sheares in a guild

[SirTokesalot]

How but shares?
This could work for differnt things.
But ill keep it short and use to guilds as an exanple.

For a guild:
Say you are starting a guild, and you can sell shares to othere players.
This gives u start up money.
 As your guild growes in size,exp and cash,so dose the value of your sheares.
Now if anothere guild or player gets 51% of your shares they can get choice to eithere get X% of
the guild profites or they can dispand the guild. this makes hostile take overs an option
in guild warfare.
 this also is good for pickpockets/spy to steal shares of rivel guild to get the 51% share option.
 Or how much would u pay for the one more share to close down your rivel guild.
 you could also make good money just buy investing in shares to make profite form differnt guilds.
Or is this just a bad idea? lol

[Waylander]

it is a pretty good idea...they are called shares though

[Efflixi Aduro]

Ah ha ha the whole time I was like \"what are sheares? am I stupid or somthing?\"

Anyways, I hate this idea.  A rich guild could easly buy 51% of a fast growning new guild and desstroy them.  Take the cabal for example, well, they would be the only ps guild left .  (don\'t complain xordan we know you would )

[Shleepy]

Well, this isn\'t too bad of an idea, but there needs to be a lot more details first created in the game for this to work well and with minimal corruption.

First of all, you need to emphasize that \"going public\" (if the shares are like stocks) shouldn\'t necessarily be a very common thing with guilds. Also, you need some sort of interesting benefits for the guild that goes public (BTW, for all of you who don\'t know, going public means entering the stock market and selling shares of your company). Let\'s discuss some interesting, but not too complicated ideas for this.

Also, this selling shares idea could really work well if there are, indeed, interest rates and dividents in banks, and a guild has a big bank account, managed either by a guild treasurer+leader (in big guilds) or by all the guild members (in small, very private guilds). What I mean is that you\'ll have the option to manage a guild bank account collectively or by only certain members of the guild. The money you put in the account, the items you put in the account (as long as they stay there?) and maybe some other factors (successful raids of some sort, maybe) would increase the price of the shares.

Don\'t forget that you somehow need to control the NUMBER of shares, but I imagine there doesn\'t need to be a crazy system for that. For example, the more members you have, the more shares you sell, and as members join, the more shares you can sell. You\'d get 4 shares that are up for sale per member of the guild, for example.

Also, don\'t forget supply/demand, which is what stocks function on. If we had an economical branch of volunteers that would help figure the economy out, and help developers integrate all these neat ideas into the game, we could definitely make a realistic supply/demand model with the guild shares system.

EDIT: a couple other thoughts:

First of all, I just want to say that because not all guilds have to go public, I don\'t think guilds taking over all other guilds would really be a HUGE issue. Secondly, it would be nice for a sort of natural faction of guilds to form, based on financial fundings, hehe.

One other thing: I just realized a huge exploit that could happen with the bank idea. People could first keep all their guild money on personal bank accounts or just on the characters, have a friendly guild buy shares of their guilds for REALLY cheap, and then PUT lots of money in the bank accounts to raise the prices of the stocks.

However, this could EASILY be regulated. We would surely have economic advisors and \"guild market regulators\" in the game that could take care of suspicious activity and check up on rumors (as well as look through records for crazy things like share prices dramatically rising).

Anyway, please reply to this thread with your opinions about some details of this issue. It sounds potentially awesome.

[ArcaneFalcon]

This is certainly an interesting idea.  I think with some tweaking it could actually work.  However, there is definitely that need for tweaking.  First, it wouldn\'t really be a tool for hostile guild takeover because guilds would, just like in real life, keep 50.1% of the shares, and sell the other 49.9%.  Second, you would need to work on a way to make the shares worth something.  Bussinesses can sell shares because their sole purpose is to make money.  You can\'t buy shares in a humanitarian aid organization or a union because they lack this purpose.  Yes, they, like a PS guild, will take money in, but their sole purpose is not to make money.  If you think about it I\'m sure you can come up with a good reason to want to buy stocks in a guild.  Great idea and keep up the good thinking.  

