Current State of Extorting Businesses

[Garras Up]

Just now, Torlo said:

Unfortunately as far as I know, it for some reason is perfectly acceptable to extort a 24/7, it continues to happen on a daily basis at the 24/7 my character works at and the administration has done nothing and simply allowed this unrealistic extortion to continue. 

 

As to your other point, that news article is evidence that in the real world, severe and harsh consequences exist for doing these things that do not exist here. 

Yeah, definitely and I think they should. Hopefully in addition to this new wire thing being added, things will slowly start to change in that area. Because in reality extortion is a pretty hefty crime and you can be seriously fucked over if you catch a case and get federally charged.

 

1 minute ago, Ink said:

I will point out two things here. One which you already pointed out, and one which you didn't.

1) Where extortion will happen, as you said, is in heavily ethnic communities. These are people who come from parts of the world where extortion is still applicable, and are dealing with people who come from these parts of the world. There are more likely to be criminal affiliations inherently in the workforce of these businesses. There's more likely to be illegal immigration concerns, language barriers, or general misunderstandings about legal rights that prevent business owners from properly seeking legal aid. More importantly, there is also more of a threat imposed here because often times these business owners have family in the native country which can be targeted with impunity. If you own a Mexican restaurant as a Mexican individual living in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood, yes, an MS13 gang member showing up and saying "this is my territory and if you don't pay me your family in Guadalajara is going to get smoked" is a legitimate concern. 

But most importantly, I want to point out:

2) This man is in custody and pending RICO charges, and will almost certainly spend 10-20 years in prison for this, at least. The shop owner, also, is notably not "CK'd." In fact, this is an article talking about 43 members of MS13 getting arrested. FORTY. THREE. For doing stupid shit exactly like this. More proof that RPing in such a way without consequences for the criminal factions is unrealistic. The US fucks anyone who extorts in this country.

Definitely, you're right. I believe there should be harsher punishments in regards to extortion. While it definitely still happens, those that are caught for it generally end up spending atleast half of their lives in or dying in prison due to gang violence.

[Ink]

7 minutes ago, Torlo said:

I'd also like to add that as a legal rper on this server as it is currently, it feels like we're simply victims of illegal factions as far as our development within businesses is concerned. We have zero recourse if a thug walks in and demands we pay them, we're extorted, cked or simply cannot rp running our business anymore without dealing with thugs on a daily basis. In reality, one would hire armed guards, but it looks ridiculous so no one does it. Leaving us with no choice in our character development, as it's simply left to the whims of illegal factions as they face no realistic consequences for their actions. 

Well, also, if you hire armed thugs, alright, they won't be able to crash your business without it being a shootout, but the criminals can roleplay coming in, can cause trouble, and then when your security asks them to leave they can RP getting really mad and threatening vengeance, then going off and waiting for the business to be closed to kidnap/assault/murder your character for daring to protect themselves legally as a warning or a message or whatever.

Basically, any action a legal roleplayer takes besides "give over money, yes sir sorry sir" is grounds for a CK or for escalation from the criminal faction. Even worse is that a legal roleplayer can follow along with the roleplay and yield to the criminal factions and pay the protection money and still have the criminal faction CK them for any number of other affronts. Meanwhile the criminal roleplayer faces few consequences of any weight even in the unlikely occurrence that the SABI or DB actually digs into the case (which they just haven't really been doing). 

This server has been way too generous with how easily criminal roleplayers are able to get CKs granted on legal players and it needs to stop. Criminal roleplayers need to shoulder more risk when they engage in aggressive, hostile, or expansionist roleplays. 

Edited June 29, 2020 by Ink

[Torlo]

2 minutes ago, El Ghetto Man said:

Yeah, definitely and I think they should. Hopefully in addition to this new wire thing being added, things will slowly start to change in that area. Because in reality extortion is a pretty hefty crime and you can be seriously fucked over if you catch a case and get federally charged.

Unfortunately all I see coming from this new update is, either people mging the fact that wire taps are a script thing now and will refuse to speak anywhere besides their own vehicle or in the middle of nowhere, or coming with a crew of 15 who all have scanners and scanning the whole area and if a wire tap is found, uh oh that's grounds for a ck! 

[mj2002]

12 minutes ago, Ink said:

This server has been way too generous with how easily criminal roleplayers are able to get CKs granted on legal players and it needs to stop. Criminal roleplayers need to shoulder more risk when they engage in aggressive, hostile, or expansionist roleplays. 

