What changes would you like to see in the economy?

[Koko]

I would just like to see a system in which niche, RP-focused businesses have a chance to survive. That's literally it. I don't mind if it's an OOC inventive, some sort of "small business tax break/benefit" or whatever you want to call it. I'm tired of there only being 3 types of player-run businesses that are viable to keep open because you can't monetize others in a meaningful way and rely on the few niche players that want to enjoy what you have to offer (which would be a legit business idea IRL and definitely breathes life into neighborhoods rather than the millionth Club of the Month).

[orca112]

Seeing as currently you basically rack up money, I would like to see more money sinks - not overtaxing every player, but opportunities to throw your money into and do something with it instead of taking it off the economy and racking it up with no idea what to do with it.

 

I would also love to see some sort of living costs for apartments and houses depending on location/size. Right now, there is no downside to owning a property other than the initial investment and a lot of houses are sitting on hoarders with (semi-)inactive characters hoping for a change in the real estate market or only trading houses rather than selling/buying them in the real estate market. It should not be as high and scale on location / size of the property; A Vinewood Hills house will be more expensive to upkeep than an apartment in Morningwood for example.

[marbella mondays]

50 minutes ago, eTaylor said:

Honestly, I’d like a system where you don’t get left behind for having a real life. I have no idea how I’d go about suggesting something like that, but my gripe is that because of the financial system the impression is created that you’re being punished for the time you can’t spend playing. 
 

Which touches on this idea, we’re not all entrepreneurial masterminds and many people are left behind in the dirt by players who have no time constraints. Meaning that if you have a full time job, a relationship and other hobbies you’re essentially told to suck it. I could do the exact same roleplay as my friend but because he’s got nothing else keeping him away from the computer he walks around with $900.000 but I’m stuck scrounging with $30.000. It took me a real life year just to get a preferred property after losing another because of a disputed inactivity wipe. Despite having a character in poverty, you’re still left having to spend exorbitant amounts. This takes me away from the roleplay I like to do, to grind away on a job I don’t like OOC or IC. And while I’m thankful that I’m able to haphazardly work my IC job in a way that still offers roleplay I absolutely hate it. This leaves me with logging on during my only free day, sighing as I have to work for 2-3 hours and then log off and hope I can do my own thing next week. I’ll take any tips anyone might have. Or how others deal with this who are in similar situations.

I think a savings system with 0.3 interest on each payment from the last payment, that equates to 500 hours, and once you get your savings done in full, you must wait 2-4 weeks before doing it again. This means you won't have 20 million like LSRP after 1024 hours of 0.5 interests, and it means you can't instantly start it again. 

[L I C E]

just remove a 0 from everything... please... 180 dollar wrench becomes an 18 dollar wrench... please... i know it doesn't matter, but god it hurts every time i go somewhere and they charge me $1800 dollars for a bag or 50 dollars for a burger or whatever. it just sounds so funny lol

[croozerdog]

Everything, full revamp.

[Gambler]

So many things, it needs an actual IRL career economist to fix it and bring solutions. Some IRL economy can fix it and make it the thesis of their diploma. "How I fixed GTAW economy".

[Ink]

There's a few tiers to this response.

 

First, let's talk about what this economy does well: This economy currently is at a pretty nice level of "grind" versus "RP" -- certainly some people will agree more than others here, but at the end of the day, this server hands every character $200,000 to start, and you can be earning $4,000 an hour (plus a $500-800 auto paycheck once the $5,000 drip is exhausted) from the first few minutes you're on the server. Plus, most $4,000/hour jobs also come with bonuses, whether paid as sales commission, as tips, or by the employer of the business. To that end, most people can reasonably get everything they need for their RP with little to no "grinding."

 

That is AWESOME. Compare this to many other GTA RP servers past and present where grinding is necessary to own anything. If you are humble with what your character needs, your starter $200,000 is enough to buy an apartment of your own and a large variety of rather nice vehicles. By just being logged in for your first 40 hours, your character has enough funds to live a decently comfortable life without you ever having to RP a single other job, and you will continue to get $500+ every single hour you're online.

 

To that end, the economy works fine for your average person. We do not want our economy to be a chore, you shouldn't have to be grinding instead of RPing. On GTA:W, you don't need to ever grind unless you want to have really nice cars, expensive homes, or to purchase businesses outright. 

