Economies of Scale--Capitalism online

[JFrazer]

Yeah I'm done, I can't bring my revenues above my maintenance and salary costs. I could dump 20 million I own in stocks back into my company, but I didn't want to play this game just to do some insider trading metagame to see a number shoot up into the billions.

If you're willing to give it a go, you can sell your old company and start over with the revenue. You receive the net worth of the company minus a fee (I believe. Can't verify at work since IE7 doesn't seem to like the game).

You can also sell off some properties to reduce cost while you catch up. I'm finding that large research centers, for example, aren't worth the maintenance until you get really high in quality. A 30 m^2 center, for example, can get you up to 12 - 15 quality before research times get out of hand. (this doesn't hold up for under-served markets. For example, I'm researching a new branch that is only 13% demand met with an average Q of 7 - 10. It's taking me 11 hours to move from Q14 to Q15 with a 45 m^2 center)

I'd be curious what your revenue and costs are. It may be a matter of expanding too quickly, expanding into an over-served market, too big of a loan-hole, or all of the above.

[Pogo]

Well, I sold one of my SPorts stores for $180,000 since I was only focusing on upgrading/marketing the other one (currently at like 30M marketing and 130m^2 of space). That marketing was just recently upgraded though so perhaps I'll get closer to a balance.

I have two 10m^2 factories though. I built the second one to be able to sell two types of products continually, but they're both sports factories (I haven't been able to afford materials to start making high quality golf clubs yet). I should perhaps think about selling one of those and at least making sure I get into the red with the throughput of one product.

[Gutsball]

I have two 10m^2 factories though. I built the second one to be able to sell two types of products continually, but they're both sports factories (I haven't been able to afford materials to start making high quality golf clubs yet). I should perhaps think about selling one of those and at least making sure I get into the red with the throughput of one product.

I thought I read in the forum it costs more in tax and labor to own two factories of the same type instead of expanding a single factory. That might be why your expenses are greater than your revenue. I have my factories around 130m and they produce quite enough to make up their expenses.

[Pogo]

I'm gonna go ahead and sell one factory and see if I can't expand my sales enough to saturate my production line before expanding the remaining factory.

[Gutsball]

One thing you might consider is find a product your factory makes that is not on the import market and sell it on B2B instead of your store. You can quickly make revenue selling in bulk to people trying to stock their stores.

[Pogo]

Nobody wants tennis balls.

[Gutsball]

I took a glance and that might be a tight market. You have human competition with quality and also the import market. You might want to diversify into other sports gear. Looking at the EOSpedia it looks like bicycle helmets and bow sets are in demand and might have some decent margins. If you can undercut the import market you could get some sales there. The more variety your sports store has gives you more customers. Are you just selling tennis balls?

[Pogo]

Yeah well, the demand was in the teens when I started.

[JFrazer]

Sporting Goods demand has apparently been adjusted. Your stores may be behaving much better today.

[paul_chambers]

Well SomethingAwful just bought out every item on the B2B prompting this from the dev:

Looked like some people had a "fun" weekend.

Since I look at all the "player generated actions" as attempts to FORCE me to change my to-do list for a game in beta, here's what I'll do, and I will not be fair.

I've made the decision to cancel my plan to migrate the DB from ratjoy.com to capitalism-online.com. Once the server is up there, everyone there will start anew. The game on ratjoy.com will still remain and act as an "experimental world" where changes are sudden and exploits are rampant, and the corrupt president (me) can "exile" anyone and "shutdown" any companies at will.

Any attempt to disagree to this announcement may get you silenced.

UPDATE:
I'm changing the admin interface today instead of changing the code to move to the new server, when this is done any company involved will be dissolved, players will be jailed, and some IPs will be banned.

[JFrazer]

There's a nice little exploit that some people are using the generate billions in free money (288 billion for one of the large offenders). It involves issues, buying, and reissuing stocks to artificially raise the share price (50833% for one company) and then dumping all the shares in the hands of the robo-buyers to cash in.

It's annoying that there are always a subset of people who make it their mission in life to find an exploit whatever they can to destroy a game. I mean, is that "fun" for them?

I purposefully avoided purchasing any IPOs this week to make sure I didn't get sucked into a company that's exploiting the logic hole.

[Ratan Joyce]

There's a nice little exploit that some people are using the generate billions in free money (288 billion for one of the large offenders). It involves issues, buying, and reissuing stocks to artificially raise the share price (50833% for one company) and then dumping all the shares in the hands of the robo-buyers to cash in.

It's annoying that there are always a subset of people who make it their mission in life to find an exploit whatever they can to destroy a game. I mean, is that "fun" for them?

