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Monday, March 2, 2009 - 02:23 pm  You can't raise the Cash of corporations over 45.00B SC$. 
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 12:44 am Please please explain why you need to raise cash in a corporation above 30B. (plus any debt the corporation may have). (let alone 45B). If you can, we will immediately raise the limit.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 12:46 am Mr Willard you need to know this. The big problem that I have with the lower cash limits in corporations is the fact that I have hundreds of corporations. There are several types of corporations that will need cash influx from time to time and can take out loans very quickly. At other times these corporations can be very profitable. I am very upset that the game has pushed the limit down from $75,000 B to $45,000B as this has casued some of these corporations to get shut down when I did not log in soon enough to pay off the debts. Which leads me to another point that I have noticed the game is closing corporations at a much lower debt level. I recall in the past I have had corporations take out as much as $200,000B in loans and still not be at risk of closing, now they get closed at as low as $40,000B or $45,000B. This is very costly when you have a fully upgraded corporation that due to the market has to take a few loans and than bang it is shut down. I managed fairly well with the $75,000 B limit. Note also that when the corporations are first built they have 100,000B$. So there might be 2 ways to fix this 1. raise the limit again. 2. allow for the corporations to stay open at the higher debt limit Nute Gunray
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 12:50 am Hmm. I'll give you an example on LU. Right now the aircraft fuel market is in surplus. It is a cyclical product. Private corporations that produce aircraft fuel use many billions of supplies alone each month. When they order supplies, it is very easy for them to take out loans from 30B. Because the market is in high surplus, it may also be three or four months before they sell products (unless you seriously expect CEOs to spend hours each day micromanaging trade strategies). So, if a CEO on LU actually has a life and leaves simcountry alone for 24 hours, he finds that his aircraft fuel corps have 10B in cash and 30B in loans when he comes back. Before it was possible for a private corporation to accumulate enough cash in good times to have a cash buffer for the bad. No longer. If you walk away from the keyboard, you will have loans. And lo, those loans will trigger support functions. And then corps will experience workers shortages because their salaries were reduced below competitive levels. Of course CEOs could just close all cyclical corps. Then who would manufacture gasoline, aircraft fuel, production plants, etc? Many of these products are essential to the functioning of the military or economy. How dense are you, Tom?
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 12:57 am If this is true (and $30B??! that's really insane) CEO's and countries both need the ability to approve or cancel any incoming loans WITHOUT penalty. Keith and Nute are quite correct, players will be hit with loans without even seeing them coming at them. Personally, I thought it was best when they were set to $50B per corp. A good enough figure that it could stave off loans that might chew up $20-40B. It gave a $10B cushion that helped avoid unnecessary loans.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:01 am I used the 30B number because after the mass-auto-transfer that reduced my corps from 150+B and dumped 30T cash in each of my LU ceos, most of my corps were left with 30-35B. My cyclicals (esp aircraft fuel) were left with around 10B and loans to pay off. Very, very good for a complete and utter lack of notice that cash was going to be removed from corps and dumped in enterprise coffers, in the game news.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:07 am Everything that has been said here is 100% true. Corporations NEED a buffer of cash to keep them from collapsing. If there is no cash, they take loans. The loan limit has apparently also been lowered, so now there is a real danger in corporations collapsing. This particularly applies to the cyclical corporations mentioned above that go through good times for a while, then bad times for a while. Why should all of my gasoline and aircraft fuel corporations (and lately, electric power...) collapse? Note that I am not complaining because they lose money sometimes, I am complaining because you make it very and needlessly difficult for me to keep them afloat during these downturns. Raise the cash limit. Loans are bad. Loans make otherwise valuable corporations collapse. Or, they force salary decreases because the corporation has debt and is making losses. Here's another thing that makes no damn sense whatsoever. How do you figure that lowering my salaries and causing all of my workers to leave will improve my profitability? Does that make sense? I'm losing money so let's drop salaries and lose some more. Pouring gasoline on a fire is not the logical way to put it out.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:14 am We have announced the reduction in cash in corporations on the game news. I did not expect even one message explaining why you need more than 30B. now i got 4 (and 2 more with no content). I will have a good look into it tomorrow morning. I will look into some corporations that make a product with a surplus on the market and see how they cope. with declining prices of raw materials, 45B now is comparable to 90B several months ago but I am willing to look more carefully into it. In the mean time, you can move cash very quickly into corporations. The limit is not 45B. It is 45B+the debt of the corporation. If one of you can give me a name of a corporation-country/enterprise and world it will help. The limit in state corporations is 50B and no one ever complained????
