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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
The Stock Exchange
I searched "Stock Exchange" but only found 23 results, most of them just using the phrase in a sentence. So, could someone who has information kindly tell me how I.S is planning to use it?
Will we have a Grand Exchange like in Runescape? Or are we talking.. NASDAQ level? Putting money in, taking money out? If so, this will be quite interesting, but anyway, how is the stock market going to be used in game?
Will we have a Grand Exchange like in Runescape? Or are we talking.. NASDAQ level? Putting money in, taking money out? If so, this will be quite interesting, but anyway, how is the stock market going to be used in game?
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On my phone so, sorry if the links are a bit ugly. It's episode 9&10. Credit to @Aggelos and his guests.
You might belong to a Military Node because it fits your playstyle, but that Religious Node across the way is doing well for itself. So, you invest in the Religious Node. But then, it comes under attack. Normally, you wouldn't waste your time because technically they're in competition with you... but since you have money invested in their well-being, off you go to do battle.
It should prove interesting.
I wonder if the players that get in the game first are going to be the ones that make the most money... like, if they go around investing in as many nodes as they can, won't they become ridiculously wealthy when these nodes start growing and the player population increases? Very interesting.
Reading the AoC wiki, I found:
"The value of stocks is influenced by world events and the performance of nodes, Social organizations or guilds.[3]
It sounds like the value of the investment will increase as the health and vitality of the investment (node, guild, etc.) increases. So if the node withers, the investment will decline in value.
So it sounds like it will not be a traditional stock market where the buy/sell demand will determine the value of the investment. Early players who invest in a lot of nodes could make great money, but early players will be poor at first. As the dwarves in The Hobbit said, it takes gold to make gold.
Also it appears that the village/town government will have to establish the market, so markets may well be rare in the early game and only show up as nodes level up. This would make it more likely that the healthy, growing cities would be the ones to open markets, at least at first. Some of them are bound to wither later as other cities compete.
So here is a question. Can anyone come up with a workable mechanism where someone (or perhaps a guild or social organization) could offer options on nodes/guilds stocks? I think it would be fun to offer or invest in puts and calls to magnify my investment returns (or losses). Ideas?
Reading the AoC wiki, I found:
"The value of stocks is influenced by world events and the performance of nodes, Social organizations or guilds.[3]
It sounds like the value of the investment will increase as the health and vitality of the investment (node, guild, etc.) increases. So if the node withers, the investment will decline in value.
So it sounds like it will not be a traditional stock market where the buy/sell demand will determine the value of the investment. Early players who invest in a lot of nodes could make great money, but early players will be poor at first. As the dwarves in The Hobbit said, it takes gold to make gold.
Also it appears that the village/town government will have to establish the market, so markets may well be rare in the early game and only show up as nodes level up. This would make it more likely that the healthy, growing cities would be the ones to open markets, at least at first. Some of them are bound to wither later as other cities compete successfully.
So here is a question. Can anyone come up with a workable mechanism where someone (or perhaps a guild or social organization) could offer options on nodes/guilds stocks? I think it would be fun to offer or invest in puts and calls to magnify my investment returns (or losses). Ideas?
That said, I think most trading will be done with the system. So if you buy early stocks and they have massive gains and then you want to sell, since you purchased the stocks from the market I assume the market would just cash back out to you. At this point I am not even sure how they would determine how much stock can be purchased in any given area.
If you gain certificates, and those become exchangeable (could lead to a P2W environment), then perhaps a real fluid stock market could exist.
Although, I suppose, a guild designed to master the economy could make very detailed plans to collapse economies/stock-markets. Having an economic guild cause a node to atrophy, as opposed to the economy plummeting due to atrophy, because of precise economic maneuvers would be awesome.
You keep getting ganked by the guy from the next node over? Collapse his node's stock market and watch all the citizens flee forcing him to down size or move.
You hit the nail on the head wonderfully in your last paragraph, Azathoth. The 'warfare' in ashes isn't limited to traditional military action, we can now take economic, religious and other actions as well. Fascinating.
One mild worry about the stock markets, though. If lots of players can buy in for low prices and later cash out for huge gains, as we hope to do with a growing economy, then that will have the effect of putting a lot of money into the game economy. Quests, drops and other game actions also put money into the economy. That gives rise to the possibility of inflation: too much money in the game causing prices to rise and the value of each piece of gold to decline.
This is a familiar problem both to real-world governments and to game economies, and it is particularly bad in ptw games where players essentially buy gold for real-world cash. Ashes not being a ptw game should somewhat mitigate the danger. I trust that the game designers have people with training in economics to track this problem before it becomes severe and take the appropriate remedial actions (ways to pull appropriate amounts of money out of the game economy &tc.).
On a positive note, as TauTau and Azathoth mentiioned, it will be exciting to see the kind of wars, alliances, and sabotaging that will be happening in Verra as a result from the presence of stocks.