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- Napoleon 3h
- Bruhlicious 2h Deine Mutter stinkt nach Erbrochenem und Bier.
- AdamBlue9000 3m Rolling 526d6 damage against both of us.
a Mench 6h Doing a bit of everything.
- notloose 1h
And 16 more hiding and/or disguised

Stocks
Buy and sell

Most mixers have the ability to gamble over sports numbers to make (or lose) a little chyen. While corpies can travel down to Red to partake, it feels like they should have something a little more befitting for the corporate lifestyle. So how about letting them gamble their money in the Withmore Stock Market? Buy stocks in Afterthoughts, ViriiSoma, Neotrans, or others. Then sell when the time is right, or bail out as Genetek stocks plummet after a recent office bombing on Gold. Prices could fluctuate hourly, daily, or weekly, with chances of suddenly changing at any time, or even responding to real player-driven events.

It would be an extra form of income that could reward those that pay close enough attention to the numbers. My only concern would be the possibility of it replacing the need for income from a salary job. Or maybe that's a good thing?

Well as the real stock market goes, money invested means more return (or loss) so at first you'd want a salary job to play the market and help cover any losses if there is any.

Then of course if you get good enough you can make enough to not have a "salary" job (just like in real life) and make that your primary source of income.

It also allows for another cyberpunk theme. Controlling interest in a company. It can be the site of huge RP spikes (Want NLM to make that show they've been debating on? Want a stake in who gets hired and fired? Bribe, coerce or kill your way into getting controlling interest in the company and getting a seat on the Board.)

Yeah, I think that's part of the huge appeal of stock markets for me. Investing in corporation X? Hack corporation Y, then leak some internal documents to make their market value drop. Watch rival corporation X's value go up, then sell your shares. Profit control.

Which makes having it as your 'full-time job' pretty dangerous I guess since things could possibly change at any time. Sounds like good login incentive.

Then buy Corporation Y's shares at rock bottom prices and help get some angle to boost their stock shares up and make double the profits.

Looking at it from an RP angle it could help do a lot of things. Everyone loves doing things for chyen.

This would be an awesome thing to have implemented. Alot of RP could definitely be generated by this.

Corpie X decides he wants to buy a ton of shares in corporation X, but that corporations stock value is high at the moment. Corpie X hires mixer X to go bomb the place to drop the stock value so Corpie X can get those shares at a major discount and rebound the corporation with his motives in mind. All the while, Corpie X just bought a shit-ton of stock in Coporation Y(corp X's primary competitor) and sells it as it's value rises due to Corporation X's decline.

So many possibilities with this, and those who can actually get good at reading and judging the ups and downs can trully live the 'HAVE' lifestyle. All the flashiest things, throwing money at mixer scum to do their bidding, become the envy of all their friends and actually start to populate the Blue sector. Also creating jobs for those who have skills in driving and piloting, to fare these elite members of society from sector to sector.

I love this idea.

The downside is that implementing a simulated stock market would be insanely time consuming and possibly need a lot of debugging. But, it is a neat idea.
I think the real downside is that, to actually control the market, you'd need a lot of staff intervention. Otherwise it's just a numbers meta game, and there are plenty of those already implemented.

Even without the ability to casually influence stock prices, it'd still be incredibly fun. If during implementation the staff added the ability for other staffers to gently nudge a stock up or down, then it'll give them a lot of freedom to say, "Hey, event A happened. I think that should influence the shares of Z company. What do you think?", then do it what they think is best.

This would probably be helped by having a weekly or even monthly shift in prices so that events could be tallied, Staff have time to look it over and adjust any prices as they see fit among themselves within the generated numbers.

It could also be used to help, like Swash said, the haves 'HAVE'. Also it might help push more players into the higher ranking positions in the game but it also does another thing. You want to have that VP slot in the company? Well then you better have so many shares bought as well as all your hard work.

I think long-term shifts (patterns/trends?) is a good idea. But there should definitely be changes that happen much faster, perhaps hourly or even faster. This should reward those that can react quickly, not just those that log in every few days to take a look and see if prices have changed on some of their favorite stocks.

I really like the job opportunities for this though. Imagine investors that can help direct your stocks to maximize income, or maybe even completely manage it for you for a percentage cut.

Perhaps major drastic events or very tiny shifts for the short number game. I mean it doesn't really take a lot for a stock's bottom to drop out if something really shitty happens. But it shouldn't be decent fluctuations in short order.

