Cypher99

It comes down to running the numbers for crate prices, depending on item cost. Mechanic garages hardly make any profit at $300/crate and the 20% mechanic payout. Some shops simply may not be able to afford the additional crate cost depending on their item pricing.

Personally I think any sort of attempt would be better than nothing at this point with the trucking system. I'd love to see how this goes: 1) Crates don't cost anything to truckers. They just pick them up and deliver them. Truckers get paid a flat $4,000 per hour like other /startshift jobs on the server. I'd suggest a small minimum delivery requirement that walks the line between "Oh I only have to deliver X amount of jobs and still get paid" and "Oh shit I have to get this many deliveries within an hour to get paid". A balance that doesn't make people slack, but doesn't make people zoom around the map like speed racer. 2) The full crate payment ($250/$350 average per crate as of now, but probably should be adjusted as needed) from the end-point business goes directly to the trucking company instead of the truckers earning a commission, since they now earn by the hour. This sounds like it would be a lot of money but there are trucking companies out there who really care about creating RP over money. With the amount of funds coming in with this change, I bet companies could afford to hire HR teams, fleet techs, in-house security, etc. at decent wages comparable to other jobs on the server rather than relying on A) People who don't care about money or B) Petitioning LFM for extra funding in order to even attempt these extra jobs. A major point with this influx of new income would be trucking companies who could now afford to offer bonuses to truckers who take on long-haul jobs versus short-haul jobs, thus encouraging truckers to deliver to those businesses that aren't so close to the supply points. This would allow companies to kind of compete with each other in terms of benefits, bonuses, etc. since the base trucker pay is all the same at $4,000 per hour. There are only a handful of trucking companies, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to keep an eye on them to make sure the influx of the extra income is going to create more RP rather than lining the owner's pockets. This would not require a whole lot of script adjustment. I'm sure a lot of this is already in place, just needs to be moved around and adjusted slightly to fit the idea.

Some thoughts that come to mind: 1) Trucking gets boring. You burnout. You are required to use forced, repetitive action /me's that are disguised as "role play" but in reality just meant to prevent people from rushing the job without typing anything. Spoiler: It doesn't prevent anything. People still rush, copy/paste /me's, type stupidly bad /me's or none at all. It's a completely thankless and unappreciated job. Truckers are the lifeline to businesses, yet they are the ones who get insulted both OOC and IC on a daily basis. Police hate trucking companies and frequently ignore their calls (This is both an IC and OOC issue). Businesses just want their crates. There's a zero interaction factor for a trucker 99% of the time because when a business is open, they are focused on their customers and when the business is closed, truckers just spam their load & unload /me's over and over for nobody's benefit. 2) Payment system encourages rushing, which makes most people drive like shit and only deliver to the closest business to the supply points, thus painting truckers and trucking companies in a bad light to the rest of the server. Getting paid per job turns it into a speed over role play job. Businesses that are far away from the main supply points suffer and sometimes barely receive any crates at all. Change the payment to a flat hourly system like other jobs on the server and allow trucking companies to award bonuses through an IC manner, see how quickly things change.

I mean I understand from the standpoint that we need to pull some real life content for knowledge and baseline purposes, but I totally support divulging from the norm and letting factions run their own path IC. I think sticking too closely to the real thing curbs the potential creativity because of the "oh this group/faction can't do that because their real life counterpart doesn't do that" kind of thinking. It paints groups into a corner that just eventually restricts where they can go with the story and development.

Bump

I've wondered this myself lately. A lot of the garages bring your car inside and you're just left outside waiting, so you can't always interact with your mechanic. After a few minutes, your car spawns back outside and boom the upgrades are finished. Who knows what even goes on inside lol

You can do this in real life. Ever heard of OnStar? It’s very common in personal vehicles. If your car gets stolen, they can remotely shut the car off from anywhere. Satellite technology exists. Hell there’s even a commercial about it highlighting the feature in the event your car is stolen. This is not new technology at all and absolutely realistic.

Let’s not make the standard of effort even lower than it already is. There’s plenty of auto theft already and this would just make anti-theft useless. Cars shouldn’t be easy to steal unless they are old or lack the technology. Then again, playing devils advocate, if your car is insured you get it back in a few hours. Big deal. File a police report. Call a friend or hope to get a taxi in the mean time. In any case, the system should not be made any easier than it already is for car theft. One compromise could be is to start the chop process in the script but put a sliding scale time limit on the anti-theft features and before the script outputs any car parts. Within the first 5 minutes of enabling the chop process in the script, someone can still shut the car off and use the tracker. The next 5 minutes, they can only shut the car off. Maybe after a short, random period of time after that in order to give them time to RP the car being chopped, the system will output the car parts.

((L&A))

Common house sales aren’t auctioned off. There’s almost certainly other factors that go into it. If you’ve got 10 people all offering the same price, more often than not it comes down to who gives you the best chance of getting the house sold. Factors like if they pay cash, if they care about repairs, who pays closing costs, etc. We don’t have that here. The way houses are auctioned off is also unrealistic unless it’s a short sale or a foreclosure owned by the county or city. There HAS to be some OOC screening. Keeping it 100% IC makes no sense if we’re going for realism because we simply don’t have those factors I mentioned to distinguish one buyer from the next. I agree we need more oversight to address the issues you’ve mentioned, don’t get me wrong. Telling people who they can and can’t sell their house to shouldn’t be part of it.

While we’re at it, we should make all mappers become IC companies because frankly mapping OOC is not realistic either. The point is people are allowed a bit of leeway in regards to housing because it’s necessary. You have 10 people who offer buyout, so some OOC screening is necessary. There’s virtually zero difference between buyers IC that are all offering the max buyout in cash. Telling someone who they can and can’t sell their house to is just taking it a bit too far. If they want to screen their applicants, let them. If you think someone is breaking the rules, you’ve already outlined what to do. File an RPQM report.

((L&A))

You get an A+ on this assignment.

Bump.

Cat ears need to be erased, deleted and never thought of again.