How does someone get out of extortion?

[yerro]

34 minutes ago, Ink said:

 

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." 

 

 

It kinda baffles me how the OP has a very wrong mindset concerning this situation and everyone seens to nod along to it?

 

I mean, if we're discussing it, it doesn't even seem hard to me to avoid getting scammed. You involve the police and eventually some of the perpetrators may end up under arrest. Naturally, you'd need to be put in witness protection as there'd be people coming towards you, but I disagree with the notion that victims of extortion are helpless — "perpetrators" stand much more to lose.

 

If taxing a business leaves or grants a high chance to leave their goons in jail with their criminal record extended, that group is likely to consider taxing another business instead. Sure, when one gets incarcerated, another may take their place — but OCs don't benefit from public exposure. They don't benefit from giving police charges against them, especially considering extortion doesn't seem that hard to prove and it's an easier conspiracy (among many) to prove in court.

 

But ultimately, you're treating extortion roleplayers as OOC pests. They're here to roleplay, just as you are. Would be nice of you to show appreciation for their efforts, OOC, instead of trying to find an OOC loophole to avoid RP.

[Ink]

2 minutes ago, yerro said:

It kinda baffles me how the OP has a very wrong mindset concerning this situation and everyone seens to nod along to it?

This isn't the first time this topic has been brought up on this community, and a large portion of the community definitely has a well-earned way of feeling about extortion RP being a downer.

 

2 minutes ago, yerro said:

I mean, if we're discussing it, it doesn't even seem hard to me to avoid getting scammed. You involve the police and eventually some of the perpetrators may end up under arrest. Naturally, you'd need to be put in witness protection as there'd be people coming towards you, but I disagree with the notion that victims of extortion are helpless — "perpetrators" stand much more to lose.

Saying "involve the police" may sound good, but the police are players as well, and a finite number of them. They're stuck in a city where about half or more of the population has crime as their main career path. There's always stuff for police to be doing. Investigating criminal organizations takes hours and hours of roleplay. All Grigory Mikhailovich has to do is show up for 5 minutes and be like "where is owner? give 10k week" and his RP is on track. Now the business owner, instead of running the business itself which benefits the ENTIRE community by providing an RP venue, now has to go and involve a bunch of police officers who really would rather be doing anything else and start a boring investigation RP into what is example #944 of Vaguely Ethnic Mafia extorting another business owner. Now they need to roleplay gathering information from audio recordings and videos which runs into all sorts of OOC complications based on the availability, portability, and permissions of these pieces of data. Then this all needs to be documented and prepared for case files on the PD side of things, taking a human being literally upwards of hours of real life time to put together and organize. Then this needs to be executed on, there is possibly a Judiciary segment even before the arrest is going to happen to get warrants, then there is the judiciary segment afterwards all of which can require upwards of 5-10 other players (judge, defense lawyer, prosecuting lawyer, DA, witnesses, subject matter experts] to have to prepare other testimony. 

 

And the police have to do this for every time this happens. On a server with like 40 criminal factions. And like, what, a thousand businesses?

 

And even if all of this works and the criminal is brought to justice, he goes to jail for like 3 days.

 

And then he comes back by the end of the week "dis little pirozhok put me in prisons for 3 monthses we kill whole family."

2 minutes ago, yerro said:

 

If taxing a business leaves or grants a high chance to leave their goons in jail with their criminal record extended, that group is likely to consider taxing another business instead. Sure, when one gets incarcerated, another may take their place — but OCs don't benefit from public exposure. They don't benefit from giving police charges against them, especially considering extortion doesn't seem that hard to prove and it's an easier conspiracy (among many) to prove in court.

 

No, here's an even bigger problem. If one of them gets incarcerated, you're right others take their place. They can literally roll up an almost identical character to the last. Also a foreign tough guy from a hard country who has come to America to make tough living as big bad mafia man. They can literally be back up and running exactly as they were within a couple weeks of development. Sure they might lose a rank, but the character will be functionally the same. The mob does not really weaken itself that much. Yes it sucks to be raked in court, but the Conti Crime Family literally got raked on a closed and shut case where one of their dudes was trying to assassinate an executive of one of the largest corporate entities on our server. 8 days in jail. The characters on the legal side? They quit those characters because they're basically unplayable now. The Conti guys? Still RPing as "regular legitimate businessmen" like nothing happened. 🤡

 

(I mean no ill will, I again applaud Conti for being a faction which early on led the charge in completely eradicating Tony Spaghettios style extortion as a valid RP venue for their faction.)

2 minutes ago, yerro said:

 

But ultimately, you're treating extortion roleplayers as OOC pests. They're here to roleplay, just as you are. Would be nice of you to show appreciation for their efforts, OOC, instead of trying to find an OOC loophole to avoid RP.

