Corporation and individual player loans

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

There should be a way for a corporation or an individual to offer loans at a specific interest rate and payment rate and be assured of the regular payments for that loan.

2

There are people offering and requesting loans in the Market forum. Game mechanics offer no enforcement mechanism and that is unlikely to change. Most loans are secured by collateral, sometimes a mutually trusted 3rd party is involved. Sometimes the lender simply trusts the borrower to honor their commitment and sets an interest rate that lets them make a profit even if some renege.

3

This is not possible in EVE. With a loan you have one of two possible outcomes, depending on the value of the collateral:

  1. Collateral is less than the value of the loan. The player immediately transfers all of the loan money to an alt and never repays anything. Even if you make the mechanic automatically take money from the borrower (a very anti-EVE mechanic) you can’t recover debts from a character that has been deleted.

or

  1. Collateral is greater than the value of the loan. No loan ever happens because the player can simply sell the collateral for ISK and not bother screwing around with the loan mechanic. Unlike in the real world cash and assets can be exchanged for each other with negligible effort. In the real world you might spend months trying to get someone to buy your house to get cash, in EVE you spend a few minutes on the market. And unlike in the real world property in EVE has an extremely high loss rate. In real life you can borrow money to buy a car and use the car itself as collateral on the loan, because the car is unlikely to be lost and is fully insured even if something happens to it. Good luck using a ship that a player is actively using as collateral. You’d have to get someone to hand over the collateral for the duration of the loan, at which point they might as well just sell it on the market.

The rare exception to the rule would be a case where you’re trying to build trust with a loan provider so that you can get a bigger loan in the future and more profits from your scam. So the loan market would consist of two types of people: gullible morons getting scammed, and gullible morons placing a bet that this is the legitimate loan and someone else is going to get scammed later.

1 Like
4

Steps to profit:

  1. Create character
  2. Obtain loan
  3. Transfer ISK to other character
  4. Abandon new character
  5. Scale and profit
2 Likes
5

this already happens and it works just fine

6

there was once… LOL
you would lose money doing this

7

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