I'd say the obvious solution is a capable faction representing a branch of the FIB which focuses on these sorts of crimes.

[Ink]

8 minutes ago, mj2002 said:

I'd say the obvious solution is a capable faction representing a branch of the FIB which focuses on these sorts of crimes.

I agree that this is a great long-term goal for the server and fully support this. However, some problems.

 

We already have the SABI faction. They have proven, so far, to be utterly toothless with regards to getting anything done.

The nature of investigative roleplay places a massive workload burden on players. Although it takes criminals only a few minutes to create some incredibly stupid, unrealistic, and downright nonsensical roleplay which exposes their criminal association and creates evidence to incarcerate them, it takes the investigative players literal hours to create lengthy and detailed reports, to collect screenshots, to collect interviews, to collect logs both IC and OOC, to ask OOC questions of involved roleplayers to represent their character's investigative efforts. Then they need to go through appropriate channels, it presumably needs to go through a court system for review, this needs to then get converted into a warrant and then the actual arrest neesd to be roleplayed. This involves many steps which require very lengthy, detailed, and realistic roleplay and upwards of dozens of real life human beings involved. This can take literal real life weeks to accomplish. Over one crime that took a few minutes to RP. By the time action can be done, that criminal character has done a ton of damage, has done worse things, has maybe even been killed or has gone inactive, the faction might have stopped playing. 

It's a lot of work for very little payoff.

In addition, staffing this faction requires multiple players who are not already in the PD or SD, who don't already have criminal characters, and who are willing to dedicate a ton of their time with these characters creating reports "OOCly" (they're IC, but require a ton of OOC effort). These are also supposed to be some of the best roleplayers our server can field to be able to handle the highly technical RP. Not only that, these players then need to be ICly trained appropriately, which can take weeks to accomplish, these training programs need to be established in the first place. 

I agree that we should have a competent FBI/SABI. But the problem is that it creates many natural bottlenecks which don't exist in real life. In real life, investigative agencies can afford to have a team of 10 officers dedicated strictly to monitoring one organization and one organization alone with these officers pulling 50-60 hour work weeks doing nothing but watching their every step and building a case. In real life, a crime a criminal did one year ago is just as relevant to their downfall in a year, if not moreso. And in real life, if someone is stupid enough to do brazen crimes, they get bagged and imprisoned immediately and will likely not be free again any time in their life for the next two decades--they don't get to "keep RPing" while 3 weeks of investigation and court cases pile up.

Edited June 29, 2020 by Ink

[Lemonade319]

1 hour ago, Ink said:

-deleted to make the post smaller-

Extortion still happens, has it changed? Sure, there are more advanced ways of extortion available now that don’t include smashing up stores, cyber type stuff comes into mind however, that is near impossible to portray in the game so you have to do what is able to be portrayed in game.

 

I agree with you that corporate businesses are harder to extort, especially with traditional methods of extortion but most player owned companies aren’t national/multinational corporations, they’re local to LS, thus it is easier to locate the owner and use more traditional methods. 
 

A lot of what you have pointed out hasn’t been a lack of creativity or failing with illegal RP, it is a problem that law enforcement are clearly failing to tackle you claim that extortion is too much of a risk for criminals, if that is the case then how come so many players are getting away with it? If it was such a risk you’d expect someone to be arrested for extortion by now, that is not the case. You want extortion to stop? Deal with it ICly and get a grip of your law enforcement to stop it. 
 

Stop demanding and ooc fix to an ic problem. If people are extorting in a way that is detrimental to RP report then, like you would in any other situation. 
 

You guys also act as if you’re being extorted of all of your money when I know for a fact what a lot of people are being asked for is minimal when you take into consideration how much they earn simply on door fees and hourly pay checks, that’s before any money from actual business. 
 

You claim it’s not realistic because “police would stop this irl” when you’re playing on a server where you get 5 grand a pay check until you’re at 100 grand and where every club that opens is lined with exspensive sports cars, even if said clubs open in the poorest, scummiest part of town. Yes, this server is supposed to “portray” reality for the most part, but it won’t and never will 100%. I’m not sure why extortion is the “reality breaking” hill you guys are dying on with other stuff that occurs on the server.