 

Yeah, uh, because they're OOC pests. Instead of creating RP for the server or doing something interesting with their characters, they're playing a stereotypical and unrealistic cliche which attacks the meta of this server by leveraging all the advantages criminal RPers have because of the limitations of GTA:W while twisting the weaknesses legal RPers have. There are interesting ways for a criminal faction to profit off of legal fronts, and how to appropriately portray a modern criminal faction in America. Extortion is lazy RP for boring people who don't know better.

 

It's also really ironic you call people expressing their dislike of how ridiculous extortion RP a "OOC loophole" but extortion roleplay is literally a loophole about robbery limits and the rule about robbing open business. So. Disagree there, chief.

 

[Vash Baldeus]

16 hours ago, PSYCHOTHINKER said:

I mean... I don't think it leaves you with a choice if it's a legal character tbh except for taking it the legal way which I don't really think will be effective. So let's say I put the extorters in jail through the legal way with the help of PD, they will come back after a few days and the same thing will happen again. (Or at least I think the same thing will happen)

That's how things work, a few times people tried to extort my business. A few friends of mine took care of it without too much of an issue.

[eTaylor]

How do you guys think about adding a rule to rule 10 covering extortion? Something along the lines that you can’t extort franchise businesses? Or corporates? So for example, a 24/7 or any of the chain stores basically. 

[yerro]

28 minutes ago, Ink said:

This isn't the first time this topic has been brought up on this community, and a large portion of the community definitely has a well-earned way of feeling about extortion RP being a downer.

 

Well-earned? Debatable.

28 minutes ago, Ink said:

Saying "involve the police" may sound good, but the police are players as well, and a finite number of them. They're stuck in a city where about half or more of the population has crime as their main career path. There's always stuff for police to be doing. Investigating criminal organizations takes hours and hours of roleplay. All Grigory Mikhailovich has to do is show up for 5 minutes and be like "where is owner? give 10k week" and his RP is on track. Now the business owner, instead of running the business itself which benefits the ENTIRE community by providing an RP venue, now has to go and involve a bunch of police officers who really would rather be doing anything else and start a boring investigation RP into what is example #944 of Vaguely Ethnic Mafia extorting another business owner. Now they need to roleplay gathering information from audio recordings and videos which runs into all sorts of OOC complications based on the availability, portability, and permissions of these pieces of data. Then this all needs to be documented and prepared for case files on the PD side of things, taking a human being literally upwards of hours of real life time to put together and organize. Then this needs to be executed on, there is possibly a Judiciary segment even before the arrest is going to happen to get warrants, then there is the judiciary segment afterwards all of which can require upwards of 5-10 other players (judge, defense lawyer, prosecuting lawyer, DA, witnesses, subject matter experts] to have to prepare other testimony.

Now you're kind of doing the same thing that robbery haters do — you're pulling a strawman to describe the worst kind of roleplayer that's a fine mix of minimal effort & OOC cash grab mentality to make it look like that's all OC RP is about.

 

This entire point can be dismissed with the following — when dealing with subpar roleplay, report it to have admins teach and instruct them to be better. It doesn't mean you get to paint the rest of OCs the same bad color.

28 minutes ago, Ink said:

And the police have to do this for every time this happens. On a server with like 40 criminal factions. And like, what, a thousand businesses?

The police have to do a lot of very repetitive things. You know what I've found though? There are people that like these sort of investigations.

 

Lemme give you an example. It's not uncommon at all for people to have paperwork in the PD/SD, and there have been people leaving the PD because it feels like you're doing more paperwork and holding back from engaging situations just to avoid having to write a ton of reports after.

 

On the other hand, there are some people that just enjoy doing it. While they are a minority, they're still a sizable minority. The same applies to VICE/RHU-based units that are more than willing to take the time and investigate the thing.

 

You can learn about the means available to you and start with the very first steps instead of finding reasons to shrug it off and, again, take the easy stance of saying, "extortion roleplay sucks".

 

28 minutes ago, Ink said:

And even if all of this works and the criminal is brought to justice, he goes to jail for like 3 days.

 

And then he comes back by the end of the week "dis little pirozhok put me in prisons for 3 monthses we kill whole family."

 

No, here's an even bigger problem. If one of them gets incarcerated, you're right others take their place. They can literally roll up an almost identical character to the last. Also a foreign tough guy from a hard country who has come to America to make tough living as big bad mafia man. They can literally be back up and running exactly as they were within a couple weeks of development. Sure they might lose a rank, but the character will be functionally the same. The mob does not really weaken itself that much. Yes it sucks to be raked in court, but the Conti Crime Family literally got raked on a closed and shut case where one of their dudes was trying to assassinate an executive of one of the largest corporate entities on our server. 8 days in jail. The characters on the legal sie? They quit those characters because they're basically unplayable now. The Conti guys? Still RPing as "regular legitimate businessmen" like nothing happened. 🤡

Here you go again at painting this argument poorly.

