What would attract you to a corporate faction?

[Belco]

question here is, what would attract you to being in a corporate faction instead of being an indy trader?

you'd probably make less money working for a corporation, having to ship their commodities, less flexibility, but what would make it worthwhile for you?

-the chance of escorts?
-convoys?
-events?
-a higher level of RP?
-contributing your profits to a bank and getting a salary so you could ship food and oxygen for a profit as long as there's still some valuable runs being done?
-company stock options?
-starting funds or even being given a set-up ship to trade in?
-just having a tag in front of your name?

just having a poke around for ideas to improve trading factions, and that list isn't complete, throw up some more ideas if you have any.

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Ingame: Luxury Liner PGL-Winfield | Sal_Paradise | Victor.Fane

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[Quorg]

I'd like to hear these, too.

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ATTENTION SMUGGLERS
The Midnight Express: A Slaver <strike>who doesn't completely realize what he's doing.</strike> (video)

Quorg, you're officially a moron.

...mongs like Quorg being like a malignant little cancer...

Way to be useless, Quorg.

[TYHPilot]

Convoys would be awesome a single bomber or GB would have a hard time hitting more than 2 ships at a time. Imagine seeing a line of trains arriving at trade lanes. Really cool in game event I feel for anyone to watch.

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Black|Sails

Kishiro Technologies

[Montezuma/Kukulcan]

Well, i gave up indy trading for Bowex a while ago (sold my zoner whale about a week or so ago, as it sat unused for ages), and i can say this, you will make at least as much if not more money in a trade faction than you will ever do if you are in indy. This is mainly due to the fact that indy trading is so hard because it is a boring grind, corp trading (or at least Bowex) is great fun when there are a few of your faction on, and it makes trading fun, and frun trading is profitable trading (cos you can trade for days and not be bored).

Plus the fact that trading factions usually insist on a higher level of RP and such, which also contributes to the fun and easyness of making money.

I can understand why faction trading can be intimidating to new people and indies, but just save up a hundred mil or however much you need for a good transport, and apply to one, you will soon find that there are few to no downsides.

In regards to convoys, if you are pirating and you see a few Bowex trade ships heading your way, run, or prepare to feel the wrath of 4 angry shires.

[/propaganda]

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[Angelfire]

Convoys = Win
Ar Pee = Win
Forum Life = Win
Pooled Resource = Win
Player Interaction = Win
Skype Chats = Win
Shared Routes = Win

Corporate Trading = Epic Win.

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The Chronicles of Angelfire

[Belco]

yeah i really do like the pooled resource idea, it does alot to change a faction from being some indy traders with tags on their names to being an actual corporation.
i'm particularly interested to know how people feel about throwing your hard earned profits in a bank and getting a weekly salary that's probably less then what you earned.
like i said, it means that you could run a high profit route and lose some money by being paid less then the profit of the route, but then it lets you run a really low profit route like food or water or say, for planetform, terraforming gasses and still make a reasonable amount of money.

problem is a lot of peoples trading characters are just there to finance their PEW PEW PEW and really dont want to be giving away their hard earned cash.

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Ingame: Luxury Liner PGL-Winfield | Sal_Paradise | Victor.Fane

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[Angelfire]

Usually the hard earned cash is not given away.

A membership fee of 10 or more million per week is added to the pot. Loans for Vessels are given but with interest.

The faction funds your initial Vessel while you put in an application for a Capital transport.

When you pay the loan, you replenish Faction funds but also increase the pool which enables the faction to recruit and fund more set ups.

Usually 10 mil is one run or so on a Capital Transport so it's not a big sacrifice for all the Wins you receive in return.

Also:
If the faction RP is really good, players tend to give more freely into the pool and even set up new recruits from their own resources.

When you have ten or more Traders in your faction, you start seeing massive increases in your company pool.

Example:
I Started Sirius-Wide on the USA server. Started from scratch with only 1 Adv Train. After about 1 month we had about 7 members and almost a billion in the bank. (Plus Royal Liners at House planets).

The toughest parts about trading are: finding a great route, getting a ship that has enough cargo space for good Net yield and dealing with profit sapping pirates.

When you have 3 or 4 Trains with a strong escort (Cost per gun comes down when the cost is split), A route given to you on a platter with a massive Trading ship... the game changes dramatically!

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The Chronicles of Angelfire

[Benjamin]

In terms of actual trading, going it whilst in group chat is around 600% more bearable.


As for pooled money, I'm in two minds. I've always thought it was a turn-off for a lot of players - I think paying money to the faction and having to start off in a small ship were/are the two biggest factors for people to avoid corp factions, and I specifically went out to avoid them with my own little outfit. But at the same time, having pooled money is great. I got lucky and had a few ridiculously huge donations from a couple of my members, and now Cryer sits on a giant stack of money and a fleet of shared ships which can be made available to the new players to use instead of scraping about in a rhino or gull.

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Join Cryer Pharmaceuticals

[Drake]

When it comes to faction members you trust, having some max-sized transports (Adv. Trains, or whatever) on a couple shared accounts helps people enormously. They can earn money for their own transport, rather than receiving a loan, or just continue using the shared trader for their money-making needs if their primary character in the faction is an escort or pure RP character. This has worked out very well for Cryer.

Edit: Curse you, ninja.

[Benjamin]

Yeah I've gotta say, when I'm trying to bully someone in to joining Cryer, it's normally a pretty tame response until the shared A-Trains get mentioned. Like you said, it lets people focus on other aspects of the corp, knowing that there's some faceless A-Train for them to use if they ever want to/need to/feel like grinding out some woolongs.

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Join Cryer Pharmaceuticals