[Torlo]

11 minutes ago, Lemonade319 said:

Extortion still happens, has it changed? Sure, there are more advanced ways of extortion available now that don’t include smashing up stores, cyber type stuff comes into mind however, that is near impossible to portray in the game so you have to do what is able to be portrayed in game.

 

I agree with you that corporate businesses are harder to extort, especially with traditional methods of extortion but most player owned companies aren’t national/multinational corporations, they’re local to LS, thus it is easier to locate the owner and use more traditional methods. 
 

A lot of what you have pointed out hasn’t been a lack of creativity or failing with illegal RP, it is a problem that law enforcement are clearly failing to tackle you claim that extortion is too much of a risk for criminals, if that is the case then how come so many players are getting away with it? If it was such a risk you’d expect someone to be arrested for extortion by now, that is not the case. You want extortion to stop? Deal with it ICly and get a grip of your law enforcement to stop it. 
 

Stop demanding and ooc fix to an ic problem. If people are extorting in a way that is detrimental to RP report then, like you would in any other situation. 
 

You guys also act as if you’re being extorted of all of your money when I know for a fact what a lot of people are being asked for is minimal when you take into consideration how much they earn simply on door fees and hourly pay checks, that’s before any money from actual business. 
 

You claim it’s not realistic because “police would stop this irl” when you’re playing on a server where you get 5 grand a pay check until you’re at 100 grand and where every club that opens is lined with exspensive sports cars, even if said clubs open in the poorest, scummiest part of town. Yes, this server is supposed to “portray” reality for the most part, but it won’t and never will 100%. I’m not sure why extortion is the “reality breaking” hill you guys are dying on with other stuff that occurs on the server.

My main concern is mostly that Ic laws should be more strict on extortion and yes I do agree that it needs to be done in an IC manner. However, we also have the issue of legal characters having cks approved on them because they got a mobster arrested for a few days and now your character is gone forever, we're stuck between a rock and a hard place while illegal players can continue to extort multiple businesses at once without more than a risk of a few days in jail. 

Edited June 29, 2020 by Torlo

[Lemonade319]

3 minutes ago, Torlo said:

My main concern is mostly that Ic laws should be more strict on extortion and yes I do agree that it needs to be done in an IC manner. However, we also have the issue of legal characters having cks approved on them because they for a mobster arrested for a few days and now your character is gone foreve, we're stuck between a rock and a hard place while illegal players can continue to extort multiple businesses at once without more than a risk of a few days in jail. 

That comes down to law enforcement though. They need to be building cases on this stuff.

[Torlo]

5 minutes ago, Lemonade319 said:

That comes down to law enforcement though. They need to be building cases on this stuff.

And you're 100% right, but as it's been stated in this thread previously the current punishment for extortion is not at all close to what happens in reality, and correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I know the ic laws and punishments associated cannot be lobbied for or changed in any way icly. Currently it's more like we live in Somalia where you have to choose which warlord you'd like to pay and the police don't do anything about it. 

Edited June 29, 2020 by Torlo

[Ink]

35 minutes ago, Lemonade319 said:

Extortion still happens, has it changed? Sure, there are more advanced ways of extortion available now that don’t include smashing up stores, cyber type stuff comes into mind however, that is near impossible to portray in the game so you have to do what is able to be portrayed in game.

 

Extortion does not happen in any way remotely similar to what is portrayed in-game. Rather than criminal roleplayers taking it upon themselves to realistically come up with more creative ways to be criminals, they're devolving to unrealistic stereotypes and abusing the nature of the game world in a way that has their characters ignoring what would be highly consequential in the real world.

 

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I agree with you that corporate businesses are harder to extort, especially with traditional methods of extortion but most player owned companies aren’t national/multinational corporations, they’re local to LS, thus it is easier to locate the owner and use more traditional methods. 

 

All modern American businesses are incredibly difficult to extort, especially in a major city like Los Angeles fielding one of the largest metropolitan police departments in the entire world. Extortion in today's day and age creates immense amount of evidence and threats against body and property are taken very seriously in the eyes of the law. A camera feed showing someone coming into your business and simply demanding that you pay money for protection is enough to involve the FBI because the US's legal system is cleverly designed to intentionally make this a federal crime rather than a local one.

