistic reasons, it is bound to fail. There's nothing inherently wrong with creating an Eve bank for its own sake. It is an ambitious project absolutely, but it is far from impossible. The opportunity to take on large, ambitious, risky, etc projects is part of what makes Eve great. If you're doing it with the recognition that it is a personal or group project in a hobby game that you play, then you are starting in the correct place; otherwise you're just fooling yourself, and the illusion will only last as long as you can maintain the self-delusion.

Realistic expectations.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with shooting for the moon. However, the greater the goal you set for yourself, the more critical and reflective you have to be of the projected path to that goal. Olympic athletes don't win gold medals just because they really believe in themselves; that internal faith is merely a necessary yet insufficient condition for success. The same principle applies in every endeavor, big or small.

Now, the key factors to consider when designing an Eve organization are fun, relationships, and income. This applies everywhere, from badass nullsec mercenaries to hisec mining consortium. These are the elements that will carry you through the bad times when everything doesn't go exactly as you envisioned it in your fevered imagination. This is the meat and potatoes of what you will be doing for hours and hours in an online game as you work towards your goal. Having a vision and some hubris is absolutely necessary to achieving great things, but it won't carry you all the way to your goal, not in a game. As you go through the process of planning each aspect of your bank ask yourself: Will this be fun? Will this be interactive and relationship building? Will it be worth my time?

Furthermore, is “banking” something you really want to do? I'm sure nobody would say no to having a space bank of their very own, but is everyone suited to being a spacebanker? Far from it. You have to be sure that once you get there, it's actually somewhere you want to be.

Trust.

Trust is dead. Deal with it. Investors have learned their lessons from the disasters of the past. New unsecured borrowers have slowed to a trickle, and the idea of somebody new gaining the requisite trust to undertake something remotely resembling a bank is farcical. It just plain isn't going to happen. This, however, is not a dead-end. The one name that everyone trusts and is the only possible backing for a new bank is Chribba. The only item you can extract value from while it is being held in collateral is BPOs. How you would go about building a partnership of initial funding and creating APIs tracking for all your deposits is the first realm of innovation. The point is, you can extract value from BPOs through copying or manufacturing while also using them as a base security for a bank. Any new bank that isn't 100% backed with Chribba will not even get off the ground, I guarantee it.

How you then compete to acquire deposits is another room for innovation. You may have secure backing, but you need to flesh out the details of how you convince people to deposit isk with you. I will add here that, as mentioned previously in the thread, teller deposits are a terrible idea on paper. There MAY be room here where you can innovate somehow to achieve cheaper rates with a teller system, but I highly doubt it. The other possibility is that you max out how much you can achieve with just set-term deposits, but again I highly doubt it. Teller deposit innovation is best left for a time where you actually need it, I doubt anyone ever will.

Market Share.

At the moment, the collateralized loan market is very small and insular. Nobody inside the existing clique has any reason to go to anyone new when they can deal with one of the few established players. What you will need to do is aggressively market collateralized loans as a popular concept. You need to innovate streamlined and appealing processes that can draw in new customers from outside a few MD denizens. There is an inherent logic to collateralized loans, you just need to hit the pavement and sell, sell, sell. In addition, there is even more room for premium collaterlaized borrowing involving what you are doing with Chribba actively using collateralized BPOs. Innovation in this area to run down costs and complications should open up huge potential loan markets.

Internal Organization.

Leading from the previous discussion about realistic expectations, you need to design the internal relationships and processes that make up your bank. You need to consider the balance of trust and effectiveness every functioning position will have, you need to consider redundancies for high turnover, remuneration, auditing and accounting. The more simple, automated, and less reliant on people your organization is, the more smoothly it will run. You also need to consider things like morale and persistence of vision, especially as the initial founding high wears off. You need to identify people with qualities that suit the position they're being given, not everyone is suited to loan origination or customer service for example.

I have to disagree with your *conclusion* here. ("Any new bank that isn't 100% backed with Chribba will not even get off the ground, I guarantee it.")

1: More people than Chribba could pull this of (not many, perhaps a handful - maybe even more, due to point 2)
2: You vastly underestimate "greed" - Greed wins over (lack of) trust *any* day.
Offer enough incentive (interest) (but not too much, or "scam will be cried right away) and they'll come flocking.
Slowly at first, but then in avalanches of avalanches.
One could argue it's what killed EBANK. Too many accounts with too much ISK, got too tempting for someone in RL financial trouble, not too mention they got sloppy with it... what does a few hundred bill matter in defaults (and bad book keeping) if you got trillions..


The rest - I more or less agree with.

Show me a 99% sure way of making even as little as 1% return on 10's of trillions each month - and I'll accept the challenge.