AVRO DANKASTER

System of payments directly from your bank account is already in works as a part of a larger moneysystem overhaul. Whether you decide to roleplay it as a cheque or a debit card with no overdraft possibility is a purely IC choice from there.

System that you've described can be abused far too easily. Also, script-provided consumer credits have no room to exist in my opinion - financial solutions should emerge as players show will and need, both.

It's an unemployent benefit. It's not meant to be your pocket money that covers all necessary expenses. Bare minimum, that's it. And $250 does just that, bare minimum for fuel, maybe a 24/7 item you need, maybe a small roleplay encounter. Roleplay jobs will grow exponentially after the business grants and public contracts are introduced.

Mechanics can put your car back onto its wheels using a tow truck. Adding a /flip command would remove yet another facet of a potential RP job.

Look, all I'm saying is all of the problems and flaws of a script could be ignored and roleplayed around nevertheless - have a separate person with a van delivering your fish, something. I don't disagree with your points, I'm merely stating that "incentivizing civilian roleplay" is not supposed to be associated with fixing the script. Because those are two different things. Script jobs are meant to be a supplement, nothing more. Player-to-player interaction, providing services - that's what we're supposed to do to generate the most income, and that's where the economy is headed (or so I hope, I have very little decisionmaking power. I just suggest everywhere that it should go that way.) Otherwise, we'd require a full overhaul going either towards a fully scripted supply&demand market or an utopian get-what-you-want-whenever-you-want-it system.

Problem is, police protecting the civilians is a roleplay job. Criminals robbing the civilians is a roleplay job. Civilians going on a fishing trip could be a roleplay job, but your suggestion turns it into a script job. In other words - civilian roleplay should be incentivized by being the easiest avenue of making money THROUGH roleplay. And that's meant to happen by business grants and public contracts system. Script, on an RP server, should never take the priority over roleplay.

Having taxes and not interest serves a purpose - unless you generate income you will not progress. And since the new taxation system has been introduced, going up to $800,000 is easier by generating income through roleplay. And if you get beyond $800,000 and stop generating income, you'll fall right back down. The point of all this is to prevent people hoarding massive amounts of money and then competing for limited supply of, let's say, real estate. It would inflate the prices beyond reason. In other words, if you become a millionaire, you gotta work hard to stay there. No more interest/savings that let you reach millions upon millions and never see your assets dwindle as a SCRIPT SOLUTION. If you can make it work IC, on the other hand, by running multiple businesses or just a single very successful one - kudos to you.

Hold up, since when have you struggled to buy anything in an LSRP 24/7? On the contrary, script prices on LSRP were low compared to the prices of firearms, properties or rare vehicles - remember the $200million auctions? I agree that the prices are higher in the 24/7 than they would be IRL, I disagree with it being caused by a weak currency. As far as handguns and cocaine goes, that's a supply and demand market. Prices are up not because everyone has money (you wouldn't blink paying a lot then), but because so very few people have guns.

Sounds great. Matter of fleshing out the exact ins and outs and it could be turned into a whole separate suggestion - I think it could get overlooked in here. I still have my doubts regarding how active the players will actually be in that system - without them, it will fall, and with that, the prices will skyrocket which makes for an interesting IC scenario at the very least - but it's a step-up from the current process nonetheless.

My question is what sane person would opt for a "necessary evil" instead of simply reintroducing the money as house/business grants interest-free. Not like the government couldn't create the jobs or outsource them to you guys to handle it. And we'd remove that "evil" bit, you know. Give the economy some time to kick into gear. Then, hey. You can have my money too.

