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July Term - Report 1

The Return


Hi All,

Yes, that is right, I am back! I know none of you missed me but I decided something needed to be done. After I heard stories of access lost from orgs for weeks and nothing done about it then along with the missing cash I decided a steady hand was needed to fix the mess.

***WARNING****
I apologise for the wall of text - there is a lot of stuff to say and given that this is talking about national assets and all of our cash, I need to say it. If you don't want to read, that is fine by me 😃

I did not know quite how much of a mess it all was until the 5th. It was pretty bad, there seemed to be no real records I could find, most things were done by word of mouth and many of the orgs were inaccessible.

First order of point - With my role of MoF again I am unable to track down who stole money from the orgs last term or even determine if money was indeed lost. What I can tell you is how much was there when I was last in office and in a day or so I will be able to tell you how much is here now. I gain no extra powers to seek justice sadly. The country CP can ticket admins asking for logs and such, as stated by Woldy last term the admins seem to have no record of the specific day money was stolen.

What will I be changing? - Orgs

They seem to be the argument point of the month with lots of articles going up about them. They are obviously something I know quite a lot about, I had 6 months using 50+ of them so am fairly familiar with them. It is funny how times change - back when I first went offering orgs out and offering investment I had two individuals invest and less than 5 eUK people ask about renting an org (my memory is fuzzy on the exact number but it was low). Now everyone has really jumped on the bandwagon and wants to get involved.

Access to Orgs is a big security issue. I can see that during my time away from the game a lot more and different individuals got access to the orgs. While I was MoF I allowed access to the orgs to three individuals. Myself, Talon (He trained me as MoF and pretty much everyone trusts him with anything the eUK has) and Emergy (Again a past MoF and possibly the most trustable guy in the game to almost everyone). This was mainly as a back up precaution. If I were to be hit by a bus, while it would be irritating for you guys to not get the honour of reading the words I write, it would not be devastating from a MoF point of view. If I didn't log in for a few days it would be noticed, picked up on and the orgs would then be run still. And secondly, security.
Standard email address are not as safe as private ones. The orgs use a private email which makes them much more protected.

These are two guys I trusted with the cash as much as I trusted myself. Nothing went unaccounted for and profit was made on the MM whenever possible. After a while doing this job you do start to see it just as that, a job. It is a job without pay. I was in the situation where both CP candidates would ask me to be the MoF so I knew I could continue the offers over the 5th and just keep doing what I was doing. I did not allow access to the orgs for the CPs. I did not care who they were (sure Talon was CP for my first two so they don't count 😉), they didn't get access. If they didn't like that, I wouldn't be MoF, that was fine, life would go on.

Most CPs just ploughed on and accepted that. You can ask BigAnt, I am very firm on my stance with the Orgs and I plan to continue as I was before.

Why am I telling you this you ask?

I am telling you of how I dealt with things in the past and will do in the future so you know that the cash we have will be safe. It seems security was a bit lax recently and this is my assurance to you all - changes will be made, security will be fixed and information will flow.

I am currently in the process of regaining access to all of our country orgs so that I can take stock of everything we have. I am taking back orgs from private individuals once their MM offer has cashed out and will be taking back any extra orgs from MUs once theirs too have cashed out (An extra org is any they have over 1).

We will then be moving to a fairly simple system.

1) Every Significant MU will receive a single Org. This will be for newspaper purposes and storage purposes. However they can use this org on the MM as much as they wish. I will decide if an MU should not receive an Org. Effectively this rule is in place to prevent MU spamming just to get an Org, I am hoping that I will not have to use this rule and any MU around now is entitled to one. If an org starts dying out or is just a single member we may have to look at if our national assets are getting used effectively.

2) MUs and private citizens can then invest their own cash with the MoF. Any cash you invest will be placed on the MM. Your cash will be put into a ten day cycle and the profit averaged out over all of the profit from orgs over the past ten days. This means that if your org ends up not cashing out at all you still receive a good chunk of profit. Obviously the word I am using here is average. If the org your cash is placed on ends up fully cashing out then I am afraid it is hard luck because it seems unlikely all orgs will fully cash out. Profit will be split 75/25 - That is 75% of the profit going to the individual who has invested the cash.

Yes I am aware this is a bigger chunk than last term and that anyone renting an org had to hand over 50% of their profits (some people handed over more as a nice gesture) but I am changing this to 25%.

I will give you an example.

Say Billy A invests 50k cash with the MoF. After his cash is put on the MM his ten day cycle begins. His Org ends up not buying any gold at all, disaster! The average over the past ten days however is £3k profit per org. Because Billy A invested the exact amount an org will be run on (currently) he gets 75% of £3k.

That means over the ten days, Billy A gets £2250 profit for investing his cash over 10 days.

At the same time as Billy A, Teddy B invests 10k. Teddy B gets exactly the same Org average as Billy A because they invested at the same time. As Teddy B invested 1/5 the amount needed to fill an org he will get 1/5 the average Org profit. That means over the ten day cycle Teddy B gets £450 after splitting the profits.

I hope this is easy to understand, I have probably written too much about something that in reality is very simple.

I will be starting this system as soon as I have received all of the Orgs back from private individuals and MUs. I know people will not be happy about this but I am doing this based on two observations.

1) Security - This became lax. I am taking things back to my old style as I know it works and the money will be safe.

2) Some orgs were not getting efficiently used - I think some people will be much better off investing than doing the orgs themselves. Orgs are one of the things that interest me so I did keep an eye on them while two clicking. I saw offers not cashing out because they were not following simple rules stated in many of my past MoF articles.

I will be giving you the good old fashion break down of our finances as soon as I have gathered all of the information from the orgs still to recover (not from MUs or private individuals - those MUs will come back empty) and will be keeping all of the information out there clearly in the open. I like the rest of you were not happy with how the finances were dealt with in the past few months.

I have rambled quite a bit so I think it is time to just post this before I write another few pages!

If you have any questions please do just send me a PM, I am playing the game again now (obviously) so I will respond as quickly as I can and if you comment below I will also respond.

Can we please not have the usual nonsense in the comments, I know it will be hard to get but what I have done is in the interest of all of us in the eUK.

If you are just going to spam that you will not trust cash in the MoFs hands please consider this:

1) General MoF Orgs are now safer than last term - Access to Orgs will be completely striped down to the ways of old.

2) The General MoF Orgs will now be as safe as any org you have had over the past few orgs + me - Last term the CP could change your email and the email owner could reset your password via email. That is two individuals. Access to all of the eUKs MoF orgs will now effectively be exactly that + me. So if you don't trust me, fair enough, don't invest. If you do trust me then there is no reason to not invest if you did have orgs before.

3) If things weren't a mess then I wouldn't need to clean it up.

Have fun all - good to be back,

Carlini


P.S - Pretty sad my old reports from Feb can be seen here right? : http://www.erepublik.com/en/newspaper/bank-of-england-news-2217/1