 

The 4k/hr bonus for some businesses is really a great system because it allows more people to be given IC jobs which otherwise would not be profitable on this server. 4k is also a really generous number, perhaps too generous, but I really appreciate it because it means that most usual purchases an average human being would be making are really attainable. You want a 120,000 car? That's 30 hours of RP, less whatever extra money you make off of sales commissions, tips, bonuses, and automatic paycheck money. While 30 hours is still a lot of play time, that is play time spent roleplaying rather than grinding (ideally). 

 

I think this system is kinder than almost any other server I've ever been on, and the only way it can get any kinder is just by handing assets out to players by requests. "My character would ICly be a hard-working so and so, so this is what my character should ICly have." I think there's room for looking into a system like this, but I really feel it's unnecessary. If clocking 30 hours of your character working in a heavy roleplay server is too much of a time commitment for you, GTA:W might not be the best hobby for you--and I don't mean that bitterly, just realistically. Or, perhaps, try roleplaying a character who doesn't rely on assets. 

 

 

Now let's talk criticisms:

One of my biggest complaints about this server's economy is how much of it is pretending to be IC. Our server rules say it's 100% IC at all times, but our economy is fucking retarded ICly. There's also a massive double standard because although it's 100% IC, Property Management and Roleplay Quality does not allow you to play your assets 100% ICly and instead expects some OOC abstraction.

 

I have no idea why on this server we bother roleplaying the 4k/hr or 20k/opening bonuses as being in-character. They make zero sense as government payments. Why the fuck is a major Los Santos city shouldering an INSANE financial burden to help businesses succeed, but also only doing it for most businesses but not all of them? We should just abstract this money and roleplay it as your business paying you a fair market hourly range. I feel there's a way to make a more sophisticated system which entails a set script amount per the "level" of job (entry level, skilled, degree, etc) to set a standard market rate.

 

But right now, because it's IC, anyone can at any point call my character out on not actually paying her employees, that it's the government paying for them. That's ridiculous. It's also a problem because IF PEOPLE ARE MAKING $4,000 AN HOUR, WHY ARE THEY BITCHING ABOUT DRINKS COSTING $200, OR ENTRY FEES COSTING $600, AND HOW CAN A BRAND NEW CAR COST $50,000!?!?! It makes no sense, this drive to keep everything 100% IC is making our economy a massive ridiculous mess to roleplay around. I have been playing this server over 3,000 hours and I have no idea how to roleplay the worth of a thousand bucks. 10:1 scale says it's $100, but people make $4,000 an hour working in gas stations and cafes. 

 

If you make $4,000 an hour working in a gas station or cafe, realistically a professional with an education and experience in their field's time should be worth $40,000+ an hour. In real life you make minimum wage at these jobs, which at the very highest in the USA is currently $15/hr. Skilled labor tends to start around $40/hr, and it's not unusual to meet people in my city who make in the ballpark of $100+/hr. 

 

This creates the biggest problem around RP jobs on this server that if you have a 4k/hr business, hiring people is trivial. It's incredibly easy to hire people because the script pays them for you. That's a good thing!! Allowing people to "create" jobs like this is good for RP. The problem is if you have a job which doesn't fit into a script or a business, it rapidly becomes very expensive unless you are RPing with someone who is willing to ignore money for the sake of RP. It's awesome when people are willing to pass up e-maniez for RP, but that's not a reasonable expectation, and the bottom line is that we're a 100% IC server where everything is IC, so your character has no realistic motivation to take less than $4,000 an hour for work because they can literally go to a gas station and make that much in an hour.

 

Let me talk briefly about my RP project. I had envisioned creating a large-scale workplace venue where the idea was that we'd be open almost 24 hours a day with about 20-30 employees and that people involved in the project could always expect to find people to roleplay being "at work" with. With the 4k/hr script, this would have been easy enough to foster, and this would have been sustainable and allowed us to tap into a level of RP quality and detail that this server has rarely, if ever, seen before. We had a ton of people interested in this project and ready to work with it. When we launched, however, Property Management gave us a nightclub/bar script, and because of that we were expected to pay all of these people out of pocket. I tried running this business as intended and shouldering the cost myself, but I was losing over $50,000 an opening (after profit) just paying people. While I was glad to do this for the roleplay, this made no sense ICly--why is my character wasting $50,000 every time this business opens when it's only pulling in $3,000? To be a nice person? It's also not sustainable.