I purposefully avoided purchasing any IPOs this week to make sure I didn't get sucked into a company that's exploiting the logic hole.

It's more complicated than that when they exploited the issue - since no new shares may be released without players owning at least 80% of them, they had to use the B2B to launder money illegally to their private companies as well to get the cash into their own hands.

Please let me know if anyone here got jailed because of the issue and being unfair as I am, I'd try to get you out if you're from here.

[Eric Majkut]

What's up with the stock market? Looks like everything took a huge dip this morning.

[JFrazer]

It's more complicated than that when they exploited the issue - since no new shares may be released without players owning at least 80% of them, they had to use the B2B to launder money illegally to their private companies as well to get the cash into their own hands.

Please let me know if anyone here got jailed because of the issue and being unfair as I am, I'd try to get you out if you're from here.

I've managed to avoid getting pulled into any of the skyrocketing IPOs. Been making a majority of my profits from JCP, which, since you're like the #3 owner, I'm guessing is a safe company to invest in. :)

I've been pretty cautious with the game up until yesterday. I spun off a new company to produce furniture and electronics. Threw $40mil and 1k influence into it to get it up and running pretty quickly.

I'm so into this game it's not even funny. With the queuing system in place, you don't have to spend a ton of time playing it to be successful. The folks concentrating on exploiting the system are annoying, but unless they do something silly (like flood the market with extremely low-priced goods, or buy everything on the B2B), they really don't affect my enjoyment of the game. I'm spending way more time playing than I need to. It's just fun to me to comb the B2B, adjust my prices, track supply and demand to see if I need to shift products, etc...

[Rod Humble]

Likiewise I am loving this game.

[Ratan Joyce]

The new server will open on 6/1 at capitalism-online.com. The current server on ratjoy.com will remain as test server. The new server will start with only the core of the game - factory/store/R&D/B2B. No stock market or IPO. Bonus will be limited to 5% instead of 20%.

[JFrazer]

Looking forward to starting over without the stock market in place. Some folks running around with all that free money kinda disrupted things for a bit.

The new store interface is really great. The transition to shelves makes managing large stores (supermarket, farmers market) a lot less tedious.

I'm still amazed how you can organically grow your business from a small number of specialty items to an empire selling in several sectors. I spun off a new company (Noisewater Lumber) figuring I'd serve the high-demand, low supply paper and furniture markets. Having a prospector R&D and only using it for lumber and charcoal seemed wasteful, so I started up a mine and started creating raw materials for sale on the B2B. Having the mine in place gave me access to silica and tungsten for integrated circuts, which are used in some of the lower supplied furniture (fish tanks, clocks). What the heck, let's fire up an electronics factory and make circuts! I can use some for my furniture and B2B the rest. Well dang, my office supply store can also sell computers and TVs, and I have this handy electronics store now...

Suddenly the Noisewater Lumber Company has grown from a supplier of high quality hand crafted Amish furniture into an electronics super store.

[Fishbreath]

I could probably start branching out, but so far it seems like there's plenty of money to be had for a wee, privately-held firm like Vought Co. in the raw glass and chemicals market. Particularly glass, though-- there aren't many prices it won't sell at on the B2B market.

[Pogo]

This is good news. I let my failing business just sorta lapse. I have no idea how large my bank loans are right now to pay for maintenance but I'm sure it's a ludicrous amount (relatively).

[Rod Humble]

Cant wait. I just sold up my toy store for a cool $62M it was getting too much hassle to maintain. Cant wait to start on the new server with no stock market stuff. Should be fun.

[JFrazer]

Today's the big day for the capitalism-online.com version of the game. Good time to get in on the ground floor for anyone looking to try the game out. Server opens in ~9 hours.

[Strollen]

I fired up capitalism-online yesterday after a few month break. Unfortunately the game momentum really seems to have slowed/stalled.

Ratjoy/Scott seems doesn't seem to very active any more at the new server population is quite small maybe a 100 or so players if that many.

They have implemented some good changes restricting a single store from selling no more than 8 items which seems like a good idea (although it tends to focus people into a vertical integration model). The also killed the stock market which obviously was huge source of exploits, and perhaps isn't actually needed in this game.

Are any Qt3 people still playing?

[GatInDaHat]

Nah I bailed when he threw a little strop and decided do-overs for everyone, reneging on promises of account continuation. "NO CHAR WIPE!", still on the main page.

[Fishbreath]

I'm still going over at the old site, but eh.

[Eric Majkut]

Still playing but the game feels a bit directionless at this point. What's the point of my dude having personal money if there's no more stock market?

[eliandi]

I've been playing, but today the site seems down