So, being an accountant and a computing nerd, I was thinking on my hour long drive home about a mod that I think would be neat.  More like a thesis of sorts, but I was wondering if you could run a WoW guild like a company.  That is, how do the economics/accounting of a guild relate to that of a company, and how could you actually sell shares of your guild, report out financial statements, pay dividends, etc.?

So, the theory is pretty simple…a guild has a pyramid type structure, with a CEO (GM), C-Suite (Officers), Management (Raiders), Staff (Members), Interns (Recruits).  Most guilds have a variety of skills, including raiding for gear/badges/rep/patterns, farming mats for sale/use/craft-to-consume/craft-to-sell/hoarding, and general progression through the game.  The guilds that progress further enable their members to do their trades better and faster.  For instance, a level 80 mage with a high gear score can pretty much go anywhere in the game and AOE farm mobs.  If that mage has just T9 badge gear, that farming is slower and more dangerous.  If that mage had T10 gear best-in-slot stuff, that farming is almost a sure thing.  Tedious, but guaranteed to go well (aka, overpowered).  On the other hand, a high gear score healer may not be so good at farming mobs, but is going to get queue pops and be invited to raids more.  So, you basically have departments/business units/entities/whatever-you-want-to-call-it that specialize in certain aspects of the company.  Those tasks, when used to contribute to the better good of the guild, turn into transactions for the guild.  If you take your trade and use to sell, and put those sales into the guild, the guild makes a profit.  If you start to organize, plan, and coordinate tasks, watch the market, and sell effectively, that profit gets much bigger.  The better the gear of the players, the faster that profit can be made. 

I suggest that people would invest in that type of activity (in-game with virtual currency…I’m not talking real-world gold farming here), in the hopes that their contribution to that guild would allow it to be more successful, and in-turn, provide money back to the investor in the forms of dividends or profit sharing. 

So, I started thinking, couldn’t you create a mod that was a quickbooks of sorts, that you could track financial activity in a guild?  This could then turn around and create financial statements on a periodic basis (I was thinking monthly).  Being a fairly liquid organization, the guild would have very few fixed assets (save it’s guild members), very little liabilities (unless they begin lending), but would have very tangible, real-world type transactions.  Start up costs include creating the guild (which requires some seed money to pay for the charter and potentially some signatures), full guild bank tabs (I think totalling 9350G), and some start-up cash in the GBank (need money to make money, right?). 

That requires some start-up cash – lets get some investors.  If you sold shares of your guild (say 1000 total shares at 500G each) you’d start with 50o,000G.  But really, who’s going to give away 50K?  No one, unless you’re an established guild with some armory data to support that you have the necessary tools to turn a profit.  So, it really requires an established guild, and some established financials.  Once you have that, you could have an IPO and sell some shares.  How to sell shares in game though?  I still haven’t quite figured that out…some ‘Made by MBTreasury’ items (that is, when you craft something like

[Linen Belt], it tags it with your character name as the maker)?  Web-site driven stocks, with a way to track via in-game logs?  Mixture of both? Not sure on that yet.

Once you have capital, you use that money to make money – auction house.  I don’t know about your guild, but Mindbomb has some folks that like to play the auction house.  Some self-proclaimed farmers and crafters for profit.  Also, you continue to farm (raw materials either for goods sold or held for sale), run raids, sell raid runs, collect badges for

[Primordial Saronite] or gems, honor for gems, rep for patterns, raids for patterns, farming for rare drop twink items, etc. etc. etc..  There are a million ways to make money, don’t believe me?  Run a google search on ‘how to make money in wow’.  Look how many sure-fire guides there are out there (and videos, and mods, and more guides…guides for sale, guides for free, stolen secrets of the chinese farmers)!

Once you start these transactions, you classify them, account for them, and track all activity.  You really need a CFO and accounting staff to keep track of all this.  Maybe a controller for each leg of the guild, responsible for reporting up to the general ledger.  Since you can track your auctions, your mail log, the auction market, your people’s acheivements and activity to an extent, all guild bank logs, etc. I think it would be reasonable to track the transactions for a guild.  Especially if you had an external collector/processor.  WoWhead/Curse/Thot and all those sites have written tracking data dumps – so, it’s possible to dump a log of activity upon logout that posts to a site that turns those activities into journal entries, which post to your ledger.  Again, with the right level of LUA coding (look at auctioneer/questhelper/etc.), you can do some real amazing things in-game.  Start parsing that data outside of game, and you really could import into quickbooks and have a real accounting system, that could post financial statments on a monthly basis.

Then, on a monthly (I think most wow players would throw a fit to have to wait quarterly…but something to consider…maybe every 45 days) basis, take your bottom line profits and redistribute back to your investors in dividends.  If you think about it, you buy 10 shares, the guild made a net profit of 100,000 gold in a month (very very possible if you have a guild concentrated on making money – we’ve made 0ver 10K in a week with only like 3 people workin hard), distributed back out at say a 50% dividend, to 500 shares, you’re looking at 100G per share for a month of doing nothing but putting up some money.  There are a TON of people that would put up a little bit of money to sit back and just get gold sent to them monthly.

I’d love some thoughts on this, and would be willing to kick it off if anyone wants to help code!

~Fatty