Financial Services!!!! (Little Upsilon)

They dropped the Financial Service to $15T???!!!
what the hell!! Did I miss the memo? I know they said they were going to drop but atleast they should give us the exact dates a few days prior. This is like a landlord telling their renter that they are going to sell the house one day and then a month later the renter wakes up and the house was sold the night before and they have 2 weeks(most times 30 days here) to vacate!
Better notice should be served. Thanks for the respect.
disgruntled postal worker
now where did I put my AK47?

honestly, thats probably my only gripe with W3C. most of the changes i can live with, or figure out a work around... but it is like you said, they make changes with out telling any one... some they do, some they don't. allot of this uprising would have been avoided by simply letting people know... "on tuesday, we are going to increase staffing requirements for these corporation types..." or "we are changing the way quality works, this is what you should expect..." we'd still be angry, but not quite as enraged...

making the changes to financial services, was expected, and unwelcome, but the way they surprise us with these changes... is sneaky, at best, or malicious at worst...

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

The amount of financial services free cash in countries will decline gradually from the current 20T to 5 T. The change will be gradual and will take 6 months to complete.<!-/Quote-!>

Game News, December 23, 2008


5T

lol 5T.

yeah, we all knew it was going to happen, the "when" part could be a little more clear, ie, when they change it, they should give us a date...

W3C can make all the changes they want. It's their game. We also have choices. Play or don't play. Pay or don't pay.

Not too long ago, I used to spend a lot of GC just to acquire the needed weapons and assets needed to defend my empire. Now that I have the financial resources to adequately defend my empire without spending GC, I find myself in a position where I will be penalized for having the cash on hand.

I ask myself what my countries will get for the cost of the financial services. I come up with "nothing" for an answer.

Jozi may ask how much cash I might need to defend my empire or federation. I remember one war in 2008 that cost me 50T in expanded ammunition and weapons and lost revenue from reduced production in my corporations while my manpower was made available for military mobilization.

I've enjoyed this game for a long time and had hopes of playing it for an even longer time. The recent changes and events are weighing heavily on my mind.

John.
If you don't understand the writing on the wall and you don't enjoy, why are you here?
I saw this explained many times and you too.

You can exchange your cash into gold coins now and you will not pay a penny in financial services.
if you need cash later, you can change back whatever you need. it is that simple.
so why do you pretend not to understand.

In the process, you will either exchange for exactly the same price or you may get a bit more or a bit less. the average will be the same.

and of course they will make all the changes they want and this one was made clear a long time ago and they offered gold coins to help you do it fast.

rich countries will remain rich in gold coins. I am. I have 3000+ gold coins from these transactions.

new players, will not be faced with old players with 2000T in cash.
it is a technical difference but you seem to prefer crying about it.

I love it. i have 3000 gold coins and they will take me a long way.
I could get $ 150 for these coins but I prefer to use them instead.

You don't have to exchange. I wouldn't know any reason why not but you can refuse but then, pay the financial services that you could easily prevent.

There are enough real issues here we should have corrected. why do you need to complain about something that is plain trivial. Is it because everybody does? Do you know at all?

Romeo,
Over the course of the last year I have been being a good simcitizen and purchasing GC with my extra cash. I purchased 1000GC and in the process I have \b {LOST 250T} now I lost this much because I was forced to pay 15T for 20 coins to avoid financial fees. Even If I were to have bought them for the price at the time which was 560B per coin I still would have lost 100T. At the current prices and the 460B/GC price I lost out on 217.4GC. At the price I was FORCED to pay I lost 543.5GC. That being said, tell me what advantage it was to me to purchase these GC?

January 4, 2009 I decided to cash out so that I could use the money to renew by March 22, 2009. I am still awaiting my $25. I kindly messaged Tom as well as the Finance Department and asked them to either send me the $25 or just to give me back my 500GC. So far it has had no avail, and I have not heard back from them. Although when I look at Cash Transactions it says that W3C has indeed paid me and that I have received the money. So right now I am out 500GC or $25 from cashing out.

In total I am out between 717.4 and 1043.5 Gold Coins.

With Regards,
Dragoon

Jack.

I paid 2.750 for 5 gold coins and did it many times. I never paid 15T for 20 gold coins. (I did but this was years ago when all prices where 5 times higher.).

I think that the money I will now get for a gold coin might be less then I had before but as prices went down by a factor of 2 in the past two months and a factor of 4 in the past year and salaries down by a factor of 5 in total, and a factor of 2 in the past several months, I am better off with the purchsing power of the money one gold coin will give me now compared to what it was before.

