Soft cap on # of companies a player can start

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Soft cap on # of companies a player can start

Innocent Bystander RJ: Matthew Matician Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 76 Karma: 54 Joined: Apr 2, 2012	Posted on May 8, 2012 I like the idea that existing businesses can expand by buying ever-more-expensive plots of land. Unfortunately, I think this mechanic is trivialized because players can start new companies for practically nothing (relative to the value they receive). The current system encourages/rewards players to start a lot of companies that are hyper-focused on only producing or selling a small handful of products (say, one company that is comprised only of plantations, another for only textile factories, another for only clothing) where one company's products are passed along to the next company via B2B for the next step in the supply chain. While I think that the ability to have a handful of companies is very good (I have a couple myself, although one of them exists simply to hold goods I don't want to mingle with my store inventories), I think that having an (effectively) unlimited number of companies reduces overall strategy since plots of land are no longer a limited resource. Instead of having a hard cap of, say, 5 or 6 (or more) companies, perhaps the fee to start a new company (or a new fee for taking over an existing one when the stock market comes back) could go up for every company you already control. If we want to target 5-6 companies as a sweet spot, it could be: Found first company: free Found/acquire 2nd company: 1 million 3rd company: 10 M 4th company: 100 M 5th: 1 G 6th: 10 G etc Founding or taking over a company would be 10x more expensive than the last time you acquired one. To prevent unwanted and hefty fees when the stock market comes back, perhaps there could be the option to pass on taking control of a company when you move from minor to majority shareholder, where control would conditionally and successively be offered to players based on their percentage of ownership.
Scott (Admin) RJ: Ratan Joyce CO: Ratan Joyce Post Rating: 1 + / - Total Posts: 1175 Karma: 5083 Joined: Jan 13, 2012	Posted on May 8, 2012 I'm agreeing with the idea of increasing fees because managing TOO MANY companies actually makes the game more like a job than a game, but would 10x be a bit too much? Or do you think it's fair?
Nwabudike Morgan RJ: CEO Nwabudike Morgan CO: CEO Nwabudike Morgan Post Rating: 15 + / - Total Posts: 108 Karma: 344 Joined: Apr 4, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 Orders of magnitude are easy to remember and commonly correspond to your "Net Worth levels" already.
Andrew Turner RJ: Thomas Lazygun Post Rating: 1 + / - Total Posts: 44 Karma: 26 Joined: Apr 9, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 I appreciate the idea but I don't think it'll work in practice. Suppose the CEO of a company loots it and dumps its shares. Then you could become the owner and not only be left with a worthless company but you have to pay through the nose for the privilege, perhaps going massively into debt. And if you instead were left with the option of becoming CEO, and you somehow turned the company around, any of the players with higher shareholdings could take the company away from you in an instant. Would you get your company ownership surcharge refunded then? There's a tax on running multiple independent companies and sharing via the B2B. That's the commission you pay on the sale.
Innocent Bystander RJ: Matthew Matician Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 76 Karma: 54 Joined: Apr 2, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 I'll admit that I don't have a perfect solution to the CEO thing at this point, but on the plus side, if IPOing is disabled for a while on capitalism-online.com when it starts, we can cross that bridge when we get there. The idea that I was trying to convey in my first comment is supposed to account for your examples Andrew--before CEOship of a company fell to you (thus making you incur fees), you'd be given a 24 or 48 hour window before you were charged to sell your shares and stop being CEO. I think any discussion on caps needs to consider becoming CEOs by takeover though. If you look at the 'workaholic' section of rankings, the number of companies some people have through takeovers is clearly ridiculous and balance-breaking. Also, I think orders of magnitude make sense because it needs to become prohibitively expensive to found/takeover new companies. If it's just "n million for nth company", there's no barrier to stop acquiring companies.
Cian Kemp RJ: Cian Kemp CO: Cian Kemp Post Rating: 12 + / - Total Posts: 183 Karma: 58 Joined: Apr 9, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 I honestly don't see a problem with someone having a bunch of companies. We can legally have multiple accounts, so why put in something to prevent people from having tons of companies on one account? You pay a 5% fee trading between companies on the b2b, so that's already something in place to limit its effectiveness. If someone has the time to run 10 or more companies, why not let them? If we DID limit it to a few companies people that wanted to run more would just make more accounts and do the exact same thing. There isn't anything in place to let you link companies together if you own them all, so multiple accounts would be exactly the same. I just don't see the harm in it.
Gamma Alpha RJ: Gammatron CO: Gammatron Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 104 Karma: 62 Joined: Apr 7, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 "I'm agreeing with the idea of increasing fees because managing TOO MANY companies actually makes the game more like a job than a game..." Mr Ratan, it's already a part time job for me sir.
Innocent Bystander RJ: Matthew Matician Post Rating: 1 + / - Total Posts: 76 Karma: 54 Joined: Apr 2, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 Cian Kemp, you're right in that it's a potentially difficult thing to police (perhaps) -- but there is one important difference: when you own two private companies, you can have them interact in a way that is unfairly profitable to one of them at the expense of the other (similarly, you can transfer money directly through the bank). When businesses belong to the same person but different accounts, that's technically illegal. While I think it's great that bots are allowed in general (though I don't use one personally), this seems like one of the areas where having bots doesn't simply reduce the amount of time you need to run a business, it allows you to run a nearly infinite number of businesses (if there is no cap) if you can get them almost 100% automated. At that point, it seems the only people who have a chance at being in the top 5/10/whatever, would have to use bots to be able to manage so many companies if everyone else is doing it, too. In my mind, that twists the game from being a strategic game about capitalism to a whoever-runs-the-most-bot-companies-wins game. This is one area I see that having bots puts other folks at a disadvantage: if there are no business caps, you can run a nearly infinite number of businesses that are all almost 100% automated.
Random Tester RJ: Tester CO: Random Tester Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 26 Karma: 46 Joined: Jan 21, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 (Last edited on May 9, 2012) The hard cap will never be lifted based on my own experience running 3 in-game companies AND trying to code in the early days when the multi-company function was put in. As is the hard cap on the number of positions you can take. I may be wrong, but I believe the point of this thread is to suggest an increase on the costs for obtaining 2nd+ companies UNDER the existing hard cap, and I like the idea.
David Gray RJ: graydoo CO: graydoo Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 11 Karma: 29 Joined: Apr 19, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 (Last edited on May 9, 2012) The ability to set up a lot of businesses is something that appealed to me and I would much rather at least feel like there wasn't a hard cap in place. Maybe this is something that could be managed by headquarters that had been considered but no real decision had been reached for how they would be implemented? That could help create a point where more companies are impractical from an overhead point of view rather than initial investment. (edited out the terribleness to get my actual point across)
Victoria Raverna RJ: Victoria Raverna CO: Victoria Raverna Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 107 Karma: 43 Joined: Apr 11, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 This is not something that need to be fixed. Let people run as many company as they want to. If it is because of the expensive plots become meaningless, I disagree with that. From my experience, eventually you want to buy the plots even if you can run multiple companies. Check the player ranking page and you'll see that this is not a problem that need to be fixed (at least at this point of the game).
Random Tester RJ: Tester CO: Random Tester Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 26 Karma: 46 Joined: Jan 21, 2012	Posted on May 9, 2012 I'd like the cap to only include companies that you are the chair or owner of. I believe that's the idea, the current hard cap is 10 for starting new companies, and 20 for total job positions. Obtaining extra companies from the stock market is not restricted so theoretically you can go above the cap.

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