Observations and/or Questions from a FiveRPer

[Smilesville]

So I've been around for a week or two now, and comparing the experience on this server versus FiveRP has left me a bit cold in some areas, but warming up to other aspects of what the server has to offer. For example:

 

The fact that there are more scripted jobs and businesses seems to be a good thing. Though many seem niche and the focus on mining, mechanics and metallurgists makes it feel more like Detroit than a California city, but the end result is fun so I wouldn't begrudge the server that - it's even allowed me to take my character in a bit of a different direction that ties in with how blue-collar I'd intended him to be.

 

Entrance fees (and bars in general) drive me up a wall. There's only so much suspension of disbelief I can handle when simply wandering into a bar can cost upwards of two hundred dollars and the beer itself seems to be fifty bucks a bottle. Compared to other consumables at the 24/7, that seems more than a tad high. When my new character bling drops out and I'm down to making a base $800 per check from the job my character has, I'm really going to think twice about going to them - which is fine if the point of all that is to dissuade bar RP from becoming too prolific (FiveRP had a problem with 95% of the social congregation being in bars) but I suspect that may not have been the intent. In a nutshell: why is this?

 

I'll be bouncing in and out of this thread with more as I notice it, so stay tuned, but maybe some of you can help me with #2.

[Rensai]

Well, in general prices are higher. But if you'll notice, scripted jobs also pay significantly more than fiverp ones, there's also bonuses throughout the day to each scripted job (giving it a 50% boost). Beyond that, player-owned businesses can better pay employees due to the bonuses they get from just having a successful opening. Though, I will agree alcohol prices need to be looked at and reworked. When you're getting charged 180 for a "bottle" of whiskey, you're not gonna be drinking a lot that night. Hell, one of my characters went to a liquor store to buy a 12 pack of beer, and it was 840. So that's definitely a point of contention for me at the moment.

[Th3Madjackal]

The entrance fee is a major killer and need to be adjusted depending the place as if the place ask a high sum right away and on top of that make you pay a beers at the price of a fine wine and commodities at the price of a tv you'll probably have less people come and buy anything and hangout.

I dont mind paying an entrance fee for a high standing club but not when you go to a tavern/pub/bar.

Also the problem of fiveRP was that the active population was low, most of its players were playing in clique or at odd place so of course as soon as a bar opened people were gathering because it was an assured way to meet peoples.

 

And yes some job can net you major gain compared to what FiveRP used to pay (300-500 vs 600-800 for courier as an example, prior to job update that happened on FiveRP bumping courier to 800-900 or so if i remember correctly) but in same time it's not much of a difference if the cost are higher.

 

 

Edited May 5, 2018 by Th3Madjackal

[Aquila]

As a former business owner, I agree that the entry fee thing is ridiculous. Actually, I think it's just plain bullshit.

 

The reason why business owners set entry fees to $200+ is because they get extra money from the government. Basically $200 is nothing to the business owner, but they NEED to set it to $200 so they can earn $1,000 from the government per person who enters. Some businesses give you a free drink or pay you back for your entry fee because they know they'll be making $25,000 per night of opening if they get enough people walking through that door.

 

The system encourages greed, and I know this first hand. The entry fee thing needs heavy adjustment because on one hand, nobody wants to keep paying a ridiculous entry fee just to see who is inside a bar or club, but on the other, the business owners have fees to pay. I can say that from personal experience, that most business owners (including myself) are very greedy. I'm not at all surprised that bar/club RP is dying because of this.

[Rensai]

1 hour ago, Aquila said:

As a former business owner, I agree that the entry fee thing is ridiculous. Actually, I think it's just plain bullshit.

 

The reason why business owners set entry fees to $200+ is because they get extra money from the government. Basically $200 is nothing to the business owner, but they NEED to set it to $200 so they can earn $1,000 from the government per person who enters. Some businesses give you a free drink or pay you back for your entry fee because they know they'll be making $25,000 per night of opening if they get enough people walking through that door.

 

The system encourages greed, and I know this first hand. The entry fee thing needs heavy adjustment because on one hand, nobody wants to keep paying a ridiculous entry fee just to see who is inside a bar or club, but on the other, the business owners have fees to pay. I can say that from personal experience, that most business owners (including myself) are very greedy. I'm not at all surprised that bar/club RP is dying because of this.

 Personally I think its mostly to do with the price of drinks. A 200-250 entrance fee is nothing compared to what you'll be paying if you want your character to even drink a moderate amount. I think both the entrance fee and the price of drinks need to be adjusted, and maybe bump up the bonus to these businesses and rework what they have to do to get it.

[Asesci]

I personally believe that RPG jobs are generally a bad thing, because they keep players away from what's most important on a role-play server: role-playing. Due to the fact that the unemployment benefit is only $500 an hour, and entrance fees, clothing items, tattoos, vehicles, properties, etc. all cost a lot of money, there's no other choice but to result to delivery missions, mining, fishing, and other RPG jobs in order to keep up appearances and portray one's character realistically.

 

In other words, players are basically being forced to work for hours on end, every day, if they want to role-play their characters to the fullest. That's why I don't agree with the concept of RPG jobs as the concept currently exists.

 

In order to remedy the situation, I'd propose the universal basic income for all players for an unlimited duration of time. $5,000 an hour would be sufficient in order to be able to afford all the basic necessities and certain luxury items, too, and people could focus on role-play rather than doing these RPG jobs. Also, what about those players who have work and other commitments in real life? I'd argue that those people didn't have much time for the grind, perhaps even driving them away from this sort of game that takes up a lot of free time in order to get everything out of what the game has to offer.