If you did not exchange and lost some money on the financial services, what is the percentage compared to the decline in the price of everything.

ammunition is now less than half of what it was. should we give them half of our cash back?
If they want to take our money away, why did they reduce the base price of everything and salaries too?
You may have been robbed. I was not.

I hope all this will stop soon because it is confusing many people, but I understand why they do it and I hope it is done and over with.

It is very hard to explain and they failed in getting the message through although they did try.
I would not have done it but it did not change the logic of my game, never destroyed my economy, I did not panic because I had some more or less workers of this or another type and it always leveled off.

We had here so many complaintrs about it and now it is gone. are we going to panic about these details? I can, like I did before, move my country from rank 1500 up very very quickly, even faster than I could before and I can do the right things, the same things I did before and it works and if you know how to tune some of these parameters, you get there quickly and I will not come here to cry about a shortage of 20.000 mid level workers. I will just solve it, or rather wait a day and it will solve itself.

Instead i think we should explain to these guys that we need more details on many of the numbers they show us so we understand better what happens. They could show us all the cash changing transactions that happen each month so we know how our cash went from what it was at the start of the month to what it is at the end of the month.

This is just one example.
This will be better than the issue of financial services that everyone can easily escape.

Is Romeo Tom Willard's multi? Because I honestly cannot tell...

Romeo,
I will answer you after I get an up-to-date exchange rate with gamemaster.

Who was crying? I have not seen any harm in countries maintaing large amount of cash. Why does W3C wish for us to deplete our cash reserve? Are they hoping to profit from the trading? If I see I will be able to buy game money back same exchange rate I would quickly do so. Up to now I have found I would lose in the exchange.

About a week ago I decided to launch an attack on the White Giant countries chart. Before that I could not comprehend any reason for reducing cash levels.

Moving a few trillion $SC into my main country squeezed a few points on the asset index. I believe the asset index is added to the country score. If you are only few points behind the number one seat it would be prudent to sell 30 gc, perhaps a lot more. Paying the finance charge for a few months would not be a serious expense.

If financial services did not exist the asset index would be the only index that did not cost something. Countries with large cash piles block a spot on the ranking chart.

correction. The finance index pays you. But other than that the asset index would be the only index that does not cost you. The finance index also has a max limit. Finance is often lowered when you do something to raise another index.

IF there is a cap on max cash one "ought" to have, THEN cash level "ought" not to influence the score.

the cash is for players to play with.

to loan out, to brag about, to take away from someone else, to buy commodities, shares or weapons and ammunition, which then can be traded further, stored, consumed or destroyed ~ played with.

i suspect this ability of cash many find as fun, as integral part of the game.

it was argued, by the GM, in past that this exact aspect of cash is not desired. its not desired for player to play around with THEIR cash, allegedly because it gives them too much power for influencing the world market for example.

such reasoning is ill, as it matters not if one plays with chunks of cash in several steps, in several exchanges for/from Gold coins, or if one has such cash available at all times. the end result will be the same, just with lower cash allowances the whole procedure will be more bother.

personally i find it insane that on one hand the GM sells me in-game cash for real cash, then tries to prevent me to play around with it.

you seen nothing yet Keith :P

I am not going to give up my cash and playing around with it is fun. I don't think this is the point here.

I read a discussion about the price of Jeeps on the forum and it was far too high. what is high?
A jeep costs 5 millions? this is a joke. we sometimes see pricing that does not make sense to us. but then, if you have 10T sitting in the bank, who cares? 10T can buy 2 million Jeeps at 5 millions each.

I would prefer to have a jeep for 500.000 and 2T in cash. It will buy me 4 million Jeeps and a price of 500.000 looks more reasonable to me.

It is not the number of zeros that counts but what we can do with the money. This is where we should look at and if they reduce our purchasing power, then we really have a problem. I don't see here anyone who ever discussed this or checked if our purchasing power is declining or not while this is what can make us poorer.

I still think they should stop these rteductions anyway. obviously people are confused and this is reason enough. Look what we are talking about while we have no idea if it is making any difference at all.

Romeo,
I have thought about my reply to you from yesterday.

I took the wrong approach. I thought about what you said about the crying and the complaining because other are complaining.

I finally realize why I am commenting on this issue. It's because the change is being forced on us and we don't upderstand exactly why the change is NEEDED. If W3C has a game change planned that is unworkable with high cash levels, for goodness explain it to us in terms that make sense.