 

I've never been in a forum report like this, but I'm damn sure that if you were to report someone for roleplaying getting out "three IC days" after for RICO-tier charges, an admin would shut them down fast. Not to mention there's an actual points system so getting a character imprisoned isn't without its consequences.

 

Lastly, it's again a quality matter. My point is that if you're dealing with faction that's spitting out goons at you, perhaps you should bring an admin to check if they're spitting out copypasted characters. Because sometimes that is the case. If the faction goes changing its members' characters without a good reason and just replacing them with fresh blank profile goons, that's something you definitely want to report them for.

 

This again leads me to the point that people in this community hate to drive change. They take extra time to whine about it — sorry — on the forums and Discord, but when it comes to taking a moment of their time to shut up, settle down, and construct a report to get admins involved? Nah, let's get back to the former.

 

To add, a report isn't to get people ajailed or banned. It's not to flex on others like, "hey, suck it". It's to get people to roleplay better. My point is that people siding with anti-extortion notions seem to have a very flawed avoidant mindset as roleplayers. And if they stay on that path, they're only going to derail this community's roleplay standards.

 

tl;dr

 

• FM is there to prevent subpar roleplay; there are rules factions have to abide by.
• there are server rules against spawning copypaste characters.
• make a report.

28 minutes ago, Ink said:

Yeah, uh, because they're OOC pests. Instead of creating RP for the server or doing something interesting with their characters, they're playing a stereotypical and unrealistic cliche which attacks the meta of this server by leveraging all the advantages criminal RPers have because of the limitations of GTA:W while twisting the weaknesses legal RPers have. There are interesting ways for a criminal faction to profit off of legal fronts, and how to appropriately portray a modern criminal faction in America. Extortion is lazy RP for boring people who don't know better.

I may not like people robbing others on dirt bikes, but it doesn't mean I get to instantly judge characters riding dirt bikes as subpar roleplayers. I feel like I'd be repeating myself here, so let me just direct you to the points I've made above — make a report and respect people trying to create RP with you.

 

28 minutes ago, Ink said:

It's also really ironic you call people expressing their dislike of how ridiculous extortion RP a "OOC loophole" but extortion roleplay is literally a loophole about robbery limits and the rule about robbing open business. So. Disagree there, chief.

"Chief". Okay.

 

If there's anything ironic about this is how you see extortion as a loophole to robbery rules where it clearly isn't. It's not covered by the rules, because it's an entirely different activity. Here's some food for thought — don't you think that screaming "they play to win" makes you appear like you just don't want to, ergh, "lose"?

7 minutes ago, eTaylor said:

How do you guys think about adding a rule to rule 10 covering extortion? Something along the lines that you can’t extort franchise businesses? Or corporates? So for example, a 24/7 or any of the chain stores basically. 

I'm generally against introducing more rules that streamline encounters. Most of the time that leads to playing whack-a-mole and loopholes.

 

Instead, you can bring up the problem with IFM and get their attention to scamming to make sure factions are roleplaying it properly, including accounting for their targets. That would definitely be a good start and I'd support it.

 

Edited December 8, 2020 by yerro
added a reply to eTaylor

[caballero]

1 hour ago, yerro said:

It kinda baffles me how the OP has a very wrong mindset concerning this situation and everyone seens to nod along to it?

Buddy I literally mentioned I don't have much knowledge on the topic and that I'm not attacking it lol, I made this topic for knowledge and people made it a war, hell I'm not even a legal rper as I've mentioned

[yerro]

1 minute ago, Santanaa said:

Buddy I literally mentioned I don't have much knowledge on the topic and that I'm not attacking it lol, I made this topic for knowledge and people made it a war, hell I'm not even a legal rper as I've mentioned

Fraternizing doesn't do you much justice. My point is you're looking at extortion as something potentially bad OOCly that you need to stop OOCly. That's not exactly the case. That's like saying PD/SD should have an OOC goal to police the server — they do not.

 

My point was more aimed at people supporting and going even farther with this than you did.

[Pathway]

ive owned three businesses during my time on the server, one in vinewood, one in davis and one in little seoul

none of them have gotten extorted, and they were all very active. So it's not as big as a problem as people are claiming, and the guy who said 80% of businesses get extorted is jus lying or doesn't know what he's talking abt

[Guest]

Keep your Shotty under the counter. 

Edited December 8, 2020 by Guest
jk btw

[Law]

2 minutes ago, Pathway said:

ive owned three businesses during my time on the server, one in vinewood, one in davis and one in little seoul

none of them have gotten extorted, and they were all very active. So it's not as big as a problem as people are claiming, and the guy who said 80% of businesses get extorted is jus lying or doesn't know what he's talking abt

I haven’t had an extortion encounter either, but I think it’s less about the frequency than it is about the quality of this roleplay. As mentioned in responses before ours.