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Happy holidays!

Short description: Simple suggestion, add the Vapid Contender to the game. Detailed description: The reason to have this car added is fairly simple. We only have three normal sized pick up trucks ingame at this time (Bison, Bobcat XL + Sadler, the Sandking and the Guardian are just ridiculously huge). I believe the addition of another pickup truck would be nice and might lead people to buy more of these, as they are some of the most common vehicles in the states. Items to add: Vapid Contender How would your suggestion improve the server?: More possibilities for players

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Over the last few months, there has been a deliberate effort to reduce the amount of wealth circulating in the economy. I remember in the summer there was somewhat a fever going around among the staff team about how non-RP it was for a character RPing in the hood to drive a sports car. I remember many ideas were tossed around: doing auctions on very large properties based on the qualifications of someone's character rather than their wealth, in an effort to keep the IC environment cohesive and consistent, was one that I remember debating against for the imbalance it would put in the economy by enriching people easily. Since then, only more measures have come to stifle the accumulation of wealth. Vehicle taxes were added to expensive cars, lucrative do-it-yourself scripted sources of wealth have been removed and while I was staff, I was party to some chatter about furthering this erosion of wealth even more (like by stifling lease income from property, or by reducing the payout of a property's market value to prevent people from trying to game the economy). I have always been one to RP in a business sphere and capital is a large part of that. Some had disdain for gangsters in sports cars, but I personally disdain those who portray an empty role: the "Fortune 500 CEO" who leases an executive office at low price, wears suits all day, buys a luxury sedan ranging from 100-150k in price and proceeds to hold empty meetings about business plans that will never be actioned. For a time, I was running a real estate company before I realized that this entire market was deliberately eroded: how can you sell a $600,000 property to flesh out the story of your character and engage in business RP that is not just empty talk if nobody on the server still has 600k in cash? I'll jump into the meat of what I have to say now. Overall, these measures have allowed rich people to stay rich and poor people to stay poor. They needlessly restrict new players from acquiring sufficient capital for person-to-person interaction and they allow that cashflow to head directly to those who were fortunate enough to put themselves in good economic standing EARLY ON. I believe the outset of these changes was to move people away from interacting with the script and towards interacting with one another. An essential component of players RPing with one another in any business or service sense is the exchange of capital. If you want a lawyer, you need to pay them, and pay them decently. If you want a therapist, you need to pay them. That is the primary IC motivator for most things, and those who deny that by saying interaction is purely for the "good of RP" will be disappointed to find that the majority of players on any game with an economy seek upward mobility. The vehicle taxes were designed as a disincentive towards buying flashy cars, and that goal was achieved. Taxes were added to increase the base price of these vehicles and raise their value in the market, thereby making them harder to acquire. This worked, but as a byproduct of something else and not in the way I believe it had originally been intended. These sports cars did not become more expensive with the taxes: in actuality, they became cheaper on the market. With the addition of vehicle taxes, maintenance was such a disincentive towards buying expensive cars of any sort that demand shrunk. I saw a Raiden being sold for $250,000 recently, but when bought new from a dealership it will run you close to $430,000 to register and fully modify. To some, that still sounds fine, so long as the end goal of "fewer flashy cars" is achieved, but this is a psychological barrier that only affects people with less money. Police on this server are understanding of how exorbitant the vehicle taxes get, and though I have been pulled over, I have never actually been punished beyond being told "go pay your tax." IC issue? Maybe, but it has a deep effect on disparity of wealth. I have a car with a vehicle tax exceeding $20,000 and I do not pay it because that amount of money per week is not worth the feeling of safety. But someone with a cheaper car that has a tax of $6,000 might be more willing to part with their funds for the feeling of security. 4 weeks later, the result is that they have a cheaper car than I do and $24,000 less in liquid money, whereas I have not lost anything. Those who were fortunate or savvy enough to amass wealth prior to these changes are in a great position, because that wealth is essentially locked in by time. It is far more difficult to acquire capital, property and wealth and this system will perpetuate itself. For example, the market for homes has nearly entirely diminished. People cannot afford to buy homes outright any longer, and those who would have done so for profit are discouraged because the housing market has eroded. But people still need places to live: so instead, they are leasing, and all of that money is accumulated by the owner of the property rather than having wealth spread out healthily in the economy via multiple well-off homeowners. It is very difficult to outright remove money from an economy, which is why in large part that money is simply reallocated rather than removed. Changes in the economy have indeed made some hood characters unable to buy a sports car, but it has resulted in extreme concentration of wealth. Far more money is being held by increasingly few people than before. I have money, why does this matter to me? Because in order to properly engage in business RP that is full and satisfying, there need to be people with sufficient capital to participate in the "upper echelon" of the economy. Nobody will pay $20,000 for a lawyer because $20,000, for some players, may as well be sacrificing a kidney. Nobody will build a new business, because the reduction in overall server wealth has entirely eroded the profitability of "services" (aka, player-to-player business). The capital behind this has always come from server jobs initially, because wealth does not just spontaneously come to be. It is created somewhere. People would spend $20,000 on a lawyer if they knew that they can make that $20,000 back easily, but not everyone is confident or entrepreneurial enough to make money in the player economy. Server-sided income bridged this gap. And to that end, the fact that they participated in the player-to-player economy at all is the goal. People are participating in fewer unique player-to-player transactions because they no longer consider those experiences worth the price that comes attached, or vice versa, those experiences are no longer offered to the players because those who would manage them no longer see the benefit via upward mobility. I have a company that deals in real estate sales, had plans to enter mining with a warehouse (and pay miners out-of-pocket, which would give them player-to-player interaction) and has been developing a law firm to flesh out the sphere of legal RP on the server. Every one of those things has been dismantled by the rate the market has shrunk, and the result is a removal of an upper echelon of economic RP, infinitely approaching a server where there are 5-10 magnates and then 100 cops and robbers. My rant is over now. Does anyone else have opinions?

Screenshots on point. Great faction.

For RP purposes, 911 calls have now been issued a log number in the format "YY-XXXX", e.g. "18-1234". I will be looking to implement more of these further down the line.

Thread updated with a new chapter.

Forwarded.

Here's two more from yesterday to lighten the load.

Frankie Henk