Finances in EVE Online

Marketplace Services
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For a number of years I’ve managed accounts which offer financial services to capsuleers with varying success, this is typically to corporations and overall I’ve made a net profit and it has been a very fun experience. Some of you may well have had business with me in the past, for better or for worse.

A lot of the time offering corporations funds to carry out expeditions comes with very satisfying outcomes, as you can imagine a ‘fuel for the fire’ mentality comes into play and if I don’t get my money back, at least I have some entertainment in return. But I want to expand my operations, and stop hiding behind a trillion alt accounts.

Naturally the obvious problems with financial services in EVE online are:

  • Delinquency Rates
  • Financial Assessment
  • Collections Enforcement

Obviously capsuleers get biomassed, move corporations, stop playing or simply choose not to pay. Part of the fun of running a financial service is that you create genuine motive for collections enforcement, which in turn creates content for capsuleers who like to ‘hunt down’. A similar problem is assessing risk, luckily EVE is rich in information but the hoops I have to jump through to do that limit me to only big-time lending.

Some of the factors that play into my lending criteria are (in no particular order): capsuleer age, social assessment, corporation history, total asset turnover, known lending history, guarantees, offer of security, monthly net income, playtime frequency, character assessment.

I was thinking of developing a website which uses ESI to get limited information for characters/corporations looking to acquire financial products, and by extension build a New Eden credit bureau in the hopes to have some sort of impact on the balance of things.

Therefore I’m very keen to know people’s thoughts - have you ever considered borrowing ISK to fund your operations, have you struggled to find willing entities to lend to you, how comfortable are you for an in-game corporation to collect financial history and would you feel comfortable such a corporation ‘selling’ such information to others?

Feel free to ask me any questions around the service I have been offering, though I should stress this is not an advertisement.

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No offense, but you really need to get out more. :slight_smile:

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As far as I know, banking has really not been that successful, since it requires something not abundant in eve, which is trust.

That being said, if you find this idea fun and would enjoy doing it, nothing really stops you from trying. You might fail, you might succeed. But honestly, the outcome doesn’t really matter as long as you had fun doing it. Eve is a game after all.

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@Tater-nuts My fiancee would be inclined to agree I should spend less time playing EVE. :rofl:

@Maekchu Yes, delinquency rates have been high, though not that much different from what you’d typically expect from a sub-prime lender IRL, which is fairly interesting. Thanks for your response, it certainly is fun seeing what people do with the opportunity of funding as it is a very niche activity in New Eden. :relaxed:

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This proposal should probably be moved to “Services”, there you will get a better idea of how successful your idea would be. That’s where the banking and a lot of bigger finance items gets done. :slight_smile:

Sounds like your fiancee is a wise person. :wink:

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Good idea - thanks. I’ve moved the topic to Services.

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If you’re lending ISK you need to use full collateral, otherwise your rates of return will be FAR below that of a RL sub prime lender. As for banking, it has always been a scam in the past and since any decent size banking operation requires many players to operate (cashiers) it really can’t be anything close to secure.

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@Keno_Skir Collateral is almost always required, though it’s not uncommon for me to lend to subsequent customers without security. Sometimes on smaller sum loans people do get their corporation to act as guarantor, which is less risky as failure to pay means the corporation is part of the collection activity and not the capsuleer. We don’t really offer banking, the main products are all forms of borrowing and delinquency rates remain around 15% - and of course the interest rate tends to reflect this.

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I like the idea of establishing a credit history, but as others have mentioned it would be an issue of trust. With the lack of law enforcement in-game you would potentially have the following scams:

  1. Not paying the debt at all by the borrower.
  2. An agency making fraudulent claims for the credit history to increase the amount to be borrowed by the borrower who may or may not have ties with.
  3. The lender not giving up the collateral (I would assume it’s a collateral loan).
  4. A borrower borrowing small amounts to have a credit history good enough for a large amount just in turn not pay the debt off and run with it.

Perhaps there are ways to counter or prevent those above concerns maybe through contracts or a third party that does audits?

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me personally ive wanted to take a loan but never had enough collateral to take what i want. im looking to get into bpo buying which is hard when trying to sub with what i make aswell. even tryed a community kick starter offering at cost ships with the bpo’s i do have.

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Thank you for your responses. I have actually been developing the application which would keep a record of your character’s ‘credit history’.

In the past I always required API access to evaluate an application as part of the underwriting process, the credit scoring process uses EVE’s SSO and gives you a score within seconds based on some information gathered there. I’m essentially feeding in data from previous agreements over the years to train a machine learning model which indicates risk - which will also consider past searches, accounts and history on those accounts much like a real credit bureau.

In the case where someone does not pay, that’s always a very high possibility, but creates content for others. Additionally it would prove a valuable service for corporations such as mining corps, manufacturing corps to have another metric to assess whether someone can be given responsibility or trust. It might not work, but it creates content nonetheless.

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In that case it seems there is no need for a credit tracker?

What kind of collection activity? I’ve been involved in ISK lending for quite some time, collections is pretty much impossible if the borrower gives you the proverbial finger. If the corporation acts as guarantor then they must either provide collateral in place of the individual which begs the question why the individual isn’t borrowing from the corp in the first place, or the lender must have trust in the corp as an entity which one assumes would only be the case if the corp had the means to pay back the capital… but then why isn’t the borrower borrowing from the guarantor?

You made it sound in a couple of places as though wardecs are one of your collection tools? Is that the case?

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A credit tracker is just an elegant and formalised way of automating the process somewhat. As the system essentially combines a number of factors I would usually consider when looking over limited API details before I say yes/no. The data is exciting for me to work with, I’m curious to see if I can get enough data to analyse if there’s any indicators of trustworthiness in this game that can be gained by benign things like what race someone chooses and other factors.

It depends on how much, what the terms were etc… Obviously because of the game that it is people are more inclined to not pay if they don’t have to and as you said many times there is little you can do to recover the money, but I don’t lose out completely if you do something meaningful with the situation. I’m interested in people’s behaviour and the financial services are a fun way to get into that. The fact that there could be no consequence is partly what makes it more exciting.

Some techniques involve war declarations, sometimes I tip off others using some of the information I used to assess the application, sometimes I just log an alt and track them if they are particularly active. But the point is, the credit scoring system is geared towards how likely it is I’ll get the money back and how unlikely it is that they are untouchable.

All in all, so far I’ve made a small profit from my lending, because I’ve been too careful. I’m keen on assimilating data for personal curiosity and that has value too. I think you know where I’m going with this…

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I’ve published the first part of the scoring facility.

You can access it here: https://eve-necb.co.uk/

It looks a bit rancid at the moment as I haven’t bothered to make it look pretty, but interesting nonetheless.

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