Could There Be A Guild That Acts As A Company?

[:1]I'm wondering if it's possible. I'm wondering if it's possible to create a guild solely for the purpose of making money. Even issue shares like a publicly traded company.

People invest, guild uses the money for materials for enchantments, weapons, pots, armor, etc. Crafter makes it, earns a profit from the sale (commission), gives a profit to the gbank for reinvestment. Then measure the yield a share would make, or do what Apple did and not pay out dividends but instead reinvest in the "company". I'm seeing it all as very possible. Guildies act as employees, making money off of things supplied FOR them, financed by the securities that were sold to investors of the guild.

Though, the problem I see is just how simple you can get it. Since there aren't multiple people doing this, it's not as if there would be a stock-market for just one guild. And people would be skeptical. Also, since there wouldn't be a market, how would share prices fluctuate? Especially if there is no yield on the shares? At least a yield would spur some sort of demand among players to buy the security from another player. Would there need to be some sort of mutual fund set up? How possible is this? Also, how would one even represent a share? It could be done an old fashioned way by taking names of bidders and how many shares they own, and stating that they must contact someone when they sell their shares with information.

This is, of course, an over simplification, but I'm wondering about it. If it is possible it could be extremely effective at making money for everyone involved.|||It could work and it's an interesting concept, but, as you say, people with be wary.

The real nature of the problem is that there is no in-game mechanism for this, so any agreements (contracts even) would have to be handled outside of the game, making any problems nothing that GMs can do anything about. (appalling grammar - sorry).

Also (and this may surprise a lot of people), WoW isn't like the real world :-)

In RL, we have regulatory bodies and commissions to make sure that people follow the rules. In WoW, dumping and flooding is common, for example. Skews the economy ...

I'd be interested to hear how it goes if you do this - will you come back and tell us?|||I personally don't believe we'd need the regulatory commissions if they weren't around. I mean, if you remember, the guild would own the investor money. Why would the investor want to break the rules when they have their money on the line? Once the guild pays off security-holders I think it's out of their hands and people will be looking to make money.

I think everything is doable but I'm still trying to figure out a system of how the share prices would actually change, you know?|||The way guilds work in WoW, there is very little to stop the guild master running a Ponzi scheme.|||Oh, you were talking about the guild. Well, you're right. I could be the next Madoff. But here's my thing: some people would be very wary of that and not get into it. But servers are so large I think there would be enough people, and since I'm asking to see if it's possible for ME to do it, I can trust the GM to not be a crook.