W3C - Dividend Payments by Public Corporations

Following multiple reports by a player, we have looked into dividend payments, made by public corporations with multiple shareholders.

The reports claimed that dividends were not paid.

We started with country owned public corporations but later extended the search also into enterprise owned public corporations because there is no difference in the processing of the two variants.

What we found out is quite complex and in some cases wrong.

- Dividend errors were found in both types of public corporations but in low frequency and only is special cases.
- Dividend errors were all in the amounts paid to the main shareholder. There were no errors in the payments of dividends to all other share holders.
- The errors only occurred in a small number of cases where the main share holder owned many shares or in other words, owned a very high percentage of the shares.
- In some of these cases, the main share holder did not get the dividend or received it in the following month.
- The errors only occurred in the last short period of weeks, starting when increasing profits of corporations and an increase in the total amount of dividend took place.
- The error occurred when the amount of dividend exceeded the max value of the dividend data base field was exceeded.

There was no error in the code which made it very difficult to trace.
The database structure caused this error when gradually increasing volumes, profits and dividends at some point exceeded tolerated values.
Corporations are now much larger than ever before and recent increases in their size caused the error.

We have decided to pay dividend more frequently and pay smaller amounts each time.
This has resolved the problem.
It also prevented a repetition of this problem when possible future increase in the size of corporations might exceed any other maximal amount.

Oof.

That issue sounds like it was a massive pain to track down and troubleshoot.
Congrats on getting the job done and making the game better.

Finally! Now to see if how the fix shakes out.

Hern,

Thank you for your steady push despite my push back.

This feature was so old and unchanged in years, we could not imagine anything wrong with it.

Repeated checks of the code did not discover anything wrong because there was nothing wrong.

As I said before, increasing amounts, resulting from the larger size of corporations exceeded the max amount in the max value in a database field and caused the error.
I was afraid that this was going on for years but it was only the last slight increase in the size of a small number of corporations producing only some types of products where the amounts ticked up a bit.

luckily it is resolved before many more corporations would become larger and more such error could occur.