Until the reason is properly explained, I have come up with my own conclusing why W3C wants us to accept the change and the way I see it now it is just another way of taking assets from the players. Are they now happy enough with the 30GC I willingly pay to play the game every month, do they really want to profit from the cost of exchanging my money back and forth from GC to game cash.

Damn Romeo, are you a GM in disguise? It doesn't matter what anyone says, you will either dismiss it, discount, or, if worst comes to worse, simply say you like it better that way? Like ANYONE gives a damn what you like? Particularly W3C? They have shown time and time again they care little or nothing about what the community in general thinks.

Oh, that made me realize, there is something someone like about you. W3C just loves the way you pucker up and plant fat ones on their rear ends.

You missed one fact. There are more than 2 choices. You and everyone else always seems to think there are binary choices based on if you like or don't like the game. (Pay or leave.) Maybe I simply do not like some things about the game. Maybe I don't like the game, but see potential. Whatever. The point is that there are people willing and able to work AND PAY to make the game better and W3C clearly cares nothing about the vast majority of those people. W3C even modifies the game so that actions people can take in the game to possible get W3Cs attention become impossible.

W3C will get no more of my money. If I can make enough GCs to continue playing, great. If I can do anything to hurt W3Cs income until I feel they are actually listening to me, even better.

John, I am not sure exactly why they want cash down.
I know what they said repeatedly.
They want everything to go down by some factor and make amounts smaller and closer to what people expect.

they should have shaved off a zero from everything at the same time but this they say is technically impossible.

I think this whole thing is a non issue. we accused them of doing so to take over the debt market. then they cut the interest they recieve on loans by the world bank by 2 to 1. it is now 15%.
do they want to make money on loans or not?
now you say they want to make money on the exchange.
is anyone exchanging with the gamemaster. Look into the cash market, most of the trading is between us and they are no party. so where is the profit.

By exchanging thousands of gold coins for our cash, they gave us so many gold coins, I would think that none of the old timers here needs to purchase gold coins. I don't need any in the coming years.

so here too they shot themselves in the foot.

I don't believe this is about money. I could invent 10 better things they can do for more money. This is cumbersome and takes months because of all these small changes.

It is either what they say it is or it more more complex.

I have been here very long as I said before and I do trust them. You obviously not.

Romeo,

Although I agree with you in general, I feel I need to add for objectivity reason:

GCs are not freely convertible to cash.
There is a limit how many GCs you can convert to cash over period of time and I think (but not sure) it is 2GC per game month cumulative to 200GC, at least for enterprises. I found that exploiting corporation transfer via stock: I transferred about 250 corps from one ent to another in a week and found I can no longer cover debt of purchasing (target) enterprise because I hit GC conversion limit. Clearly, it is non-issue for someone who have a friend or two, but why would they make such limitation that can be so easily worked around?

But overall I agree with you and I would like to give them benefit of the doubt. I found their direction is quite reasonable and understandable. The only beef I have they leave loopholes that can be exploited all steps on a way.

FredMark
In the past we accused W3C on this forum of introducing a way for someone with real cash, to buy their way to the top.

I think I was one of the first who exploited the so called fast track as they called it and spent many gold coins and got a high score quickly.
I am doing it again now.

we wanted them at the time to reduce the amount of money someone could invest.
they wanted to create a way for new player to catch up.
so here is where all this got us.

you can do it but not all the way although I think they increased the limits without telling us as they often do. I say that because I can spend more gold coins than I can remember from last round and I got from rank 1500+ to 257 in a week or so. I don't know if this is fair but it sure cost me some gold coins.

IF environment is to be competitive environment, THEN it's not fair no matter what kind of argument is used to defend it.

question is if this game is, or rather is designed to be, such environment, and here my opinion is that it is not.

this is not environment for those who like to compete. this is environment for those who like to hoard.

Zdenek,

Financial services will not prevent you from hoarding cash or playing with lots of cash. It just costs a little to do it.

A business game set up with players starting as a CEO in a corporation would have players thinking that $800,000,000 monthly profits made their corporations filthy rich. A game could be established where you start as a garage business and then build up. Millionaires would be top players and think they were rich.

The important thing is how much more you have. It is not how much you have. Financial services ensure that you can have a huge pile and can be confident you won't find an inactive country with 3 times as much.

no, they do not prevent me from anything. perhaps its my English and i should have used .. discourage instead of prevent.

the bottom line, to me, is that, and as i said i go by what was said on this board by Tom Willard, the game does not want me to have large stockpiles of cash lying around, and to me its just a bother not a solution to anything, or at least i dont see it.

it does not prevent me, but it will make me spent time and energy on something i consider as waste of time.