How does someone get out of extortion?

[Torlo]

Like ink said, this has been brought up already and nothing changed from that thread, hopefully something changes now whether it's IC or OOC. I can't count how many times I've seen "Just hire security" at a 24/7 in a normal American community? Their supposed solutions make no sense and I've never seen any good extortion rp. The worst of it that happened to me multiple times was a group of 4 guys with bats demanding protection money. How is this still allowed to continue? 

[Alyssa McCarthy]

When exporters are jailed, they’d realistically be put away for long sentences, meaning many, many years.
 

Part of the problem is that IG you’re jailed for hours/days (which is for obvious reasons).

 

Wouldn’t it be better to have some kind of system whereby when jailed, upon release you have to treat any extortion victims with the same mentality of a PK? I.e - Representing the fact of potentially decades in jail that and businesses would in RL have swapped hands several times. Meaning, victims are off the hook and you can’t go back to the same business again?
 

That way, there is a way for the business owner to ‘win’ and get free?

 

it also adds incentives for such criminals to fight it in the courts rather than accept the punishment  etc

[Ink]

5 minutes ago, Alyssa McCarthy said:

When exporters are jailed, they’d realistically be put away for long sentences, meaning many, many years.
 

Part of the problem is that IG you’re jailed for hours/days (which is for obvious reasons).

 

Wouldn’t it be better to have some kind of system whereby when jailed, upon release you have to treat any extortion victims with the same mentality of a PK? I.e - Representing the fact of potentially decades in jail that and businesses would in RL have swapped hands several times. Meaning, victims are off the hook and you can’t go back to the same business again?
 

That way, there is a way for the business owner to ‘win’ and get free?

 

it also adds incentives for such criminals to fight it in the courts rather than accept the punishment  etc

 

I still think extortion RP is frankly dumb and has no place in a modern heavy RP setting. It's such an "RPG" style mechanic and it doesn't really create any actual roleplay that couldn't have developed in a more natural, interesting, unique, engaging, cooperative, and realistic way. Criminals want to exert control over a business? Then they should hang out there and make that place their own naturally. They should volunteer themselves to "settle" things for the business. Oh, what's that, some trouble happening? Don't worry about it, your regulars took care of it for you. And the influence creeps, and creeps, and creeps.

 

That being said, I really like this idea of a sort of soft PK for characters who get jailed. I think this goes beyond extortion RP. I think this can help do HUGE amounts of work to even the playing field and straighten out the power balance between "legal" and "criminal" characters. Because legal repercussions are limited to being a few days, and for those to even happen requires dozens of hours of RP of investigation, police work, forum-based documentation for the police, judicial work, potentially hours of just compiling evidence and creating cases. And the shittiest part is that you can go through all this trouble putting your character on the line multiple times to get someone in jail for like 5 days for a major crime... and then they come out 5 days later and now you have some very angry enemies for whom it is so utterly easy to get revenge.

 

I really like the idea of jail terms being the legal character's version of a PK on a criminal character. Because it's stupid for a legal character to roll up and put two bullets in a criminal character's head. But that's the meta in GTA:W, that's how you "win" an RP incontrovertibly. Criminal characters get to pull that card any time they want within reason, just auto-winning. Let's talk more as a community about jail time having a PK-like mechanic re: who got you there.

[Zayyy]

So, there's a few ways to deal with it.. but it's whatever, only the legal side person is going to end up with a CK. Why?

You get the extorters jailed.

RP'ly, they're in for years.

They get released after a day.

IFM approves the CK like it's piece of cake.

You get CK'ed for snitching on them.

Repeat 

[The OG Juicebox]

11 hours ago, Henning said:

I continuously hear legal RPers complaining about extortion but very rarely do I see anyone go about tackling it this way. In previous threads people have stated that doing so would make their perfectly legal characters into dirty criminals which is frankly a bullshit excuse. The world is not black and white and neither is the server. Making concessions to criminals doesn't make your character a criminal, it makes your character actually somewhat realistic for once. 

I respect where you're coming from but I have to disagree with this wholeheartedly. I run a business IRL and have done so for many years. If someone came in to extort my business (god forbid), I wouldn't know the first person to turn to besides calling the cops and hoping for the best. I don't associate with criminals nor do I have contacts to just go up to and say "help". It's not that I feel it would make me dirty, I simply just don't have those avenues to explore. That's the reality of it.

 

Likewise, my character has no criminal affiliations nor do I make any assumptions on people's business, criminal or otherwise. It's 100% unreasonable to suggest that my legal character, "make concessions and ask for help from someone I can reasonably assume to be a criminal to take care of it". Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You're basically saying that as my legal character, I should try to tackle the issue by consorting with criminals. This is not a solution nor should it even be a suggestion. My character would not knowingly consort with criminals nor think to himself, "Hmm, maybe I should pay someone to protect me!". No, I'm calling the cops. Hopefully some new IC rules/laws come into effect to make that avenue pack more of a punch. Again, I respect your opinion. No hard feelings. Just can't agree with what you're suggesting.

Edited December 8, 2020 by Juicebox

[ThatDutchPerson]

14 hours ago, .Pluto. said:

yeah, and in real life, people surely wouldn't check why is some business owner transferring 10 grand a week to your bank account

NGL thats reason for the IRS to start looking into your business. Then its just a matter of time they find out you're being extorted and they'll launch a criminal investigation against the extorionists.

[Paenymion]

Not sure why we have these very short jail times, it doesn't promote any sort of sense of danger or risk for criminals.  Bump up the sentence lengths and people would start getting smarter about their illegal RP.

[LoneRider]

It's very easy to avoid extorters. Have an employee or more around when you open up your business, then when the extorters come, have your employees tell them that the owner is not there, and simply keep repeating that. That requires you to not act as the owner whenever you'll be operating your business though.

[caballero]

10 hours ago, Certified Lover Boy Jola said:

Call the cops?

You're really smart aren't you

[Ink]

41 minutes ago, LoneRider said:

It's very easy to avoid extorters. Have an employee or more around when you open up your business, then when the extorters come, have your employees tell them that the owner is not there, and simply keep repeating that. That requires you to not act as the owner whenever you'll be operating your business though.

 

That this is the meta is an insult to "heavy" roleplay. How many businesses out in the real world do you guys go into where the owners hide in the cupboard every time a man of vaguely eastern european orientation steps inside and says "hello I hef speak to owner yes?" and the staff has to be trained to respond back "Oh no we actually do not have an owner we are a free-spirited collective of equals."

 

It's such game-y, frankly OOC/IC mixing roleplay at that point. Los Santos shouldn't always feel like the aborted offspring of Monopoly and Clue, holy shit. At the end of the day, extortion RP only makes the city feel cheap, it makes the RP plastic, and all it amounts to is that catching extortion is like your business's roleplay catching parasites who will leech RP from you until it's no longer fun for you or destroy your project at any time because "you have so much dirt about us" or "you didn't pay our increased rates." 

 

 

Edited December 8, 2020 by Ink