Loans & stock market

[Jax2]

Ok, my last post didn't go so well, apparently both my brilliant ideas had already been implemented and I just didn't know about them So, now that I've had a chance to play a little more and learn some things, I'm going to use this topic here to put down some other ideas. I welcome comments both from players AND staff, and hope to get some good ones. I will probably be editing this to add new ideas as they come, so check back if you're interested. Please bear in mind that I am unable to script, have no idea how it's done, and really no real will to learn it, so please take all suggestions as just that. If someone wants to try a script, great! If someone knows of an existing script that would be able to do what my ideas suggest, by all means, point it out!

4/17/08

Someone just made a joke in the game and it got me thinking... He said, I should become a loan shark. Well, why not?

What I would suggest would be a new twist on the banker. We could have, for example, the Britain Loan and Mortgage company. The way I envision this working is as follows:

Player is short on cash. Player goes to bank, clicks banker once and from menu chooses LOAN.

At this point, the script would do a check. If the player has never had a loan before, they would have rather poor credit. So, the loan would be limited to say, 50K. Enough for a decent little house. Each loan that is taken out and successfully paid back would increase the amount a player could get. By say, the 10th loan, they could get 100K.

Now on to the tricky stuff with this...

1) The loan would have to be timed. By this I mean, if you take a loan, you have to wait x (or xx) days before you could get another, PER ACCOUNT. This is mainly to prevent someone from taking a loan out with another char, giving it to someone (or another of their chars) and never paying it back... (I.e. deleting char). Furthermore, if a loan isn't paid back, they'll never be able to get another one, so before they delete a char, they'd have to make sure they have no loans out.

2) Ok. Repayment. Players could take all the time they need to repay a loan, but the script could do a check and charge a certain percentage each day, like 1% per day or some sort of thing. Payments on loan could be the full amount or a partial payment which would reduce their total loan + any interest by the amount they paid back. Once fully paid, they wait as shown above and then can get a new loan. Again, until the loan is fully paid off, no more loans.

Thats about all I can think of. I know we have a lot of rich players, but we have some that aren't rich and this could come in handy in a cash crunch situation.

[Jax2]

Coli and I were discussing this a bit earlier today ... I think it could, with a little work, be a great addition to the shard...

Now, as I don't know exactly how the whole RUNUO works, I have no idea if some of these idea will work or not, but worth mentioning anyhow.

With the stocks and bonds, the banker (yet again) could be used to purchase stocks, or perhaps a stock/bond stone.

The gist of it is as follows:

Player clicks banker and chooses "Buy Stocks", or if stone, just clicks it... A menu would appear with 10 - 20 fun sounding stocks in the game, for example, as Coli said, Vesper Torch and Candle Ltd. or some sort of thing. The script would put a random inflation or deflation number on each stock each day or each hour even, say anywhere from -2% to +2% or what have you. Players can wait for a stock to possibly come down very low and then snap it up, hoping that it will go back up again.

A few reasons and ways this could work on a small shard:

1) Have a limited amount of stock in each "company". For example, Again, Vesper Torch and Candle Ltd. would have 1 Million stock available to purchase.

2) Limit the number of stock for each company a player can buy to be fair to others. It wouldn't do to have someone with 100 million gold to go out and buy up every share of every company, so it would have to be limited to say, 25K shares per person, which would mean that 40 people could invest in that company, or change the number to allow how ever many people you want to be able to invest... So, say you allow 10K shares of each company... 100 people would be able to purchase a full 10K of the stock.

3) Set a wise initial starting price for each stock. Say, 100gp per share to begin with. 10K shares would cost a cool mil...

4) Make it fun! You could have [stockreport give you the lowdown on the current stock prices, market trends...etc. If someone is really good at scripting, you could do all sorts of things with this... show the last 10 increases/decreases of the stock, or even last 100... Remember, it has to be 100% random between -2% and +2% or some other amount each hour/day/whatever.

5) Players could buy/sell stock whenever they want... if it goes up 4% and they have 1 mil invested, that's 40K profit, but they could also LOSE their money.

6) You would have to decide what you want to do with bottomed out stocks. If something goes from 100/share to say, 2/share somehow, perhaps that would be the bottomed out price and it could never go lower (but still, if a -2% comes up, it stays at 2/share, doesn't rise, only rises if a +% comes up...)

I would even say we could have municipal bonds, but I don't know if you can tell how much gold is spent at vendors in certain cities by the whole city or not, so that may not work.

