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Changing the dealership system (used and new vehicles)


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I can't remember if I posted this in suggestions before, but I can't seem to find my post. Closest thing I could find was something I posted in the general discussions area. I'm going to be dividing this into two parts, but they're both based around the same thing.

 

First Part

My suggestion is to have player-owned used dealerships. I haven't really worked out how this will work exactly, as in whether they'd be based in current dealerships, or outside them.

 

On another server (obvious by now) I've seen a couple used car dealerships - one of them was Simeon's place in SP. It made for some pretty cool RP, and occasionally there's something new in stock. It was pretty nice too because it saved a lot of hassle by speaking to individuals about 1 car, meeting up with them in various places, etc. But with a used dealership, there's always central places to go, depending on the vehicle the player is looking for.

 

To implement this, the vehicles will need to remain spawned on the server for obviously more than 3 hours. I'd imagine that it'd be best for them to remain spawned until server restarts. I also recommend that these vehicles can't get broken into. Obviously there is one big issue here: the only way this would work (unless there was a scripting breakthrough) would be that all of these used cars are owned by one person - the dealership owner. Of course, the dealership owners would need enough money to buy all of the vehicles they're selling too. 

I understand that this can be roleplayed, but it's kinda a necessity for scripting to be done for this to be pulled off properly. I am not saying that this should completely replace how vehicles are currently purchased, but it'd be an interesting concept that'll shift us away from the boring club/bar RP that is just getting more and more stale over time. It'd be great for the community to brainstorm regarding this, and how it'd work.

 

Second Part

Dealerships should have a limited stock that gets replenished every so often. This'll make vehicles actually worth something, and people will have goals to work towards. If dealerships have unlimited stock, everyone will be buying Buffalos, for example, and there won't be much variety. People could be saving up and bidding for a car that is relatively rare. It keeps things interesting, it's realistic, and adds an element of fun to the server. Not to mention it adds a little essence of healthy competition that gives people a purpose when it comes to cars/bikes.

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I've made comments about this before on other life servers, but the next real step that a lot of life servers haven't made yet is to have a self-sustaining economy. I helped design one on an old life server years ago for Arma 2 that turned out wonderfully.

 

It's essentially built on layers of player-run companies, with various markets. The basic principle of economic design is to have an influx of steady money and an outflow of steady money. This is accomplished through several means.

 

As an example of my previous design, let's take the auto industry. The first layer is the creation of materials. This was accomplished by allowing players to have mining companies that had cheap discounts on mining equipment/vehicles. Of course, when starting out player companies with little to no money weren't required to have these vehicles/tools, but by buying them they could speed up the process of mining. The tools were degradeable, meaning that every now and then companies would have to replace vehicle parts/tools. This, in addition to worker payments, was the outflow of money for the first level. The inflow of money was by selling the ore they mined to refinery companies.

 

For refinery companies, they worked the same as the mining company. They could buy better and better refineries to refine the ore into metal. The outflow of money included replacing refinery parts, buying chemicals,etc. to run the refineries, and worker payments. We actually had a debate on whether or not we should have car manufacturing as a separate market, but decided due to our low player count at the time to combine the refinery and manufacture. This meant that once the ore had been refined into metal, the refinery companies would directly choose what cars to make. Our system at first was very basic, and only involved x amount of metal to make a car. The refinery owner/managers would then have meetings to discuss which cars they wanted to make. Often times, they would take bulk orders from the dealership companies before producing cars so that they could custom-make orders and not have extra inventory lying around unsold.

 

The final step was the selling of cars to player-owned dealerships. This is pretty straightforward, but allowed extra positions/work/RP to occur such as transporting cars in 18-wheelers, possibility of car theft if being tracked by criminals, etc.

 

The biggest problem we had was number tuning. We tested a lot of different numbers, meaning we changed the amount of ore -> metal (it wasn't 1:1 ratio), the time needed to mine/refine/manufacture (our cheapest car required 50 refined ore to make, and it took about thirty minutes of one man's work to get 50 ore), and the amount of metal required to make the car itself. We had the rare cars require anywhere between 500 to 1000 ore to make, whilst our cheapest car was about 50 as stated above. This is simply trial and error, and we informed our playerbase about it so that people wouldn't get pissed when we had to change things around. The mining and refining was relatively simple and nearly identical to our current mining and refining system, except that we could use mining vehicles to mine ore faster and refine faster if you bought better refinery machines. The manufacturing was interesting because there was a minigame created, and the way it worked was that players  would play the minigame and work on a progress bar towards a car. You didn't have to complete the car in one go, but you could work slowly at it. Of course, manufacturing companies with a lot of employees could pump out cars quickly.

 

This system was used for several different economic markets, including farming (Home Depot type store -> actual farmer -> food store/chef) since we had a hunger system in place, drug creation (Home Depot type store which had certain materials depending on what drug -> drug creation -> selling drugs), and more.

 

To combat the problem of players buying these items once then never buying them again, we had a degradation system in place for many items. Of course, we finetuned it so that people wouldn't get pissed they had to buy, let's say, a mining drill every hour, but it was enough that players weren't just saving money and getting rich quickly.

 

We also had a system where the company owners could set an payment system paying out every 30 minutes, or a payment based off of how many things were done ($x for x ores mined, $x for x metal refined, etc.)

 

It was pretty indepth, and worked in the specific case of cars because while we did have NPC-controlled dealerships, they had a very limited stock that would run out quickly (2-3 cars per different car, stocked once every two weeks).

Edited by EliH
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