Increase the price for rental vehicles

[Dodger]

1 hour ago, Scaramouche said:

I think the use of rental cars is great for new players, but I think it can/is highly abused by people who know they can respawn at the airport and rent a car for whatever their reasons. 
 

I feel a good idea is to simply take away the ability to respawn at the airport. Realistically the only reason you’d need to be at the airport is to fly somewhere, in which you’d roleplay driving there or take a taxi. New players spawn there anyways, so that’s honestly the only players that should be there without getting there IC’ly. 
 

As renting cars is very realistic in the real world, I feel there should be some effort to lessen the abuse of rental cars. I’m not quite sure how entirely. Maybe a limit on the amount of hours you’ve played? After a certain amount, you can’t rent one unless an admin spawns one for you in the event of an extreme circumstance. Might open up an avenue for a player-owner rental business. Lots of ideas. 

I think new players should have enough money to call a taxi. Taxi job is totally useless rn I rarely see any taxis around the city because of rentals.

Edited January 20, 2020 by Dodger

[Giles]

36 minutes ago, Dodger said:

I think new players should have enough money to use call a taxi. Taxi job is totally useless rn I rarely see any taxis around the city because of rentals.

This is true, but there are times a new player will spawn in and no taxis will be on duty. So a two-fold approach:

 

1) Disable the airport respawn point because that just enables people to abuse it and abuse the rental car system. There’s no reason to spawn at the airport, unless you’re a new player. If you’ve already been on the server, you should get there through IC means.
 

2) Only allow the rental car to be rented if there are no taxis on duty. A compromise here would be a time limit for a new player. Within the first 10 minutes, they’d have to try for a taxi. If there is only one taxi that is busy, then after those 10 minutes they can get a rental car but for one hour only. This will allow them to reach somewhere in the city. 
 

Again I get there are legitimate reasons to have a rental car, but I feel that most of the time in these cases, the rental car system is abused and not used for IC reasons, but more for convenience. If there is a true OOC reason that you are left without a car, there are admins and the /fixveh feature. 

Edited January 19, 2020 by Scaramouche

[M52B28]

perhaps u could have baby chars have a discount on the rental cars for the first 5 hours or whatever. just how it is with beginner income. ?

[Jester]

I only see this as a bad sign.  When I first got on the server I started to grind out fish since I wanted to save up for building up my assets for my character.  Now imagine if I hired a taxi to constantly ferry me to a fishing spot and just constantly wait for me to be done with that load then to go over to the fish seller and then repeating that.  The taxi's should be used for people around the city, otherwise you will just turn the taxi/uber companies into transport for people who want to grind which yes will increase business, but honestly keeps them doing the same stuff.  Sitting around with not much to do while people do their thing. 

 

I would like to see a increase in the use of taxi's and ubers, but I don't think price rising of the rental cars will do it.  I would maybe make some other tweaks to increase the use of taxi's or player rental vehicles. Just my two cents since I like to build my character through grinding before I roleplay so the way I portray them matches what I roleplay.  For example if I want to play a biker who should be covered in tatts, then when I first get on, I am going to grind till I can get the tattoos and a biker before I start going out and saying I'm a biker to people.  Again not saying that everyone is like me, but those who are, this will just turn them off to the server. 

Edited January 20, 2020 by Jester

[Giles]

42 minutes ago, Jester said:

I only see this as a bad sign.  When I first got on the server I started to grind out fish since I wanted to save up for building up my assets for my character.  Now imagine if I hired a taxi to constantly ferry me to a fishing spot and just constantly wait for me to be done with that load then to go over to the fish seller and then repeating that.  The taxi's should be used for people around the city, otherwise you will just turn the taxi/uber companies into transport for people who want to grind which yes will increase business, but honestly keeps them doing the same stuff.  Sitting around with not much to do while people do their thing.

?