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:19 am Expenses in state corporations are lower because they do not have "country resources used." Therefore their cash levels deplete slower and they are somewhat more stable (can survive a bit longer while you're afk) in downturns. The severe reductions in cash limits severely hamper enterprises especially, especially considering before cash could accumulate almost indefinitely in enterprise corporations, thus providing lots of insulation from downturns. Suddenly removing ALL of this cash at once led to some very nasty surprises.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:24 am Corporations in enterprises should have enough cash to survive a long time with no intervention. Unlimited cash levels are not needed. The enterprise should have the cash to provide when needed. a corporation should not fall into debt too quickly and the "penalty"when paying back debt is indeed obsolete. we will remove it. if 45B + debt is too low, we will raise it back as I promised here.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:26 am Tom, Please inspect all of my CEO and see for yourself the devastation. Hellana II GR Joinrow GR Craterus LU Kratisto LU ATG GROW INC FB I am getting killed by debt bombs. Oh, and when you look take a look at how many loans I have paid off recently. Please help!! ATG
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:29 am So enterprises on LU have to login every game month, interrupting their sleep, just to keep their cash levels stable? Example. Aircraft fuel in surplus. Four months of unsold product accumulate. All product sells in one month. The vast majority of this money is auto-transferred to the enterprise. Next game month, corp pays country resources with cash it just transferred to the enterprise (and maybe has the misfortune of ordering supplies), thereby taking out 50B or so in loans. All this can happen while I am SLEEPING. To say nothing of WORKING. A very good reason to allow CEO corps to have more cash (like, 100B or so), because state corps will NEVER have to pay 20+B of country resources used at the same time they try to order supplies, the month AFTER it transfers all of its revenue out to reduce cash to the fiat GM-imposed ceiling. Same logic applies even more to publics (which is why I don't build cyclical public corps).
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:38 am As you can imagine, I will not look at all the corporations in ALL the countries. give me one corporation, owned by an enterprise that suffered because of the 45B limit in the past day or so and is davastated. I am willing to beleive that 45B might be too low but the limit was 60B just recently and if corporations are davastated so quickly, you might consider to let them go. Corporations should not burn your cash. They should make cash. There are CEOs in each world, making a profit after all cost,tax and everything, of close to 1 Trillion per game month! Some of them are crying and want much more. Also many who make 300B and more per game month. There are many many countries making between 50B and 300B per game month in profit. Empires may a multiple of that. how come you are davastated? are you making some changes to produce products that are always short? upgrade products? There are three and they have never seen any surplus in the past year. real year that is. Some weapons and ammunition are always short and many other products too. Come on guys, make money instead of burning it.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:46 am Keith, if you have a corporation that goes from 45B to a debt of 30B in a single game month than yes. Either get up at night and give it some cash or even better, close it and you don't need to burn your cash. a corporation with a loss of 15B or so per game year will bankrupt anyway. this is unchanged for two years. Raw material use is less than 10B per game year. Payments to the country is never more than 40% of revenue which is less than 10B per game month so the contribution is not 20B but rather 4B if revenue is 10B. In such a case, with revenue at 10B, the corporation makes a good profit and does not need any cash infusions. You talk of corporations as cash burners. why do you need them if the burn cash?
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:50 am What's the point of upgrading products anymore, Tom? You've directly nerfed upgrades with your price capping. For several real months before your price capping I had been building corps to produce extremely high-shortage products such as missile interceptors. I stopped when you nerfed the financial incentive (the ability to use aggressive pricing strategies, still sell product, and get PAID correctly) to do so. Why should we close a 400B MV corp, that overall makes profit, because of a temporary downturn? Does Boeing declare bankruptcy every time there is a recession and therefore no demand for its product? I think not. It rides the recession out with existing cash reserves. Same for many large corporations. Otherwise half of the corporations in America would go bankrupt in every recession. Some do, but rarely on the kind of scale of every corp across an entire sector declaring bankruptcy at the same time. If you want examples, look at the aircraft fuel corporations in Evil Woody Thoughts LLC and More Evil Thoughts LLC in LU. I had to pay back many loans for them a day or so after they had had many many billions in cash that you had seen fit to remove from ALL corps. If you cannot be bothered to sort corps by product given the name of a CEO I see no further reason to give you any additional business...but you have annoyed me sufficiently with your obsession to run the game into the ground that I will not play past my membership expiration anyway.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 01:55 am Just to add a detail: A corporation should never have 4 months of unsold products. In the real world they bankrupt. let them go and start one that produces upgrade products. It is Hightech, makes more profit. if you have 4 months unsold than the price is too high. is corporations start lagging on sales, they burn cash and should be closed or even much better, sell at a discount and survive. sell at qual... less 10 to 20 and market less 10. (don't want to type this word). I am really surprised. I have played many countries, some intensively and recently just for testing. my corporations don't fly but never fail. I have set pricing strategy once and never touch them. They are profitable, not to the extreme but they all do OK and they sell everything. If the price is bad, they are making small losses for a period. Nothing shocking.