But yes, lots and lots of jobs and more chyen in the player base (if everyone plays nice and doesn't horde it) means more chyen in the over all money wheel which means more backstabbing, more hiring people for nefarious shit, more laundering, etc.

I'm actually not that familiar with stocks, but I thought it was more of a constant change over the day? Or do stock values update periodically instead? What would be best as a game mechanic? Something that changes inconsistently (reason to keep your eye on values while online), or something that happens in the morning or the end of the day, evening out things between those with more time to spend online and those without? I think I'd definitely lean toward the latter, but with the ability for things to change instantly without warning.

I also very much doubt that stock trading is something that happens just in person or at terminals. It sounds like something that could be handled over the Grid. I think that's the perfect environment for deckers to make some money. Hack their node, siphon some stocks out. Though of course it should be harder to do this than it would be to just hack and deface a node.

The markets change through projection. Complex computer programs simulate what the market is going to do based on several factors throughout the day, but the stock market itself only updates twice a day. Once in the morning and once at closing (for the American markets). Another thing people do is international trading, which allows you to get more opening and closing and thus more hard profits made rather than projected profits.

Let me put it to you this way. You buy 10 shares for 10$ a pop, the market projects that when the market closes, those shares will be at 25$ an hour after buying them. So you decide to now tell them to be sold. At the end of the day the stock market looks at the price at which you bought (because those are instant) but the actual selling price back onto the open market is reigned in at closing time and it turns out that the market closed at 18$ a share instead of 25$, so you didn't make quite as much as you though when you told it to sell.

Now that's open markets, private markets work differently and are instant.

Also this is my understanding circa 1990's when my mother was doing stocks. If that's changed in recent years feel free to correct me.
Even if it isn't, it feels like it would be pretty ideal for Withmore's version of the stock market.

Of course, the staff might come up with a better/different version if they decide this is something they'd want to work on.

I think an actual stock market where people can buy/sell shares can get out of hand quickly and mean staff ends up moderating a shitload of numbers for the sake of keeping the economy in check rather than providing puppets along with other GM work that I think is much more important.

However, a stock market that was not accessible for buy/sell trading but served as a representation of corporate success and failure would be awesome. I would propose Incorporated Citizens be rewarded quarterly on the success and punished for lack there of to help incentivize the kind of shady corporate RP cyberpunk is based on. This could more freely moderated as the outcome would only come into play every three months.

That sounds like a good idea as well. Allows for all the same RP without the money micromanagement. Sorta like 'Alright guys, quarterly is in, stocks are up by 18%, means you get a % increase in your paychecks this quarter!' And thus you know, can spawn similar instances of roleplay opportunity.
That's... Perfect. The changes can still take place just as rapidly, but the rewards come in larger periods. The staff can take a look at the numbers before they post and make sure nothing crazy is about to happen, then hit the okay button. For corpies, that results in a direct percentage bonus to their next paycheck (or paychecks?)*, for non-corpies, a direct deposit into their bank account of considerably less chyen.

*: Say that this isn't actually from their own corporation, but a wired deposit from Corporation B to Corporation H, which is the corp that the player works at. Corporation H is the one that gets all the money the player made from stocks (sounds sufficiently corrupt to me), and then Corporation H rewards the player for making them money with a bonus to their check.

What happens to people who work topside but not for any one corporation?

Doesn't seem fair to leave them out of the equation, also boosting paychecks to corps seems somewhat unbalanced.

I would much prefer if the stock worked similarity to Deathball (RNG) and everyone could chip in.

There would ideally be two kind of payouts: Those to corpies, and those to non-corpies. People who work for a corporation get paid out in their check (like gas reimbursement) for how good they did in stocks. Non-corpies are unaffiliated with a corporation, and would get less from the stock markets. Perhaps think of it as a buy/sell fee that comes out of their winnings, that a corporation otherwise is exempt from?

This is spit balling after all but you have to take many things into account besides if the idea is cool (which in this case I think it is). Theme, balance, viability and coding should be all taken into account. Doing so increases the chances that the idea will be actually implemented into the game. With that in mind, please carry on.
You absolutely nailed it, and that's part of what makes this pretty cool I think. It's a numbers game, so aside from the player interfaces (terminals, etc), it all comes down to just choosing which corporations will have stocks to buy/sell, the math that will decide how it goes up and down, and when it pays out.

Granted that's still not a walk through the park, but it definitely seems like it would be easier to implement than some.