quote: Original post by Paul Cunningham

How about the idea that instead of taking money off (real) people so that get a certain amount of time, they pay for a character. Then place this stock market idea on top of that.

I''m not sure I understand this right... are you saying that instead of a monthly fee you would run a stock market instead?
I''m not sure how you could handle this... but, it is a unique ideal... please elaborate!




Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

Paul, I was gonna treat you of capitalistic american fat couch potato bastard. But I remembered you are australian ;P
You really seem to have something with money haven''t you. Well, but I kinda like your idea, now that you rephrase it with "instead of paying a monthly fee".
I don''t like the idea of monthly fee, because people who don''t play that much don''t get for their money, because people that suck at the game spend the same money that people who kick ass, but have a not so good time.
On the other hand, what you are proposing is quite similar to my idea of giving the player an account and some sort of experience system that wouldn''t be directly related to the player''s character ingame. This would be a good to counter the effects of losing a highly skilled character (I could repeat my whole idea, but I might just be boring you, so ask me)

What I don''t understand... in a stockmarket, the people invest in a stock, to help this stock by giving their money, and to get money back from this support. But those investors don''t actually do the business of this stock they invest in. Well, actually they do.
So here are two thing I can see :
Do the investors have a say in what the character should do ? (a bit like a multiple personality disorder, LOL, I like this one )
Are the investors actual players ? Or can someone who doesn''t play the game invest.
If the people are only outsiders, then what''s the point of investing.
And if the people are from inside the game, then what''s the point ... are they all gonna start invest for each other ? This would be a sort of political system, but directly based on a stock market ? "Support my character, I''ll slay the evil trolls of the mountain, I''ll rescue the princess ! My opponent Sir Bragmost is nothing but the remains of an ork''s meal. Make me your candidate and I''ll be your voice, and God bless America !" Uh, yeah, or something like that

What do you think ?

youpla :-P

ps : original thoughts, though !

I love it. Raising funds for a character by floating yourself? Can you form syndicates and perhaps back a larger group for bigger quests. A bit mercenary perhaps.

"I would slay those Orcs over the hill, but the leather needs re-tooling, and these biceps don''t oil themselves, you know." Need a level 12 Mage Stick-O-Kindness? Cannot afford it?

What about futures? eg: I bet that the Highbottom clan will whip Sir Bragalot next Spring, expanding territory.

Actually, didn''t this happen in Ultima Online, where someone sold property for 1,000s in real money?

RickTzu

Sine caffeae dedere spem deponere.

First i''ll elaborate for Dak Lozer, i hope this helps. Consider the pay/month scene with mmorpg''s. Let''s say $10 a month. Now we remove this but you (the owner of the server) still want money for you game. People go to your web site and pay $2 for a blank character. Now consider this $2 as a stock brokers fee. Once a player has a character it goes on a huge board that looks something like the list of theads in the game design corner with a price beside each character, lets say for a newbie it''s $0.01/rpgshare. Now with your newbie character you pick money up from with the game it''s self and trade this money in to out of game credits so you can invest in other players, or yourself and push the price up.

Now to add on, if a character die''s then you have to pay for a new character and all the money that was put into other things by your other character gets liquidated. You could also have atrophy in the game so if you don''t touch your character for a week then it loses skill/attribute points and if they reach zero (any one of them) bang, your out.

Next we got dividends, well that would be entirely up to the player but the $managment gui would have to be supplied for players. I don''t think you should be able to buy new characters becuase this would be taking money away from the owner.

Now the tricky bit is is that only maybe 10% of your character is floated from the word go. and it''s up to you to float the rest when you can make lots of money from it (when the price is high).

Option: Remove the atrophy and make it so you have to pay up a certain amount of character-cash each month to keep him or her alive. So it''s either your money or virtual money.

Ahw, the reason why people would invest in your character are for 2 main reasons and 1 sub reason:
1. to collect dividends.
2. to sell the stock at a higher price
subreason. when money is made out of game you can bring that money back into the game so your character has more cash and can buy things or pay of the next monthly debt etc.

All this investing would only be done by gamers not by people out of the game, there would be no reason as i can see. Unless you wanted to set up a action on your server for players to buy and sell their characters aswell

Rick Tzu,

quote:
I love it. Raising funds for a character by floating yourself? Can you form syndicates and perhaps back a larger group for bigger quests. A bit mercenary perhaps.

Do you mean, like you could also float a guild or clan? That''s another good idea i guess. You could just go crazy with this idea it think. Do it how ever you want as long as it brings fun into the game



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