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 02:01 am And for real months I ran my CEOs the same way, Tom. I set my pricing strategies for new corps exactly once. I checked the profit/cash/debt page maybe once every two or three days. Because I set my auto-transfer settings low for enterprises, cash was left in the corps. As a result my cyclical corps survived such downturns without my having to micromanage them. You have now removed the ability for enterprise corporations to accumulate a reserve of cash when times are good. As a result, micromanagement becomes necessary where it was NOT before. Thus reducing enjoyment of the game. ANOTHER reason to keep existing corps through a downturn: it takes FOREVER to raise the salaries and fully upgrade a new corp. The markets can recover more quickly than a new corp can establish itself. I will also point out that for corps such as hospitals, one hospital represents four months' production. And for production plants, one plant represents nearly an entire YEAR'S production. So these corps damn well better be able to have enough cash to get through a year.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 02:06 am Good comparison with US corporations. Nice of you doing it. I was always remided that simcountry is a game. There is hardly any US corporation that had 45B in cash ever. MS has probably 30B. This is un heard of. there is hardly any that has ever anountced 40B loss in a single year. if they do, they bankrupt. In this recession we may see some they will save despite such losses but in Simcountry it is far too common. Quality will not always help you. You should probably have to do some thinking and find out which level is good for you. As I said many times, quality will become a major issue in the future. don't get back to the same nonsense we have witnessed on the forum about it. Instead, read carefully what we explained in our response. In all the heated reactions, no one ever reffered to our explanation. I don think anyone has any additional arguments so they just ignore the reasons we published. there are also alsways, the same people who say amen to anything the leader will shout. This is a low quality discussion and you are welcome to continue it but without my participation.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 02:10 am You are right about the corporations that produce very expensive products. You should consider the price reductions of all materials and of salaries. This reduced the need for cash by 50% in the past months. we will look again at cash needs as I promised. I will also look at the possibility to "convert" corporations, at a cost, to produce a different product, retaining their "development"level.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 02:12 am There is also no US corporation that can order 43B of supplies in a single month, either. Perhaps if you do not wish to listen to the near-unanimous concerns of your player base, you should lose YOUR business. I wonder if Simcountry will survive another year, after everyone's memberships have expired. I predict tumbleweed blowing through the Simcountry server.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 02:15 am Another thing to wonder about: They were shouting about high cost and low income and the financial index declining and levels becoming impossible to reach. we just said that the trend is different and will become visible. Now, when income declined but cost declined much lower and the profit of countries is much higher and the financial index shooting up, no one noticed. even worse, they keep complaining while the numbers in all countries are clear. listening to the shouting has its limits.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 02:35 am You are quite funny. everyone who disliked anything we have done at any point in the past, was telling us that the game will not survive. I know the story, you repeat the same words, same nonsense. In the mean time, we are doing better each month. The number of new players is increasing and more become full members. The current round of developments have already produced results and will be completed shortly with a further improvement of the site. We expect the number of players to increase 30-50% in the coming months with many more full members. There are many new features that some conservative players who know the game from years ago may like or dislike, buy it is clear that the number of new players signing up now, is much larger than ever before. This means that in the eyes of new players we are better than in the eyes of players who joined before. There will always be some details people don't like. We even make some errors. The big picture is just fine, even if some of your corporations make lower profits, it will not kill simcountry. Most players make good profits every single month and their actions in the game make a difference for themselves and they enjoy it. we have a lot of positive feedback and look beyond the crap of some quality issue that is a single feature in a game that has many hundreds of features. you really think that some quality points of some corporations that can restore their profits if they so wish, will kill the game? Our business plan does not depend on the quality of products bought by C3 countries and on the question whether this max quality they purchase constitues a cap on quality or not. If you really think the game is no good for you, you would quit. Some did, and every month, I get many messages from returning players, asking about the old account and telling us they are back. you will be surprised what you find if you come back after one year.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 04:21 am " Please please explain why you need to raise cash in a corporation above 30B. (plus any debt the corporation may have). (let alone 45B). " All of the above. Now Tom, fair is fair. Your question is answered. Please explain to us why you don't want us to have hi cash limits in our corps. You also keep referring these changes as "improvments" I say bullcrap. Not 1 of these "improvments" have made ANY of us happy. I'm afraid I'm with Keith and awhole lot of others on this. I won't be renewing my account. Too much too fast Tom, and it was all for your benefit. Dirt