 

I had a lot of people in my RP project approach me and say they were willing to be paid less (or not at all) to make the RP project work. Not everyone, of course. Why would someone have their character development be tied to my business when they can go literally anywhere else in the server and be paid anywhere from $4,000 to $15,000 an hour because it's a more lucrative business? And why should the people who are pouring their passion and effort into this faction be hurt both ICly and OOCly because they chose the path of RP instead of the path of sick e-gainz? 

 

End result is this killed our RP project. It's still around, we adapted, but we had to massively sacrifice on our vision. Long gone is the plan of a 20-30 person mega-project which would have offered a really new, fresh RP to this server. Instead it's a small, barely profitable venture. And I basically can't really hire anyone for it without paying out of pocket and taking the L for the sake of RP, because the meta on this server is that the owner of a business does as much of the work to make a profit.  And I do still pay people, but it has really limited a lot of what we can do. My character can't afford to pay people 10k a day to do work that brings no money in, and there is nothing they can really do to bring money in with how the business is set up.

 

This is what I see as one of the biggest problems on the server with the economy. Things like "why does a shot of whiskey cost $250" is annoying, but it's not awful. That stuff we can ignore. Things like "why is the government paying $12,000 a day ICly to every employee in the state, but yet Property Management turns around and tells us we shouldn't be RPing that even though we're literally told it's 100% IC" we can't ignore.

[mj2002]

3 hours ago, Ink said:

But right now, because it's IC, anyone can at any point call my character out on not actually paying her employees, that it's the government paying for them. That's ridiculous. It's also a problem because IF PEOPLE ARE MAKING $4,000 AN HOUR, WHY ARE THEY BITCHING ABOUT DRINKS COSTING $200, OR ENTRY FEES COSTING $600, AND HOW CAN A BRAND NEW CAR COST $50,000!?!?! It makes no sense, this drive to keep everything 100% IC is making our economy a massive ridiculous mess to roleplay around. I have been playing this server over 3,000 hours and I have no idea how to roleplay the worth of a thousand bucks. 10:1 scale says it's $100, but people make $4,000 an hour working in gas stations and cafes. 

You're leaving out the time factor in your analysis. GTAW is a past time, a hobby. There is a limit to the amount of time that players are willing to spend in return for a certain amount of satisfaction. The harsh reality is that, aside from roleplay, players consider virtual money as a form satisfaction, as it can be used to purchase items (cars and properties) that they desire to have "for their character".

 

This lack of realistic time, the most important contribution of any employed person in the workforce, means that expensive commodities need to be within reasonable reach. This means cars need to be affordable, and properties need to be affordable. But on the other hand, it means that when you sell something relatively cheap, like a drink, in order for this to be worth it, and particularly, worth their time for the seller, the prices need to be inflated. 

 

This leads us to the situation at present. It doesn't make sense when you compare it to reality, but it does make sense when you see it in the light of the restrictions we have to deal with.

[Tsarna]

12 hours ago, NickXI said:

introducing tax brackets that increase in percentage as you accumulate more money. As it stands, we have players sitting on millions of dollars and not putting it back into the economy. The tax system would force people to either spend their money or fork it over to the government. Perhaps tie this in with /charity to lower your taxable income if you donate to a charity like in real life?

Why should I put the money I make back into economy? There is no incentive. And who says that many people "sit on millions", because RPQM will intervene and say "it is UNREALISTIC, that you have x amount of money". Even if you invest more time than others into your business, open it daily, operate it, use real money OOCly to buy platinum/gold to advertise (for two years now straight), and the RPQM goes "not realistic - do not look at the amount of money on the right side of the screen." So, it is all up to ICly how you portray you wealth, meaning, you can not draw conclusions on the money ya have in bank, so why tax it higher, if I can not RP it 😄

[knppel]

As someone mentioned it: Yes, I too would love to see a more lively estate market.

I totally get why there's regulations in place, having played lsrp in its top inflation aera 2014-17. Inflated or not, however, there always was a Hills Mansion on the market - for a ridiculous price, of cours, but if I had thought IC I'd need that, I'd been able to go get money and buy it.

I kinda lack this carrot-stick here.

Edited March 5, 2021 by knppel