Official News page 5

NEW COMPANY STRUCTURE: THE IMPLICATIONS FOR OTHER RANKS

by Hazed

Alan is working on a major change to the rank of Industrialist, which will change the way companies work at that level. I'll give you full details of how the new-style companies work when the code is ready to be released, but meanwhile there are a couple of ways in which the changes will affect other ranks, which you need to be warned about in advance.

Right now, when a company IPOs, any warehouses owned by the player are converted to depots, and also converted to extra shares in the company. The new-style companies will be private companies, and shares will not be available on the open market. Instead of an IPO, the companies will be set up and shares sold by agreement. So warehouses won't turn into depots, nor will they convert into shares. Instead, you will have to sell all your warehouses before you promote.

For those going through the lower ranks right now: if you are a Merchant, there is no point buying a warehouse on every single planet, so that you can benefit from the conversion to shares. If you've already done this, you should probably sell them again before you promote to Trader.

Traders who have already bought themselves a vast property portfolio, building a warehouse on every square inch of free land they can, won't be able to sell them - but it's going to be at least a couple of weeks until the new code goes in, so you have time to promote and become the CEO of an old-style company. Besides, we will probably put some new code in so that Traders can sell the goods in their warehouses, if they haven't promoted before the companies change.

This change means that warehouses will no longer be bought simply to store up potential profits and shares for a company, but will resume their original - and true - use; a place to store goods that you don't want to sell right away. Given that you cannot teleport with goods in your ship, having a handy warehouse to stuff them into will always be important.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page