Stocks & Shares

[~Legend~]

The modern world is pretty much run through economics... and sure, it can be a bit heavy going, but there are some really cool bits, particularly when it comes to business and industry.

So, in certain Argonath servers the concept of a stock market has been tested and with the release of SA:MP's latest scripts, a stock exchange system at some level is in plan to be implemented.
Of course, while it imitates the constructs of real life systems, it wouldn't be quite so vast.


It offers another side to owning businesses and even though there are a limited number of the 'top' businesses in the server, you can get in on managing these in other ways as a shareholder.
It gives great scope to people who may be looking at shared ownership and still allows for larger scale enterprises.

Would something like that be good for VC:MP?
We don't want to miss out on features that other servers are benefiting from, but at the same time we don't need to have certain systems if they don't fit in with our playing environment.


Teddy and a few others were working on this project last year.

Teddy:

How is it different?

This stock market is like no other in the state of Argonath, or any of the other previous attempted establishments because it is powered by an advanced algorithm and series of fail-safes engineered in PHP by professional developers. The system is self sufficient using data collected by purchases, volume of shares, and real-time statistics. All purchases are done in real-time and all stock prices are updated by the automated system every 15 minuets.

How does it work?
If your unfamiliar with stock markets IRL, they work on the concept of "trading" stocks with individuals, rather company <> user trade. Of course the start will be users purchasing up corporate stocks then either holding for a while or selling to other individuals for an asking price.
Lets say I own 100 stocks in x company, the current stock price is $12 ARD and I paid $11 ARD, I want to make a bit extra so I contact a broker and inform them I want to sell 50 shares of X company and my asking price is $13 ARD per share. The broker then inserts this data into the system.
Lets continue to say a buyer is interested in x company, and wants to buy. He then contacts a broker and says I want to buy 50 shares of x company.  He can either ask the broker to get current "asking rates" so you can get a quick deal, or he can choose to enter his own bid rate. Lets say he chooses to see the asking rates, the broker will inform him a seller is offering 50 shares in x company for $13 ARD per share. He decides to accept the offer, and the broker inserts the bid price into the system and waits (up to 15 minutes ).
Every 15 minutes, the system checks all the bids/asking prices against each other. In the event that their is a match, the first (in queue) will be awarded the deal and is accepted by the system. The new price is determined by an algorithmic math depending on if the price is higher than it is current, and by how much will cause the stock to rise in a linear form, and vice versa, if the stock is less than current price, and again depending by how  much a formula is ran against it to determine the new stock price.

[Kessu]

I'm afraid we don't have the playerbase to support a shareholder idea, but then again I don't see a problem with the idea so I'm not going all negative here saying it'll be useless etc.

Infact, I quite like this idea, but scripting it would be low(est) priority so it'll take atleast few months before the idea would even be thought of to be implemented.

Also would that (how it's described by Teddy) be how you'd want it to be scripted it to the server?

[~Legend~]

The really good part is that all of it could be managed externally, away from the server, taking some of the load of us. Teddy and a few others have worked very hard to get it all set up online: http://asm.argonathrpg.com/

I checked out the trial versions last year and the area looked very promising.
It's based on a registration system, so not mandatory.

Of course, real life stock exchanges have a lot of complex mechanisms and it's not easy to construct one from scratch. This would be a model, of sorts.
It's always a great pity that we can't wholly utilise all features due to player constraints, but we could tailor systems such as these to fit our environment.

The most in demand scripted business like the Ammunation, Sunshine Autos, certain food shops, Malibu etc. will naturally end up with a rich owner who commands a big chunk of their business as a result of constraints and Vice City's allowance of monopolies.
Hypothetically, maybe a shareholder scheme would encourage people to band together to 'share' a business. We talked about the business key idea with aXXo sometime back and he gave that the all clear.
This could help with spreading ownership amongst different people.
Investing little bits of your money might sound more appealing to people.

The wealthy single owners may also think about expanding their services and be encouraged to get more people involved to receive investment.

[Kessu]

From what I remember any scripting related to connecting to internet pages would need stormeus or someone else because axxo said it was quite dodgy for him. (read, I'm not sure)

And about the businesses in high demand, I think it's safe to assume EAF will have most of them sooner than later with the new scripts and we usually do not share our things with others 

[~Legend~]

You may want to share them amongst yourselves i.e. multiple individual players. But that is purely one industry and weapons make up a part of the wider businesses. Of course, all of this would be on a smaller scale in comparison to real world models of exhanges.
But one to keep for the future; we don't want to miss out on features that other servers prosper from. : )

[Klaus]

You may want to share them amongst yourselves

/c send