Alright, the customer himself doesn't get hit by the double whammy with interest and taxation. That's good. What about lowering the supply of currency in circulation? Especially since from what I've been told you will be using tax money that should be reintroduced into the economy as-is to create a full circle. And to tie that down is to take away money from business loans, or public contracts, or any other interest-free government opportunity, effectively adding a "leech" to the system.. Not a jab at you, just how banking works in general. I don't see how mortgages that tie up capital translate into creating businesses/jobs. It's just an increase of one's personal wealth, ready to use right away and paid for over a period of time. Cash/business loan could, possibly, but I still think that an economy as young and underdeveloped as ours does not need an extra burden of interest on any money that is being introduced back into it. Employing people within Maze is good. Great, even, but if the employment opportunity comes at a cost to the whole economy, I think it's something to be reconsidered. Now if you'd take it upon yourself to, let's say, service the interest-free grants and public contracts as a service based on a public contract of your own... That's a different story altogether. But that's not what on the table, is it?

Hey, absolutely. I'm not here to argue the price fluctuations caused by shortage or abundance of supply, it'd be wonderful to see that in action. But if we introduce a commodity market, doesn't that extend the supply chain by just one more link? Manufacturer--COMMODITY MARKET-->Retailer. It's an improvement, sure, but it seems to me that it would translate into having more "owners of businesses" but not much else in terms of jobs. Not unless there's a system in place to force people to have others assist them with the manufacturing/retailing process. My main concern is, as said before, the amount of effort we can expect from the players to pursue careers that will include - let's be honest - not much player-to-player interaction.

Hammer. Serves as a prop. Going the extra lenght. It's pretty simple and was the end of the argument regarding lack of supply and demand. Also, I don't think an overpriced hammer is the biggest issue we could think of. Isn't the price of cocaine set by the dealer himself? Illegal firearms and drugs are the only two markets where real supply and demand has a chance to occur.

Handguns are $10,000 because of the scarcity of the supply. Not many people sell them on the street. If that's the price in the Ammu-Nation, it's too out of proportion and should be lowered. $130 for a hammer - out of proportion but there to emulate the lack of supply and demand and the usual spending (there are hundreds of tools you can buy IRL, but only few you can own scriptwise. Hence a simple hammer could serve as a prop for you to roleplay a whole toolbox).

Matt, have you thought your bank idea through? I'm fairly sure it's way too early for the server to see a fully-fledged institution like that. To run a proper bank, you need considerable financial resources, and you need the community to have a reliable cash flow that you can divert your way. While getting together the financial resources is not that problematic, it's the impact it will have on the economy as a whole that I'm worried about. By locking considerable amounts of currency in assets bought with loans (which nobody profits from since there's no supply chain in place) you can noticeably slow down the circulation. Even if you'd be introducing cash loans only, the interest you impose on people will affect their earning potential - the cash they gain is included into their tax calculation unless they hold it on hand (which shouldn't be expected) so they pay both higher taxes AND the interest on top. That means they need to work more than they would if that money would be introduced through, let's say, a government grant. Moreover, let's not forget that aside from the script jobs and official government employment there are very few roleplay jobs for people to undertake at the moment. Loans will mean people can live beyond their means, either pushing them further into the claws of the script which doesn't benefit roleplay, or pushing them towards default on the loan, which benefits... you guys. If you have means of getting your money back from a person with no liquidity and assets, that is. And to the last bit that we're touching upon in this thread - money introduced into the system without intention of creating a roleplay job is money wasted at this point in time. We need people to actively create work opportunities for each other. I could think of quite a few ways to use the same funds to incentivize more roleplay around the server instead of the pure financial shenanigans that COULD potentially do the same, but at a much greater economic cost towards the community as a whole. As far as the traditional economy goes, absolutely. 100% correct. The thing is, if we really think about it, IRL economy, even if we look only at the supply chains, consists of processes that were developed (and still are being developed) over a considerable period of time. Each little thing we see around us has exactly that process behind it. The question we need to ask is whether it's not too grand of a task for a small team of developers to implement it all on the server. Even in some rudimentary way, it's a separate, albeit similar, but still a separate process behind every script item we can think of. And if we come to a conclusion that it is indeed too tall of a task, can we design another system that will "work" for us? We're currently in a system in which the services players provide to other players account, or are meant to account, for nearly all of the economy, with goods simply being there for the sake of being there. Could that work for us? Possibly. Last bit we absolutely have to take into account: Supply chain means there will be workhours to be put into production of any single script item. That's where the price will come from. But will we find support within the community for a change of this magnitude? Just how many people are willing to participate as the cogs in the grand process? How many people will conform to using their already limited IRL time to producing items for other to use? All the money on the server won't help if you don't have time to use it. And if that means people with loads of time will take over the production processes, doesn't that immediately put people with less time on hand at an IC disadvantage due to OOC circumstances? A lot of stuff to think about, all in all.

