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"Item Bank" / Mail Order / Parcel Pickup Point


mj2002

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This is a concept that I've been considering for a few months now. I want to bring it up here to see if people can poke holes into the idea. I hope people can come up with challenges on why it wouldn't work, to see if there's something preventing this from becoming a success. It can also be a way to generate interest in this idea, were it to take off, either for those who might use the service, or those who might be interested in joining.

 


 

Basics

 

The concept is relatively simple. The details are a bit more complicated. Essentially a property inventory would take in items, and distribute them again.

 

 

Incoming Items

(Personal Delivery)

(Business Delivery / Mail Order)

(Employee Delivery / Mail Order)

 

 

Storage

 

 

Outgoing Items

(Personal Pickup)

(Business Pickup)

(Employee Pickup / Home Delivery / Business Delivery)

 

 

 

For any item exchange in GTAW, there need to be two characters online at the same time, or two characters need to have access to the same inventory (or you can stash items but this brings risks). This brings challenges for both time and location. In GTAW, location isn't a big deal. Almost all items can be transported across the map easily. However , illegal roleplayers can fill in the blanks here, two characters being at the same location isn't always what you'd want. It introduces risk. Time is definitely an issue. Many times, an item exchange cannot occur because two characters are not online at the same time. This concept can address both of these issues.

 

Some examples. You'd want to buy something from a shop, but this shop is closed. One way in which this concept could address that challenge is to offer 'mail order', where the service together with the shop arranges the supply of the item, and the customer can simply pick them up at the parcel center.

 

You want to send someone an item, but you can't meet each other at the same time due to time constraints. The sender can deliver the item at the parcel center, and the receiver can come and pick it up, both at times that they feel is convenient for them. This would be to offer a locker / item vault service.

 

Businesses could make use of this server as well. How they'd want to fit this in their business concept is up to them.

 

For this specific concept, depending on how it is received and what sort of interest is shown, I'm considering to try to make this concept work, likely under the GoPostal umbrella/name. If it takes off, it could possibly benefit from becoming a faction that is eligible for government funding, and then can also benefit from restrictions such as limits of corruption, which is important for a concept that could act as a sort of bank. Nothing is certain of course. Express your interest by posting here. The foundation for this is already in place, right now.

 

 

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Challenges

 

In order for this to work, the service would have to be active and open throughout the day. Herein lies the major challenge, finding people to make this work. An attractive pay can possibly take care of this. Technically it could be possible to do with without any script changes or special conditions. If it is used enough, eventually service fees could finance this completely. Its a challenge, but not something that would block this project from starting.

 

When it comes to mail order functionality, which in my view would be a big achievement if made possible, the biggest challenge is organizing the offers. Ideally you'd recreate the Amazon online storefront, but this will be extremely complicated to coordinate this with other businesses. However, on a small scale, getting some offerings and price lists from interested businesses together will be possible. Its a challenge, but not something that would block this project from starting.

 


 

Future

 

What would really make this idea be even more viable, is if deliveries at home were possible. Right now, dropping something in front of a door is next to guaranteeing it to be gone by the time the receiver is going to collect it. This isn't realistic, but with characters not being home 90% of the time due to the nature of roleplay on GTAW, its inevitable. Therefor, a mailbox system would add a lot of potential for roleplay.

 

An earlier suggestion regarding this;

 

 

 

 

Edited by mj2002
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Not much to add, this would make A LOT of businesses viable, it's difficult to run into certain businesses when they open couple of times a week for a few hours, not only it would be an amazing feature for people that want to buy certain things but also a lot of roleplay for delivery companies and businesses themselves, in this day and age almost every business out there delivers this should be a thing and would boost a lot of rp regarding all sorts of businesses.

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A challenge any system like this would create is the recreation of realistic cargo / mail screening and avoiding the possibility for people to post each other weapons and other illegal items. I wish to point out that this is technically already possible for any store owner / business owner / service provider, given the interest is there to roleplay it.

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I feel like you could accomplish this already through creative use of /stashitem - but this is definitely a more "official" solution.

The logistics of staffing an organization around the clock would be difficult for sure, but I don't agree that attractive IC pay is the answer. Compensating someone with IC cash for what's essentially amounting to OOC effort didn't work well with unrestricted police paychecks (and led to all sorts of realism issues on the side.)

 

A better solution may be to offer a small number of WP in exchange for a particular term of service. I guarantee you'll have to limit slots rather than go looking for players to do the job.

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I think having a postal courier service is a good idea - and this could easily be setup to be run self-sufficient with minimal aid from grants etc.

 

What is important is that a proper business model be adapted - and of course then it simply falls onto whether the community embraces the idea and makes use of it, or whether the community don't like it, and it fails - but that is perfectly acceptable - at least it was given a shot.

 

For instance, put a minimum cost on a delivery, say 1k, and then based on weight, further increments.

 

If someone is earning ~2k per hour transporting goods, then they're earning similar to what most other people are earning working as an on the beat cop etc.
 

Concern

My biggest concern about this idea is how it would be policed - I could see some people trying to use a courier service to transport high volumes of illegal goods & in the real world, that is a lot harder to pull off than say, putting a few grams of a drug in an envelope and sending it to an address inside a card.

Item transferring - Also, there would need to be someway for the scripts to fish out players trying to transfer items from one of their characters to another.
 

Edited by Alyssa McCarthy
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I like this. Actually got into a situation yesterday wishing there was some form of postal service. I hope the challenges it presents can be overcome so it becomes viable. Maybe at first it launches only for legal services to test the waters and see how people react to it? 

Edited by Gambler
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Dev team should create a new type of business along with a script for this, that's the only way it will work. I'm not sure if it is gonna catch on but it is worth trying if there's no other important features to be sorted out first. The employees should be able to abuse of it too, to create more roleplay opportunities. For example, stealing the packages they have to deliver and so on. This way it would be more entertain for all parties involved.

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