As to the names of companies, that could be a fun contest for players with a neat little prize... everyone could name up to 4 company names and the 20 that are picked win something small (but fun!)! I think Vesper Torch and Candle Co or Ltd. would be a great one to start with...

This would be a very possible script if someone could take the time to do it, and really, there ISN'T all that much math involved in it if you think about it... a simple random (-x% to +x%) every (whenever) and the script updates current prices. If you chose on the hour, it would be 20 random checks an hour and then when player uses the stone, the calculations as to what their stock would be worth at any time would happen then and there. It doesn't seem like it would be a big drag on the server, certainly less than keeping track of tons of spawn points...

So, to recap:

20 or so different stocks
Players can buy up to 10K of each stock (starting with 1 million shares offered of each)
Stock stone shows how many are left of each stock and let's the player type in how many they want to buy or sell
Stock prices rise or fall randomly by a set range of points (again, I.e. -2% to +2% or what not)
Stocks can be bought/sold any time for loss or gain. Players may choose to lose some money if it looks like it's going down hill...
Contest for players to decide names for companies (with first name being done already thx to Coli...)

Ok, this is one I'd really like your opinions on, so please DO share!

[+Colibri]

Hehe, well that's some nice ideas but unfortunately I don't think they're so possible. Here's the problems:

LOANS:
Everybody who needs money here on the shard has a bad credit rating. Meaning that it would all be subprime, and you know where that got the world Well, here it's just a game, if there's an economy crisis all that can happen is that the game would be less fun, nobody would be starving because of it. You have to consider that banks have lots of people employed to assess risks and do all the math, and to adapt the formulas to the world as it changes every day. Here if it's just a simple calculation it could be very nicely exploited.

STOCKS:
I like the idea, actually i wanted to do something like that but i rather went with a more ebay-type approach, with Exex on the portal. I think trading virtual companies wouldn't be all that fun, as there are already games for just that. This would be a game within a game, so out of the 200-300 people that play here every week, you might just get 10 people who would be interested in playing with this. The idea of stock market is that there's thousands of people constantly trading, not just for speculation but for sound investments as well.

A more useful thing to do i think would be "commodity exchange", where you could trade tokens, organics, ointments, etc... We got that already (Exex), but with this there would be offers for buying and selling, each offer would be quantity&amount. So, if you're familiar with the RL stock market, that's called market depth. But considering how very little activity we can see on Exex, i don't think this would be a very used thing.

There are several things i'd like to script first, that would bring functionality increase for a great portion of the players, not just a few stockmarket enthusiasts

Well, the simplest thing i can think of, that would make such a thing possible, is a sort of an API. In essence, a box that when you put something in it, it records who's it from, what and how much it was deposited, and when. Then using today's popular HTTP/SQL technologies, it would be possible for the owner of that box to connect to the server, and using a script that they wrote, to make trading possible. And with that you could also get graphs and history reports, etc etc. I would script such a thing if someone with enough scripting expertise comes along, and commits to writing the html/php/javascript/mysql portion of the thing.

But again i must say that, for a stock market to work, you need a lot of people.

[Harabakc]

LOANS:
Everybody who needs money here on the shard has a bad credit rating. Meaning that it would all be subprime, and you know where that got the world Well, here it's just a game, if there's an economy crisis all that can happen is that the game would be less fun, nobody would be starving because of it. You have to consider that banks have lots of people employed to assess risks and do all the math, and to adapt the formulas to the world as it changes every day. Here if it's just a simple calculation it could be very nicely exploited.

But everybody deserves to own a home right?! That's a great reason to give a 100% loan with payments that are 80% of the debtors total monthly income! Oh wait sorry, I forgot this isn't Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

[Chroma]

or you can just hunt to earn money. like the game was designed.

Not trying to be the bad guy or anything.

[+Colibri]

Yeah and escorting nobles... the idea of the game i think is to get away from the life of this day and go enjoy a simpler time. Anyway, these loans would be quite some work to script, could produce a lot of ways to exploit the system, and well a simple other way to make 30k for a small house is also if you escort nobles for a few hours, or get a mule and go kill some ettins.

[Harabakc]

It was sarcasm.

[Chroma]

Yeah and escorting nobles... the idea of the game i think is to get away from the life of this day and go enjoy a simpler time. Anyway, these loans would be quite some work to script, could produce a lot of ways to exploit the system, and well a simple other way to make 30k for a small house is also if you escort nobles for a few hours, or get a mule and go kill some ettins.

Finally your on my side


j/k


Yeah i would spend hours trying to crack it too.


Just so you would have to fix it hahaha