Excellent insight. The problem I see: As of right now, if we want to grow the economy, we shouldn't be encouraging people to buy more assets. Ordinarily, buying assets goes hand in hand with supporting the people who produced the assets. On the server, sadly, no such thing. There's no established supply chain as of right now, hence buying any asset creates no jobs at all, enriching a maximum of one person - the business owner. And that happens only through a merit of owning the said business. There's no scarcity of the script items, so there's no reason for the prices to go up regardless of the demand. The supply doesn't go down. Worst case scenario is business running out of components which are readily available to buy in any quantity deemed necessary. The only way to fix that would be introducing a fully fleshed-out production processes, involving more players, and eventually building a system in which someone purchasing a single product means money trickles down to a whole chain of people involved in the process of manufacturing, delivering and selling that item, effectively putting the reality of supply an demand into motion. Naturally, if we address those issues, if there will be a healthy player market to reach into that will actually see spending as a gain for the players on both sides of the equation, your tax-changing idea makes perfect sense as an extra motion to go through to emulate the cycle of a real economy. At the moment, though, I think the system is not developed enough.

OK. Removing a zero. 1) We remove zero everywhere. Nothing changes, prices-to-earnings ratio stays the same but we end up with unrealistic monstrosities like $5k houses. "But we can change house prices". YES, we can. But that has nothing to do with the currency, but the value of properties/items. We could very well change other script prices [which is under review], but to suggest doing it by tenfold is simply wrong, because-... 2) We remove zero from every script price. We slash the value of everything while leaving the income at the same level. Before long, everyone has everything they want from the script. However, player-controlled (drugs, firearms, second-hand property) prices spiral out of control compared to the script prices because you still make the same amount of money, hence anything you don't buy from the script directly will be at an inflated price. That's where LSRP was some time ago. Everyone could afford the MP on vehicles/properties, but to buy anything off of a player/second-hand at a realistic price was impossible. Why? Because if you have twenty pistols, and you have people offering you more and more money for them (since fuck do they care, they have more than they could spend on anything else), you'll nearly always go for the highest bidder. Moreover, since the whole tax system was based around asset prices as a percentage of their script value, we make stockpiling money, literally, ten times easier. The current state of the server is: smaller, less expensive items are priced slightly higher than what their IRL counterparts would be -eg. pipe wrench, $30-40 IRL, $180 IG. Taco, $7 IG, $3-4 IRL, Donuts $9 IG $1-2 IRL. More expensive items - vehicles (excluding a few notable exceptions), houses, busineses are meant to be more in line with IRL prices. However, with the introduction of a progressive tax, it's difficult to STAY wealthy. That way, we're consciously creating a bottom-heavy, middle-class economy that reflects IRL society in a much better way, and somewhat overpriced basic items help emulate the spending patterns a normal person would go through during the month, given the much faster pace at which money is being earned on the server compared to IRL. That factual enough for you?

Alright, go step by step with me here. "Currency value is ten times of that the general IRL value of a US dollar". What you said means goods that cost $10 IRL cost $1 here. But then you argue that people shouldn't be mad over paying more for goods that cost less IRL. Do you see the problem with your statement? Now, if you want to tell us the currency is LESS valuable than it should be (weak currency), I disagree with you because there's no indicator of player-controlled prices spiralling out of control. In other words, you want to charge people inflated prices while the economy shows no signs of an excessive money supply that could be the reason for the inflated prices, and hence you're met with resistance. The prices, for the most part, are not inflated, or if they are, it's by a margin that causes no major damage to the health of the economy as a whole. I'd love to have a discussion but how can we call it a legitimate discussion if I'm trying to explain that what you're saying is simply wrong, either because you don't understand the terms you use or you misinterpret how they affect the economy, and you tell me that I'm full of myself because I'm trying to explain these simplest concepts to you using the most famous examples. Only statement that you've made that actually makes sense is that some of the prices of the script goods are out of proportion, and that I agree with - hence the other suggestions regarding eg. vehicle prices (less about them being too high, simply not in line when it comes to the value of the vehicle). I'll finish with a request: Can you give me an example of a hyperinflated price on the server?

