Merchant Archive
Thread: Idea How to help new merchants and make some credits
Become a moneylender!
Since the game doesn't provide a means for new merchants to borrow money, to buy their initial stock etc. then there is an opportunity there for a wealthy player to make a few credits and help out the game. They lend money at say 5% a month, the borrower can then make say 10-20% on the products they buy/sell and over time develop enough cash to stop borrowing.
Security -
This is only a quick overview of how to make it work.
The borrower writes a gmail to the lender stating that they agree to repay XXX credits over a certain timescale and pay interest of a set rate on the loan, the email includes a disclaimer to state that it is only valid if accompanied by a system generated bank tip delivered email for the correct amount paid to the borrower.
Repayments could be handled in the same way using the combined emails as reciepts.
For this to really safeguard the loan there would need to be some word from SOE that this type of agreement is in fact binding and will be enforced, otherwise it will be down to trust and that would make it very hard to do.
Just an idea to try and ease the path of new merchants into the profession and enable it to be a true resale profession.
Interesting idea...it might be tough to define how enforcement for non-payment would work though..lots of complications there..for instance, you lend x amount to a player to start his/her business, but it flops. He/She has the intent to pay back but doesn't have the money to..what happens then?
Still, it'd be neat to have a "Banker" tree and have a system in place for this type of activity..
lisasdarren wrote:
For this to really safeguard the loan there would need to be some word from SOE that this type of agreement is in fact binding and will be enforced, otherwise it will be down to trust and that would make it very hard to do.
Just automate the withdrawals. Make it just like a mortgage, where they are charged daily interest, but they also have automatic daily withdrawals from their bank (or cash on hand) based on the payment schedule. For example, you could give a 100K loan, to be repayed over 60 days, at 1% daily interest. This would generate daily payments of 2225 credits.
What to do about players who don't have the cash to pay (or in an extreme case, reroll to avoid payment)? Absolutely nothing. The banker accepts the risk of default. The banker also has to be savvy enough to limit their own risk. I might lend someone I know 250K to buy a couple heavy harvesters (the repayment would be easy), but I'm not lending someone I don't know 250K to buy a suit of composite. I would probably lend them 10K to buy a good scout blaster to help them run missions.
There is no need for verbal contracts or involvement from SOE in cases of fraud. The risk can be controlled by the merchant and repayments can be automated.