Topic: What would you do? (Read 23 times)

Imagine that a long time ago, over a decade ago by now in fact, you were one of the few who managed to get in on an amazing opportunity.

You managed to get control of a "Galactic Repo" Corp, one of many being formed at that long-ago time.

In essence what had happened was players had been given the opportunity to set up intergalactic mining Corps at no cost to them, each such Corp starting out with debts to General Mining Corp (GMC) of 1000 GMC scrip and to General Retirement Funds (GRF) of 1000 GRF scrip, at 1% per planet-Earth day interest rate.

Back then not many actual characters on the Galactic Diplomacy planet took up the opportunity, rather as it turned out most of the Corps created were created by "random internet passers-by", likely including a few folk from BitCoinTalk forums who had not bothered to get into the Galactic Milieu with actual characters on the individual-character scale but took one quick look at this new intergalactic mining Corps scale maybe just to see what it looked like inside.

Thus most of the intergalactic mining Corps created involved someone logging in once, taking one quick look around, often not even having their initial mining colony start building powerplants and mines, and logged back out again never to be heard from again.

Naturally, the 1% per day interest on those Corps' startup loans built up quite a bit over time, as Einstein is claimed to have pointed out compound interest is powerful and these loans compound hourly in planet-Earth hours not game hours (typically game time runs 12 times faster than Earth time or thereabouts).

About a year later, an attempt was launched to get all those abandoned colonies up and running again, which of course involved finding characters qualified to run such Corps and willing to do so.

Thus were born the Galactic Repo Corps, starting with First Galactic Repo (FGR), Second Galactic Repo (SGR) and Third Galactic Repo (TGR) then continuing with Galactic Repo 4 (GR4) through Galactic Repo 33 (GR33).

Over time, more and more of those Repo Corps have succeeded in paying off their debts.

Accomplishing that involved a number of political and financial steps that included the spawning of more and more Financial Corps, starting with General Financial Corp, which turned out to be so fantastically profitable that it soon led others to get in on the idea.

In the course of those developments, interest rates fell as various Corps competed to get some of the debtor Corps to switch to them, which of course involved basically paying off the existing loans with lower interest rate loans from the new Financial Corps and sometimes the lowering of interest rates by Corps seeking to convince their debtors to stay with them.

Even with all that though, at time of writing this post a number of the intergalactic mining Corps are not only still deeply in debt but seem doomed to forever dig themselves deeper at current interest rates.

More and more competition is arising though among players and Corps and even Civilisations that recognise the value of these intergalactic mining Corps and in some cases deeply regret not having gotten into them from the outset well over a decade ago when the opportunity was presented.

My question here though is not what those looking to acquire such a Corp could or should do, as more and more ideas about that are already being proposed, but rather, how best ought the folk currently running the Corps whose debt situation seems almost beyond hope to proceed?

Several Repo Corps have already been acquired, seemingly by paying its erstwhile management a thousand or a few thousand GMC or GRF or UKB or CDN or whatever, since after all this time of running a Repo Corp at a loss, all its income going toward paying its loans hoping to end up with a fully paid-off Corp thereafter, some players were very willing to take a golden handshake payoff and let someone or something else pay off all the loans and take control of the Corp.

But is that the best thing for remaining chief operating officers or whatever they call themselves to do?


-MarkM-