"There are no businesses here to supply" - Yes, there's no ready market for you to supply with the juice. That's why I said "You need to create a market." "The currency value is multiplied by TEN" - Can you make your mind up? First you say the currency is inflated, now you're saying the currency is strong, that $1 is worth $10 on any other server. "Some people don't want to pay the tenfold value" - But why would you pay the tenfold value if the currency is strong? You're meant to pay less with a strong currency because it represents more "bang for your buck". And what is realistic currency? In Japan, prices are in the thousands. In USA, they aren't. Does that make yen/dollar any less realistic than their counterpart? Provided the server-wide script prices are addressed, it's YOU who should adjust your prices to get people to buy your juice, not have the whole server overhaul because your business model doesn't work. OK?

I'm working on the 2nd stage of financial development suggestion that will introduce financial instruments for you to put your money into. It will be more of a useful oddity, however. Not a principal source of money. Savings, investing and such should be handled on an IC level - I assume banks and other institutions will start popping up to consolidate and put the money to good use soon enough. And there's a clear benefit when it comes to having your money in the bank... You won't lose it when you get robbed.

Dude, you don't know how inflation works! Inflated prices are caused by the expanding money supply (one of the reasons, but the one that's important here), that'd mean people would BUY YOUR SHIT at the inflated price because they'd have the money to do it! Right now nobody HAS THE MONEY to buy your stuff at the inflated price because THE CURRENCY IS NOT INFLATED. It's Economy 101, two hours into any introductory course. People not roleplaying hunger and grocery shopping is their own choice, and if you want to create that market it's up to YOU to CONVINCE them to DO IT. Not up to the script to cater to YOUR wants. /CREATE YOUR OWN MARKET/ if you want to, just don't expect it to be easy. @EDIT Million dollar houses in the ghetto were caused by: 1) No upkeep/taxes that would eat into people's money, hence making it possible to have cash stockpiles. Also, the lack of taxes removed any forcible money circulation out of the equation. 2) A limited supply of the houses in the ghetto. 3) A lot of interest as far as the living in the area goes. Few houses + a lot of money in people's pockets + a lot of gang roleplayers = very expensive houses.

1) I agree that some of the prices are skewed - that's because of the economy itself being redesigned a week before the launch and not all aspects of the system that were already in place being addressed in time. 2) Nonsense regarding the prices causing the inflation. Inflation affects prices, not the other way around. 3) Creative ideas do not equal financially feasible ideas. It's up to the person running the business to make it profitable, it's up to the system to give them that opportunity. Also, not every business is meant to make you a millionaire in the long run. Hot-dog stand people don't get rich by running the same stand forever - they open new ones and scale up. 4) Since when do fruit stands publish advertisements on TV/radio? It's reserved for large, financially sound businesses. Take it upon yourself to hand out flyers, actively network, possibly use IC sections of the forums (that's free, right?) to bring some traffic to your business. 5) The trick with non-scripted goods is to make the exchange favourable for both sides. In other words, you're selling the experience/service, not the goods. Your performance needs to warrant the price (assuming point #1 is addressed in a timely fashion). 6) Adhering to the local economy =/= immersion breaking. It's just conforming to your character's reality.

Or you could open up the possibilities for the player-ran garages to peform those operations. I don't think we should increase the script presence until it's clear there aren't enough mechanics to work with it. I've been offering floor price fixes to cars anywhere so far and it went pretty good. There will be more pay and sprays to work with as the script area expands anyway, right?

I don't see why wouldn't you use Lorem Ipsum instead, then. Either way, good luck.

Nobody minds an empty topic with "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" as the body.