:emerald:

Edit:

One other thing: I just realized a huge exploit that could happen with the bank idea. People could first keep all their guild money on personal bank accounts or just on the characters, have a friendly guild buy shares of their guilds for REALLY cheap, and then PUT lots of money in the bank accounts to raise the prices of the stocks.

Sorry to say, but this wouldn\'t work at all.  In this case the result is that Guild A would end up with a small amount of money that Guild B gave them, and some really high priced stocks.  So what?  If Guild B sells their shares Guild A is now losing a bunch of money, and if Guild B keeps their shares then regular people are less inclined to buy the stocks of Guild A because of the high prices.  Money doesn\'t just appear out of thin air, if someone is gaining money through stocks, then someone else is losing that money.

Edit2: I re-read that statement and realized what you were saying, though it still won\'t work.  You are implying that because Guild A\'s bank account has more money then their stock shares are worth more.  That isn\'t how stocks work, that isn\'t even how money works.  A country\'s money doesn\'t have value because that country has gold stashed away.  The money is just paper, but it has value because people believe it has value.  If people stop believing that then the money is once again just paper.  Stocks work similarly.  Stocks aren\'t worth money because the company has money stashed away, it is worth money because people believe the company will profit in the future, and are therefore investing their money in what they believe will in the future have more value than what they invested.  It\'s the fact that people are buying a company\'s stocks that make their stock prices rise, so pumping Guild A\'s bank accounts with money will have no effect on their stock prices (which there isn\'t any benefit to anyway, rather it will actually hurt the guild - as I explained in Edit 1).

:emerald:

[Myrtl]

Originally posted by Efflixi Aduro
Ah ha ha the whole time I was like \"what are sheares? am I stupid or somthing?\"

Anyways, I hate this idea.  A rich guild could easly buy 51% of a fast growning new guild and desstroy them.  Take the cabal for example, well, they would be the only ps guild left .  (don\'t complain xordan we know you would )

Lol i was thinking the same thing

[Shleepy]

Ya, ArcaneFalcon, I see what you mean.

That idea which based the thing you quoted was bad; I agree. However, we still have to think of another reason for why the stocks will go up in price, since this is a game, of HOPEFULLY about 500 users playing at the same time (and that\'s just a very generous estimate for a year or two in the future), and you really can\'t just base the share prices realistically. It\'s just that in real life, when a company invents something, for example, and the stock-holders know that the company will be gaining huge profits, stock prices go up. Well, my logic in my original idea was to just cut out the middle step, but you are right, it just wouldn\'t work.

However, I still think that the price of the shares can\'t be based purely on people\'s trust in a game like this. As I mentioned in my previous post, we could also have the share prices increase if the guild had a successful raid and stuff like that. Anybody see any problems with this?

[Seytra]

I don\'t know. I mean, what\'s the point? A guild isn\'t some corporation, it\'s an organisation of it\'s members, and it\'s not in it\'s interest to sell out to anyone but their own members. What would happen if the thieves guild secretly bought up the mercenaries guild and then either rule them to become ineffective, or simply disband them.  Well, I suppose, once the members realise that, they\'ll almost immediately create another guild without these problems. A guild doesn\'t have much to loose, and it also doesn\'t require giant amounts of money to operate due to it\'s modest expanses and contributing members (rather than paid employees, as in companies).

I don\'t think that guilds and stock market will mix. The closest thing to a corporation will be rich merchants, so these might sell stocks.

I think if I ever join a guild, I\'ll quit immediately if they start selling themselves, but that\'s just me.

[SirTokesalot]

Thank you for your input and sorry for my bad spelling.
Meaby the price of the shares could be determine by any or a combo of the below.
Or meaby it could depend on the main focuse of the guild, like crafting or hunting mons.
 
