Cal Predine
StarKnight Security
37
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Posted - 2013.03.02 14:50:00 -
[1] - Quote
Corporations in Eve mirror just about every aspect of real-world companies, except one...
You have to pay to work for them.  Yeah, bizarre.
There's currently a great thread raging on about whether, and how, eve-style taxation should be introduced to Dust.
Now, I absolutely agree that the Dust side of corps need a way to raise funds, along with some mechanisms to spend those funds to further their goals, such as providing warfighting equipment and paying battle collateral.
Corporations absolutely shouldn't have to rely upon player donations. No argument at all on that front.
But why taxation? We have most of the elements of a decent client/ employer/ employee economy already in place!
The corps (employers) are already being paid by the Factions (client) for doing work. All we need is some mechanism for the CEO or financial officer to decide what percentage of that to retain for corporate use, and the rest is divided among battle participants (employees) - the algorithm to determine an individual's payment based upon performance is even pretty much in place already in Instant matches.
And how about those instant matches? They're like private contracts - so don't expect your corp to provide you with equipment for them, and they should probably not be as lucrative as Corp missions, but hey - you get to keep all the cash!
On the face of it, this looks like a small and purely administrative difference - instead of money going to the player and the corp deciding how much to take, it goes to the corp, and they decide what their pay rates will be. Not so very different in implementation, right?
Now, what about when the corp wants to expand - perhaps they want to take over planets? They can post their own jobs, paid from corp funds, to mount the invasion. Maybe if they're not feeling wealthy, they can offer what many companies offer when they undertake new ventures - shares in that venture - a share of the profits in return for a share of the risk - if the new colony is a success, you stand to make big money! And if a colony you hold shares in is attacked, well, then you have a great incentive to go and fight hard to defend it...
OK, so that's just an example, you can doubtless think of many better ones, but the point is by allowing corps to become the characters' employer literally as well as metaphorically, you move a step closer to providing tools which would allow Dust corps to really chart their own path to riches. It's a small first step on the way to letting corps set their own agendas, and recognise/ reward members who help further those agendas. Instead of just running endless missions for a faceless faction, and rewarding the guy who sucks up to the Personnel Director |