 

I'm not saying that RPG jobs should be removed completely. They offer the players something to do while there's nothing else to do, which is, by far, the best aspect of these RPG jobs. And that's what the purpose of these jobs should be. Personally, however, I'd wish that the RPG jobs were more interesting. Honestly, why would anyone want to work as a garbage man or a courier in a video game, especially if they had to come home from 8-hour shifts to do so? Wouldn't it be more interesting to work as a diver, pilot or a hunter? Those are the kind of RPG jobs that I'd rather see here.

 

There's so much more that I could write about this subject, but I'll leave the rest to myself, for now...

[Pascal]

1 hour ago, Asesci said:

I personally believe that RPG jobs are generally a bad thing

I agree with you that RPG jobs are a bad thing and take people away from RP. Coming from a SAMP community that had paychecks and jobs that paid peanuts, I've seen how toxic job grinding can really be to RP servers.

 

1 hour ago, Asesci said:

Due to the fact that the unemployment benefit is only $500 an hour, and entrance fees, clothing items, tattoos, vehicles, properties, etc. all cost a lot of money, there's no other choice but to result to delivery missions, mining, fishing, and other RPG jobs in order to keep up appearances and portray one's character realistically.

However, players aren't forced go job grind here from what I've seen. The initial $5000 allows you to have $200k worth of spending money, which means you can get a decent house + vehicle, or two/three vehicles depending on your needs. As someone who changes his character's clothing at least once a day and goes to businesses whenever they're open, I've not found any reason to grind at all.

1 hour ago, Asesci said:

In order to remedy the situation, I'd propose the universal basic income for all players for an unlimited duration of time. $5,000 an hour would be sufficient in order to be able to afford all the basic necessities and certain luxury items, too, and people could focus on role-play rather than doing these RPG jobs.

The same SAMP server mentioned above switched from peanut paychecks to $5000 an hour, and in some respect was good, but also enabled a lot of the fantasy RPers to be driving around in fully modded/ridiculous sports cars, making the city full of bland characters. It also didn't stop one of the major issues on that server (from my perspective) which was people spending hours job grinding and not RPing, so they 'could be rich', defeating the point of a RP server.

 

From personal experience I do agree with you about scripted jobs taking people out of RP. However I think the economy is reasonably balanced here, and once 'setup', sustaining a character on paychecks alone isn't too hard. Raising paychecks have other implications (from firsthand experience) in the long term. There should be some initiative to enable more RP jobs and an RP based economy, I think this is entirely feasible just not fully realised yet.

 

Hopefully didn't go too off topic from the OP with this - thought this was worth throwing in the discussion.

[Asesci]

@Pascal You bring up some good points, and I definitely agree with you on the fact that you don't have to grind on your first character to any serious extent in order to achieve some of your goals.

 

But the problem arises when you start a new character from scratch. You no longer receive the 5k payments every hour on that character. What's the point in that? It's not like your characters' assets were linked together.

 

I, too, hope that I haven't strayed too off-topic with my concerns, but I felt that the aforementioned just had to be mentioned. 

[Topinambour]

27 minutes ago, Asesci said:

You no longer receive the 5k payments every hour on that character. What's the point in that? It's not like your characters' assets were linked together.

I agree, it makes little sense to me, I was actually quite surprised about this. I don't really understand how making people grind for their second character would create any RP at all, I'm still curious about the reasons behind this decision (maybe I'm missing something, since I'm a very "if it doesn't create RP then it's garbage" kind of person :p ).

 

2 hours ago, Asesci said:

$5,000 an hour would be sufficient in order to be able to afford all the basic necessities and certain luxury items, too, and people could focus on role-play rather than doing these RPG jobs.

This is something I've said a lot, but I was mostly ignored most of the time sadly :p The thing is... To get money, the choices available are either:

- Grind: creates little to no RP

- Wait for paychecks: creates little to no money, given current inflation

 

Now there's a third option but... Some people ("hardcore TRUE HEAVY RP'ERS!!!!") will prolly hate me.

 

- Work an RP job. It creates good money, but if you just worked for 8 hours you may want to do something else than /me'ing more work after RL work. Additionally, it could be argued that /me'ing that you serve drinks for 4 hours in a row isn't really *super interesting* RP. It's not RP that will deepen your character, its storylines, create interesting scenarios, ... it will be kinda bland, for most people. Some players will love it of course (the "The Sims" players) and it's fine, all the power to them. But most people would rather engage in other kinds of RP :p 

 

Now that said, giving a permanent $5000 paycheck could be a bit violent. The issue is... If I had that paycheck I'd pretty much buy a mid-grade apartment downtown for my character, another car or maybe two, and the rest, I'd use it for RP purposes. But not every player has an ability to restrain themselves and we may quickly, indeed, see everyone living in the Hills with a collection of Zentornos.

 

HOWEVER... How about keeping the $5k paycheck for as long as your money is below some value? If you have less than $100k and your total assets are below $600k, you get increased paychecks. Once you reach that value, you're on your own though (if you have $700k of net worth, you can find money, let's be real). 

 

I'm not sure this is ideal, let's be clear: I already see at least 10 flaws in that idea :p But maybe it could be a basis to compensate for the very high cost of everything. A paycheck will basically allow you to go out to one bar and pay for one drink. With an hour of paycheck, you can't even afford a 12-pack of beer :( Which means grinding is a requirement, if you want to keep RP'ing in businesses, and it may not be ideal.

 

Then again, maybe there's also a solution on the business side to prevent those crazy costs... But the problem is, it could lead to a reduction in salaries. I worked in a few businesses so far and it was always great to be paid $2k+ because it felt really worth it (unlike on 5RP where you could work for 5 hours and be paid $400). 

[Airwolf]

5000$/hour for everyone is far more than most legal faction members get paid. Just  saying. I don't believe people should be rewarded for not doing anything at all. Got to work for your money.

Edited May 5, 2018 by Airwolf