 

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A lot of what you have pointed out hasn’t been a lack of creativity or failing with illegal RP, it is a problem that law enforcement are clearly failing to tackle you claim that extortion is too much of a risk for criminals, if that is the case then how come so many players are getting away with it? If it was such a risk you’d expect someone to be arrested for extortion by now, that is not the case. You want extortion to stop? Deal with it ICly and get a grip of your law enforcement to stop it. 

 

It is 100% a lack of creativity and failing in illegal RP when roleplayers fail to come up with more interesting or unique ways to develop their characters besides incredibly unrealistic portrayal of their characters being mindless murder machines with no fear of legal repercussion. 

 

I claim that extortion is too much of a risk for criminals in real life and my point is exactly that the criminal roleplayers on GTA:W are abusing the fact that OOC limitations on the police's ability to effectively deal with the bandwidth of creating 30-page reports for every investigation of extortion to field a meaningful arrest to extort more. The reason people who are extorting aren't being arrested is because our server is not currently equipped to deal with criminal roleplayers doing this extortion in a realistic way, and criminal RPers are having a field day and doing this incredibly lazy and boring roleplay to farm money.

I challenge you this: How would you feel if the server just made it so all crimes have their sentences increased substantially to reflect higher consequences? Does that seem like fun to you? Would that change the way you roleplayed if now your character will end up in prison for a week just for threatening someone? What about if it meant your character ended up in prison for two IRL months for kidnapping? What about six IRL months for shooting someone?

 

Suddenly those IC consequences seem like a lot more of a reason to RP realistically.

 

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Stop demanding and ooc fix to an ic problem. If people are extorting in a way that is detrimental to RP report then, like you would in any other situation. 
 

 

This is a really convenient argument people lean on, but the fact of the matter is that we're a bunch of OOC human beings playing this game and together building a representation of our real world using our OOC community and trying to make things OOCly fun for everyone. Roleplay should be fun, and it should be interesting. Hiding behind "this is an IC problem, deal with it IC" is an asinine mantra when there currently exists no IC solution, and the current OOC construct of the server places 95% of the consequences on the victims of the RP and only a measly 5% on the perpetrators of it.  Right now "deal with it IC" literally only benefits criminal roleplayers and is a complete net detriment to legal RPers. The reason we even have an Illegal Faction Management team and an RP Quality Management team is to prevent awful roleplay like this OOCly from affecting our IC space.

 

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You guys also act as if you’re being extorted of all of your money when I know for a fact what a lot of people are being asked for is minimal when you take into consideration how much they earn simply on door fees and hourly pay checks, that’s before any money from actual business. 
 

The amounts of money are inconsequential if the roleplay is fundamentally flawed. But the fact of the matter is we have an example of legal roleplayers who roleplayed eagerly along with the extortion. They agreed to pay the mobsters extorting them 3k a week. Then the next day the mobsters told them they're upping it to 10k a week. Then, another group of mobsters came by and demanded another 20k a week. Even though these guys paid all these guys off, they still found a reason to be upset ICly and literally CKed one of them (after already having kidnapped him and broken his leg ICly before). What these factions are doing right now is bullying people and making the game less fun for the human beings OOCly controlling these characters, dominating their RP and turning it into a misery for them such that it's easier for them to literally CK their own characters and play someone new than deal with it further.

 

That is making this server a more toxic place to play.

 

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You claim it’s not realistic because “police would stop this irl” when you’re playing on a server where you get 5 grand a pay check until you’re at 100 grand and where every club that opens is lined with exspensive sports cars, even if said clubs open in the poorest, scummiest part of town. Yes, this server is supposed to “portray” reality for the most part, but it won’t and never will 100%. I’m not sure why extortion is the “reality breaking” hill you guys are dying on with other stuff that occurs on the server.

 

The economy of this server is a mess. But as long as the economy of the server gets people to roleplay, it's working. The economy encourages people to get out there and RP service roles. That is a win for me. We have so many legal roleplayers on this server because of the economy being how it is. It's far from perfect, lots of stuff about it is really stupid. And there are dozens of threads where people are arguing about these issues.

 

In this thread, we're arguing about the highly unrealistic extortion roleplay which has no place in a modern representation of 2020 Los Angeles. We're debating the unreasonable degree to which criminal roleplayers are able to force IC consequences on legal roleplayers, and how few consequences they themselves risk in return. We're discussing how toxic this is to people and how this makes the game markedly less fun for people who are contributing to GTA:W's world being more realistic, vibrant, and interesting to RP in.

Edited June 29, 2020 by Ink