 

That's what the starting income is for. You get 40 hours of $5,000 an hour paychecks. That's $200,000. I'd consider that pretty considerable assets over the first 40 hours for not having to do a thing. There are also the jobs that provide $3,000 an hour additional over that for a few hours a day. The worst that will happen is you spend a couple hours without a car. Big deal. There are bicycles, a scooter and cheap cars under $10,000 that will not take long at all to get to. Then you can go about whatever way you want to build your assets.

 

Your justification to portray your characters the way you intended, would take a few hours at max to acquire starting assets to accomplish. Hardly a reason to justify using a rental car for fishing. That's abusing the system. You wouldn't go rent a car from a Hertz or an Enterprise rental company, then drive it out to the middle of nowhere, take it offroading down to the lake and then use it to haul smelly loads of fish back and forth. If you do, then let me know the name of that rental company because I want in on some of that.

Edited January 20, 2020 by Scaramouche

[Jester]

Trust me I get mate and I'm not taking anyway that, the only issue I have is that it takes forty hours to get that.  I'm from a community that if you were friends with certain admins you got gear so you didn't have to worry about that and just roleplay.  If you didn't have the connections or had to grind then you had a bit of work ahead of you before you could roleplay.  So I didn't mind when I first got on my first character grinding out so that I could help my out my friends on the server when we made goals and I had a set background for my character.  Granted after the forty hours and getting everything I had planned I left and my friends didn't use the resources I gave them to the best of their abilities when they asked me to come back and I got to back to grinding I just stuck with personal assets for myself, I didn't mind the grind as much instead helping my friends.  My point is just that, those who think like me will look at the high rental prices and just leave the server never to return.  I don't think high rental prices will fix the taxi or uber issue.  

 

I know a few people as taxi drivers just by roleplaying in clubs with them and they mentioned their own frustrations, but I don't think raising prices are the are the way.  Honestly if I can admit, turn up the difficult to drive if you are drunk, I have driven drunk as my character home many times when if I'm honest i shouldn't have, but that is the point.  Make it harder and you will have people calling taxi's or ubers instead of risking it and getting a DUI.  Just my two cents though, raising rental price is juts shooting yourself in the foot server wise. 

[Jennie]

8 hours ago, Scaramouche said:

This is true, but there are times a new player will spawn in and no taxis will be on duty. So a two-fold approach:

 

1) Disable the airport respawn point because that just enables people to abuse it and abuse the rental car system. There’s no reason to spawn at the airport, unless you’re a new player. If you’ve already been on the server, you should get there through IC means.
 

2) Only allow the rental car to be rented if there are no taxis on duty. A compromise here would be a time limit for a new player. Within the first 10 minutes, they’d have to try for a taxi. If there is only one taxi that is busy, then after those 10 minutes they can get a rental car but for one hour only. This will allow them to reach somewhere in the city. 
 

Again I get there are legitimate reasons to have a rental car, but I feel that most of the time in these cases, the rental car system is abused and not used for IC reasons, but more for convenience. If there is a true OOC reason that you are left without a car, there are admins and the /fixveh feature. 

The airport spawn serves to avoid bugs, more than once I have spawned in wrong places or interiors where I could not leave.

[pateuvasiliu]

A lot of people use Rental cars to commit crimes which is silly because if you crash a rental car you'd pay for that.

 

Should definitely be higher.

Edited January 20, 2020 by pateuvasiliu

[shareef2]

The usage of rental cars for crimes should be against the rules unless player-led rental companies pop up, because otherwise, you'd probably get caught, but there's not enough depth to the rental script to know if you could have gotten away with it or not.

 

I think $1000 an hour is a fair price, maybe even $1500. There's no point in using a taxi when you can have a car for an hour for $100. I typically charge $200-$500 for a taxi ride, and I think that's more than fair, in fact, it's usually $250, unless the ride is to somewhere far. Taxi roleplay is already limited due to the fact that most people have cars, but it is further limited by the rental script handing out cars to just anyone.