Since the trading aspect of this game is such advanced as it is, why can’t it have a stock market too?
The stock market could be four variants:
Player corporations
Player alliances
Npc corporations
Npc factions
The values could be based on amount of members, net worth and claimed systems.
this would make an addition to the already huge part of the game which is market trading but keeps the game as “realistic” as it has ever been. not that its a realistic game but most of real life trading happens through the stock market and i would think traders in EVE should have the oppurtunity to trade by a stock market too.
Nope. It would get wrecked and imbalanced in a matter of hours due to botting. There are already thousands of market bots. It would only take the creators of those bots a few hours to come up with stock market bots. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Not to mention, thanks to CCP, all anyone would have to do is create a thousand Alpha alt accounts to artificially inflate their membership numbers…
Funnily enough an exact parallel to IRL stock market, with its automated triggers for buying/selling, and price adjustment.
Its hilarious, but true, that the IRL stock market is completely irrational, and infact modern heuristic prediction models operate exactly off that premise.
Oszilation is where you get the profit yes. So all automated systems who try to profit from them basically take the edge out of any fluctuation and have therefore a dampening effect on the whole system.
The people who introduce oszilation on purpose are a different story.
Which is a problem that leads to irrational stock-market trade, especially as many of the triggers for sale/purchase are set by idiots that dont actually watch what is happening to the company in question, as they are pre-set by another idiot before-hand.
There is a way to invest in a Corp, by becoming part of its structure with executive privileges/control, by investing money in it to get that access, or lending them money through a trusted 3rd party mediator, etc.
Opportunities for this are rare, and even more rarely lucrative, but that is the closest EVE gets to owning stock in a Corp.
Since Corps are so interchangeable in EVE, and there is so little regulation, an EVE Corp stock market would be just one huge slew of scams.
You could also combine this into Faction Warfare where the value of each shares increases for the winning faction and decreases for the losing faction so you can kinda bet on whos the winner.
Won’t work for the same reason that there is no banking industry in EVE: there is nothing stopping a player from running off with the ISK. In addition it would be very open to abuse by RMT-ers: “read the amazing story of how this newbie scammed EVE veterans out of 60b ISK and totally did not pay RL $$ for that.”
About the only way it could work is if it dealt solely with NPC corporations. Not player corporations, and not factions, just NPC corps. There’s around 150+ NPC corps in EVE. Running missions for/against them, in addition to blowing up the associated NPC haulers/miners could create some interesting content that couldn’t easily be manipulated by players. And, unlike a player corp, there’s no player involved to scam everyone and run off with the ISK…
We do have corporation shares in the game and at some point did I even sell some, but the reality is that the mechanic is too crude to be usable as such.
If you then were to implement a better system will you only run into far worse problems. So are actual stock markets regulated. Mix this with the culture of EVE Online and it’s either going to blow up in scams, insider trading and a lot of “fun” activities, or it becomes as boring as trading janitors for tourists.
Perhaps one could create a middle ground somewhere between the two, but the market in EVE itself is already highly interesting and speculative, and having shares of corporations wouldn’t really provide all that much difference to it.
We then have a forum section specifically for the discussion of such ideas as yours. It’s Features & Ideas discussion. You should ask an ISD to move it there for you.
If you feel like so a bit of searching I made a longish post on this very subject on the old forums that specifically said how this could work.
It’s a bit of a tradition in the F&I forum to rip ideas apart or show how they can be gamed and I put some thought into designing a system that couldn’t be gamed. I think I managed this.
The main criticism was that it would be “the new T2 BPO lottery”, which was due to how I thought it would need to be “kickstarted”. I couldn’t think of a different way to my original idea so I let it go.
So feel free to check it out and save yourself re-inventing the wheel if you want to.
There are no institutions that allow for the emergence of a stock market. For example, there is no way to enforce contracts outside of the limited contract system. Another key institution that is missing is trust. IRL there is quite a bit of trust that your financial adviser/stock broker is not going to abscond with all of you money…mainly in part due to the ability to impose harsh penalties on anyone trying to do so. What sort of penalties can you impose on a fellow player who absconds with all the the wealth of a corporation you own stock in? You can chase him around and try to blow up his ships…which is simply playing the game, and since he has all that ill-gotten wealth he’ll be to reship and continue the fun.
Hmmmm…
Volatility in stock markets is more likely due to differences in expectations/beliefs about the future path of the stock market.
I think that is increasingly a myth from a bygone era before the proliferation/automation of trading by increasingly many (both smaller and larger) traders (and their triggers).
The expectation may, or may not, be informed, but when the day comes for expectation to be due, things happen very fast in often a very unpredictable fashion where everyone tries to look at what others are doing to get a bearing on what to do. Many of them have no idea why its happening, cos they look only at indexes, and not specific stock in it (and know nothing about most of them), let alone world events.
TLDR: The market behaves irrationally, because huge, cumbersome movers dont do their fking homework on specific stocks, let alone the entire index (ie: pay useless idiots a premium that dont do their job instead of partying and spending money cos its cool), and just slap a trigger on it somewhere and forget about it.
The market is populated by idiots, and they cause its irrational behavior, because they have no fking idea what they are doing.
Get out of stock. One company fail can wreck the whole index, causing a cascade.
Currency exchange is where its at, or commodity futures, if you do your homework.