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Auction cars in game WITHOUT an auction


Yung Bango

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Hello, dear community! Bango Banks here. I got a "special case" for you today.

 

I'll share my thoughts on the topic named in the title. This topic will be divided into two - my personal point of view and an objetctive point of view. So you can't suggest that I'm riled up on my personal emotions or whatever.

 

I'll provide a picture and use your own judgement what's wrong with it.

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You are correct, reader! You're witnessing a Sultan RS infront of Mirror Fashion. That is not an admin on duty.  Sultan RS is not available from any dealership and is considered an auction car. Feel free to take a peek into the auction section. No auction on Sultan RS, yet this guy has the car.

 

Objective point of view

Pascal has said himself that staff takes no individual requests concerning cars - any other unavailable property as well logically - that are not available on the server and dealerships. He also mentioned that PM's inboxes would flood with requests otherwise. This car here is obviously given to the player via request or something along those lines. For instance, my friend @Hani wrote a request and Pascal replied with the similar thought I mentioned in the first sentence. For some reason, guy on the picture is a subject to a "special case" and practice that has never conducted before.

 

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A special case, eh? Every player could generate a special cause to be a subject to a "special case". In no respect is this player the only one worthy of an unavailable car because let me tell you - this server flourishes with unique characters.

 

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Pretty dope, he built it. Nobody has ever done anything similar before.

 

It's not the matter of the car itself, it's a matter of the principle. Unavailable cars will be made available to certain players with auctions. What's the point of holding auctions in the first place when players are able to obtain such cars without auctions?!

 

As staff went down that road, there is a logical course of action:

 

  • This guy loses his car OR
  • Every other player gets a chance to obtain such cars WITHOUT auctions

 

If you take your continuity seriously that you advocate, wipe off the spit you spluttered all over the face of community and address this inconsistency.

 

 

My personal point of view

Check this picture out.

 

d3uJMpS.png

 

I find it disappointing and dreadful. Multiple days to two weeks - he probably waited 80% of the time for the reply. That's very cute. I roleplayed a construction firm for about ~4 months, then staff tells the community that construction is no more. How distorted does that seem IC? ? I'm not sure why. They get rid of the old system that was actually fine, even though there is not even a slight odor of implementing the new system into the server. IC'ly I accumulated a considerable amount of wealth. My take is that this is one of the reasons they shut us down, we were kind of the only construction firm, therefore we were dominating the market. I know for a fact that there were squealers, too lazy to start their own construcion firm to create competition. Easier way was to wet their eyes before the staff. Back to the topic - since I accumulated some wealth, can I request, for instance, a Nero or a T20? Given my case, I would just buy it from the dealership IC'ly, Mr. Samuel built it. In the end of the day, general idea is the same - we are getting stuff without the auction.

 

 

What are your thoughts, everyone?

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I also would like to add that Samuel said he RP's it like a rallycar though he drives it around in Mirror Park, why didn't he just buy a Flash GT if he wanted a rally car or a Retinue, or just kept the stock Sultan and RP'ed it modified like the rest of the people that RP racing or something like that. Just my two cents

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Just now, Pacanaz said:

I also would like to add that Samuel said he RP's it like a rallycar though he drives it around in Mirror Park, why didn't he just buy a Flash GT if he wanted a rally car or a Retinue, or just kept the stock Sultan and RP'ed it modified like the rest of the people that RP racing or something like that. Just my two cents

The car was seen around MP because of my character's area of residence. I was parked up to answer a buttload of PM's I got from you passive-aggressive people that don't seem to like people making progress with new ideas. Why bother replying to the original post when it's nothing but a salt fest. "Disapointing and dreadful," as mister "Bango Banks" said it.

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  • Robyn locked this topic

The player who owns this car in question was rewarded it based solely on the merit of effort. On February the 20th, they approached us explaining several aspects surrounding their character and their development, explaining that they were working on improving this car, providing roleplay screenshots and an explanation on why they believe they deserved the vehicle.

 

To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time a player has approached us in this way with a full plan laid out for the reason they want the car. I personally expressed my concern internally within Property Management that by accepting this, we would open floodgates to more requests of this type as every player would immediately want to request whatever car in the game they desired. Based on the PMs I woke up to in the morning, I certainly wasn’t wrong in predicting this.

25 minutes ago, Yung Bango said:

For instance, my friend @Hani wrote a request and Pascal replied with the similar thought I mentioned in the first sentence. For some reason, guy on the picture is a subject to a "special case" and practice that has never conducted before.

Special cases have occurred in the past and will continue to, for both properties and vehicles. Players have approached us with high-effort roleplay projects over PM and we’ve provided additional support - be it providing an energy company with access to vans and helicopters not available in dealerships, an aviation company with access to a plane, to providing unavailable houses in certain special cases. There have been many cases we’ve sorted in the past similar, the difference in this case is this car is more of a “personal vehicle”.

 

And if we're talking about @Hani and special cases, you likely know yourself @Hani was subject to a special case where he received an entirely new house location in Vespucci Canals that wasn't scripted prior, due to Property Management miscommunication when it came to him going inactive.

 

37 minutes ago, Yung Bango said:

What's the point of holding auctions in the first place when players are able to obtain such cars without auctions?!