 1. by the # of items crafted buy the guild and there worth in gold to npc.
 2. by # of drops from monsters in value of ncp gold of the guild.
 3. by # of exp the guild makes.

 exg. so each week my guild makes 100 swords that are worth 10 gold each to npc.
 the share is worth 0.25% of the value of items my guild craftes each week.
 My share goes up in price by 2.5 gold each week.
 so a share is worth 0.25% per week from time its made, in items crafted by guild.

 How to make shares worth somthing to the player?

 1. you could cash it in at a bank to get its worth in gold, were upon
 it disapears and the clan can make a new one.
 2. the worth of the share is cashed in and its value set back to 0 ,
 and has to build back up weekly in value.
 not sure if 1 or 2 is better.
 or u tell me # 3?
 
 And yes most clans would only sell 49% of there shares.
 this would be cool for spys/pickpockets. The clan would have something to gard.
 And this would give a reason for a spy to infiltrate a guild.
 also this could lead to a new \"JOB\" as a spy and spy skilles could be added.
 I want to be the most famous spy in all of ps.hehehe  
 
  Someone that knows more about stockes/shares then me plz some more info.

[Boldstorm]

Umm so ok I\'m confused now.
You buy a share and it automatically goes up every week depending on how much the guild does? That doesn\'t sound like shares that sounds like a savings account. When you purchase stock in a company you hope that the stock will go up in value, but depending on market trends and company performance (and other factors I won\'t get into here) stock prices can not only go up but go down as well. If all stock prices kept rising then the market would be so skewed that the buy back prices wouldn\'t even make sense.
I don\'t know I still don\'t really see how any guild except maybe a merchant guild could even offer stock purchasing. At least a merchant guild would have a business type atmosphere that could affect the worth of the guild/shares.

[Shleepy]

Personally, I can see potential for \"guild shares,\" even with non-merchant guilds (although a good idea would be to have 2 different types of shares - for non-merchant and merchant guilds, respectively).

Also, shares WOULD go up/down in price, not necessarily just up.

EDIT: Don\'t forget the potential for complete guild failure, resulting in the complete worthlessness of the shares.

EDIT2: Just thought of this... I think we should decide how shares would be bought/sold. We COULD potential create an \"online-stocks\" kinda system, where u don\'t have to keep any sort of papers. On the other hand, we could have paper shares, which u actually have to go to the bank with, and it would be almost purely player-run, in that you can just sell them to random people for as little or as much as you want, but there\'d also be potential for selling them at a bank or something.

Finally, what about a little stock-market kind of thing, maybe with NPC or even player \"share-brokers\"?

[ArcaneFalcon]

Simply put, the only way I think shares in a guild will be feasible is if you get rid of this price changing thing.  All it would be is owning shares in a guild, no price rising or falling based on guild\'s performance, etc.  It just doesn\'t make sense.  I can see, however, someone\'s desire to own a portion of a guild.  Perhaps open share buying up to guild members only, or award them to guild members, and when they receive a certain amount they become an officer, etc.  However, that isn\'t much different from a guild rank system or simply buying your way up in rank in a guild...

[zinder]

I agree with ArcaneFalcon that shares could only work for guild members. There are simply to many problems(measuring worth, control(participating) problems, tricking problems).

As for raising money there are loans, which are more flexibel. You can set the interest on loans to your liking, for example 40% of the revenue of your mining operation for 5 months, double the money after 3 month or a weekly fee and 10% interest on the sum, etc.

[Shleepy]

Alright, I can agree with that

[Golbez]

I fail to see where shares fit into the game theme.

I could see it happening in a science fiction game, a futuristic cyberpunk thriller where cities, nations and the world itself are dominated by greedy corporations (A Shadowrun-esque setting).

But there is no stock market in Yliakum, or a parallel to Wall Street. We live in a setting where differences where settled with a battle in the arena, steel and spells are the rule of thumb and the closest thing you have to a corporation is a tavern or a smith.

And guilds, as the game conceives them, are organisations of individuals with similar ideologies and beliefs, not a regulation of a craft or skill (Such as a Thieves Guild, or a Trade Guild, for example).

From my point of view, buying and selling shares would be a simple and blatant \"No\".

- Golbez