On 12/2/2023 at 1:58 AM, Quartermaster said:
shits and giggles till the station goes poor at the worse timing
Probably the job would be held at a higher standard though, since the person would be handling your money…
See, you’re getting it.
It would be a fun role for someone to play. It could add a new practical element to financing departments of the ship. And it could add extra, dynamic, drama to the station as well. I think all three of these elements are important things for new jobs to be able to do.
You could imagine the Broker coming in to save the day if a department is low on funds and invests well and gets some good money for the station.
But, you could also imagine a fair amount of drama if that situation backfires and the Broker ends up loosing the department everything if the investment falls apart.
Sense the financial instruments would be programmed to imitate the actual markets (though at a quicker speed to keep up with how fast paced the game can be) the Broker could try a few things.
The Broker could try investing in a ‘slow and steady’ stock that makes a little profit over a long period of time. Or, the Broker could try to invest in a stock that has been showing higher fluctuation; hoping to buy in on a downturn and turn over once the stock picks up.
The whole idea would be to bring the fun of investing to a job role on Space Station 14.
I’m not a programmer, but I wouldn’t imagine this would be the hardest thing to make. At least in a simple form to start out with.
I have just tried Frontier Station and they already have a Space ATM where you can deposit and withdraw Spesos from. They also have vending machines that charge money. I honestly don’t know why vanilla SS14 doesn’t make more use of the Spesos like this and have a more detailed, actual, Station economy already.
So, the Computer Investing Console would essentially function like Frontier’s Space ATM. The main differences is instead of just having your own account you could deposit money into multiple accounts that you can type in a label for. (That way you could label them in a way that makes most sense. For either a department or individual people.) Instead of the Spesos just sitting there collecting dust; you could tie them to purchases of Space Stocks and Space Crypto. All these would be creative, fun names that would mimic Stocks and Crypto Currencies. Each of these would be tied to an algorithm that would simulate realistic price movements. (Just sped up for Station Time. So, instead of having to wait a 24-48 hours for an interesting movement, you’d just wait like 5 or 10 minutes.) Then you could sell back the Stocks and Crypto and make the profit or loss in Spesos. I think out of everything, a decent algorithm to handle these price movements would be the most difficult thing to program. Though, not that hard though. But, again, I’m not a programmer.
This idea came to me because I recently got into Stock and Crypto investing on my app and have been having fun with it. This got me to thinking, this would be cool to recreate in SS14 as a new job. I think it would have a lot more effect on the station if vanilla SS14 had more of an economy like Frontier Station has. But, even with what is in SS14 right now it would still matter.
Why doesn’t SS14 do more with Spesos? They’re kind of just there and you can’t really do a whole lot with them right now. In SS14 the Vending Machines are free, the Beer is free, almost everything is free. It makes Spesos a lot less useful than they could be if everything were priced like Frontier Station does.