I agree with you, and I'd go even further to explain the whole idea of auctions is not well-suited for purpose currently. I wasn't a fan of how the traditional auction system worked as it opened the doors for characters who didn't fit the bill to win anything purely on the basis of script-wise cash and not fitting portrayal, and as such developed the idea of "pitches" as a system. The intention was to phase out the idea of traditional auctions with a system that matches assets to suitable characters - and I recall not being huge on the idea of the name "pitch auctions", but keeping "pitches" separate to them.

 

Pitch Auctions, in practice, saw several issues. First of all, demand for them was severely limited, with only a very small number of players that you could barely even count on one hand openly asking for them to take place. Second of which was timing. We would have players approach us to ask how to acquire a certain asset - a garage for example - and then next week a garage Pitch Auction was launched, with little-to-no applications being sent in. Third of all was overall quality of applications often being both bare minimum and not lining up well with the property in question (mainly a property thing, as there's a lot less to match with vehicles).

 

Pitch Auctions will continue to not be posted for some time and there is a good chance you may not see one at all in the future. The concept of pitching is good and some pitch auctions have been great matches, but the auction part of it doesn't really scale to match needs of the playerbase well.

1 hour ago, Yung Bango said:

this server flourishes with unique characters.

I tend to agree with you on this, which is why we do put effort into supporting special cases when they come up, however not all go through due to lack of available time/script support. With the system you've mentioned in your post in place, we will have considerably more free time and I'm interested in figuring out how we can get more involved in not just the distribution of properties, but support for high effort and creative ideas. That is something we're stretched thin on at the moment, as nearly all our time is completely consumed by handling requests/leasing, and balancing this with general admin responsibilities and personal life.

 

54 minutes ago, Yung Bango said:

I roleplayed a construction firm for about ~4 months, then staff tells the community that construction is no more. How distorted does that seem IC? ? I'm not sure why. They get rid of the old system that was actually fine, even though there is not even a slight odor of implementing the new system into the server. IC'ly I accumulated a considerable amount of wealth. My take is that this is one of the reasons they shut us down, we were kind of the only construction firm, therefore we were dominating the market. I know for a fact that there were squealers, too lazy to start their own construcion firm to create competition.

As we already spoke about privately over DMs, I explained to you that construction was not shut down due to "squealers" or that "you were the only construction firm dominating the market". In fact, I'll go as far to share what I said in the discussion about construction monopolies several weeks back:

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That was my last message of the 7 message discussion before it shortly ended. I didn't care much for the idea of monopolies, it was something easy enough to solve by a rival group of players. The issue with construction went much wider, and I went into this when there was some backlash after the announcement from workers in your firm:

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The second point is one of the most notable ones. We've seen huge issues with construction and maintaining it that have existed for months on end (before you even had a firm), which for the most part stem for how structured and focused Property Management is around handling requests and leases on a constant daily basis. This, mixed in with much more demanding personal lives recently (there was a phase where the majority of Property Team were at university/work and we had to pull through with very little coverage). I could go into detail on the numerous problems it had with both regulation of firm activity, execution (process of collection of ores, time it took normal players to get in touch with firms etc.) and maintenance (lack of interest, required propping up in the past with announcements).

 

A one-off monopoly simply doesn't cover it, and I care very little for something that can easily be resolved through a very small number of players getting together and creating competition ICly. Construction as a system had numerous issues, Property Management has a severe lack of time, and we've got a new system up-and-coming. On to that next:

1 hour ago, Yung Bango said:

there is not even a slight odor of implementing the new system into the server

While it's not been placed on a huge public announcement, saying there's not even a slight odor of it is far off the truth: I went into huge detail regarding how the new process would work in the Property Discord some weeks ago, and last night I closed a thread regarding changing the leasing system with this response:

19 hours ago, Pascal said:

All applications (both requests and leasing) are getting changed to an entirely new system at the moment.

Why is this new system not here yet? It's not a forum system which is just a matter of re-writing an application format. It's a UCP system. To achieve this, we've had to coordinate development efforts to synchronize any external changes to the Property Database so that they register and refresh in-game live. Once that was achieved, we laid out a plan for how the new system would work on the UCP, drafted an entire specification for it, approached the web development team for approval, and then had the system started on the web development side of things. The initial draft of the system has been developed, we're now waiting to be able to host the test version of it so we can experiment with it and make any changes before launch. That's currently being held up due to the current Facebrowser server migration, which takes up a large portion of the web-dev team's time.

 

Seeing this system in reality isn't far off, as we have all the specifications planned for it, and are simply waiting in line to be able to test it while the recent Facebrowser host migration is resolved.

 

In summary, this was done out of a special case of a player approaching us with a well-thought out roleplay project. We were concerned that approving this would open the doors for a wave of similar attempts that would likely be much more low effort. However, ultimately the quality, thought and evidence provided led us to reward the player in this case with a vehicle they produced through roleplay. I am all for supporting roleplay efforts, and the lease team decided to take on this request and track it with our internal system that we use to track vehicle leasing. As has been explained above, we do listen to players when they come to us with unique, well-thought out projects that match characters and how they have been portrayal well. Pitch auctions are not the only way to acquire vehicles outside of dealerships as mentioned above - as we’ve already handed out vehicles for specific roleplay projects in the past. Consequently, players are able to come to us (as they have always been) with their ideas, however this does not mean that these will be accepted as this one has. I am still not huge on this idea of allowing these sort of requests, however the lease team was open to supporting them - and the decision to continuing accepting these sort of requests relies on them, as they track vehicle distribution. They can be contacted for these sort of projects directly, however I suspect the demand will become too much without a full system in place for it.

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