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 04:30 am If the corporation cash allowance follows the average price of commodities nothing has changed. Since prices of goods are dropping my corporations can buy as much with 45B as they could 2 months ago with 75B. I don't see why prices should drop. I'm also not sure why we ever had a maximum cash allowance. But it does make sense link the cash maximum to commodity prices.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 07:06 am @ Tom - You requested a corp that suffered as a result of changes - DCE Aircraft Fuel 1 - Corp # 1523159 - This past friday was the last time I had logged in and NONE of my corps in Dark Clown Enterprises had any debt, now I have $180B in debt. The need for that limit to be kept at 50 is kinda obvious when I scroll through the list of corps. 60 is the highest and 10 is the lowest. With the limit at 50B, I'm certain I wouldn't have $180B in debt. DCE Aircraft Fuel 1 - Corp # 1523159 might still have fallen into debt as it seems to be the nature with aircraft fuel but I doubt that deep. Here's another reason to stop playing with the limits - 1) it's a GAME, not based upon real life (so who cares if we have $1T in our corps or $1000T in our countries?) and 2) it reduces the amount of time I have to click back and forth to fix problems. Loading pages tends to be slow, the change trade strategies is just plain awful for my CEO. Anything that reduces the amount of time I'm stuck in a click-fest is a major winner of an idea for me.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 08:10 am Tom have you considered that your changes may not be responsible for new players and that word of mouth, advertising, and a growing online mmog community in general may be responsible for increasing numbers of players? Just because you are making changes and the number of players is increasing does not mean they are related.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 10:46 am I had suggested convertible corps several times, and am glad about the possiiblity that this dream will come true. (Now about those trains!) I hope that a conversion will be fairly quick, maybe on the time scale of bulding a new company. And the price should be paid out of corporation cash, which is another reason for a higher cash retention, although Tom, I think you might be thingking a 1 coin fee might be appropriate. I do have a question. Since the sales price of high quality products is limited, what is the point of truly public corporations?
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 08:18 pm We have discussed the cash limit in private corporations this morning and raised it to 60B. I asked yesterday for reasons and got them. thanks. as cash needs will continue to decline, we may come to different conclusions in the future, but for now, 45B seemed too low and we consider it an overshoot. It is already corrected.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 08:52 pm Transferred 4.82T SC$ to 565 corporations. For some corporations it was not necessary to increase their (net) cash above 45.00B SC$. ^^You were saying? Apparently this change is not in effect yet.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 09:10 pm Yeah upon reading this message I went to recap my CEOs and they both tell me the limit is at 45B still. Glad to see that there has been a change of heart though Tom. With Regards, Dragoon
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 09:12 pm Please try again. It is 60B. I made the change myself this morning. I checked again now I really typed 60 and copied to all worlds.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 09:14 pm I tried. it is 45B. something is wrong. I will be back in 5.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 09:14 pm /me rolls eyes Yes. You did change the limit to 60B. But you forgot to change the message.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 09:28 pm good call Tom Willard. thanks for listening.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 09:31 pm There are two properties. one for the cash reduction target level and one for transfers into corporations. I only increased one of them. it is now corrected and stands at 60B. The message is just fine. sorry about that.
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 09:39 pm Thanks Tom, its a start!
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 10:50 pm have to admit that GM actually listened to the issues and responded extremley quickly to increase the transfer to 60B. Applauds loudly. However this raises a question that apparentely has not been asked - why was the transfer limit raised to 60B when it had been lowered to 50B and then 45B. Can we take it as read that the reduction to 50B was causing issues. Will GM subsequently address the other issues that have been raised especially the quality cap limit. GM - address the issues - keep your customers
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Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 11:01 pm *cough*Royal Bank of Scotland*cough*
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 11:06 pm even better - Insurance giant AIG has reported a loss of $61.7bn (£43bn) in the final three months of 2008 - the largest quarterly loss in corporate history http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7918643.stm
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 11:17 pm Great now we can continue to stuff cash into our corps to avoid financial services!
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| Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 11:24 pm Not really...before this I had several corps with 200B that can now only hold 60B.
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| Wednesday, March 4, 2009 - 02:24 am Tom, I would like to say thank you for listening. This is the first step in the right direction. We have given you a lot of crap here and I think we all at least feel that you have heard us. Please keep listening and working with us. ATG
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| Wednesday, March 4, 2009 - 06:45 am Thanks for listening to our reasons and acting upon them!
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| Wednesday, March 4, 2009 - 07:22 pm Next-convertible corps...trains
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| Wednesday, March 4, 2009 - 11:44 pm And when trains have been added, what about theme parks? 
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| Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - 02:22 pm Anyone realize why they are doing this change? Well they introduced financial services for enterprises right? So smart players just think 'alright I will just withdraw cash from corporations when I need it'. Leaving a loophole in their cash limit, allowing CEOs to store their wealth in corporations. Well not anymore. The problem is their persuit for visa warriors appears to have caused yet another deprovement in game functionalliy. Soon SC will be a slot machine without the fancy eye candy and very improbable jackpots.
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| Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - 05:07 pm This is yet another reason for leaving the game.
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