How the server fails to encourage roleplay over money

[Alyssa McCarthy]

1 hour ago, SugarDavis said:

Server needs more money sinks. Right now you get paid (with very little taken out for tax) and then just sits. In reality, people have various bills they have to pay. For example, in my real life I have to pay...

- Rent
- Utilities bills (water, electric, internet)
- Personal bills (phone service, discord, netflix, etc.)
- Insurance
- Debt (car payment, credit card)
- Gas for my car
- Groceries

FYI, we asked Aurum energy to start billing ULSA for energy & that followed quite a few members contacting them to request similar for their apartments.

 

I saw this as a good way to IC help promote & fund a non govt faction, so if anyone wants to volunteer & request an energy bill, just get in touch with them! 

[LilManiac]

Controlling the economy is something that has to be discussed further but I personally don't believe that the server doesn't fail to encourage roleplay. All the money a player get, may it be the starting 200000 paycheck or the 4k paychecks for jobs,  it is there to help the players. In the end it's all about the players mentality. If you wanna roleplay as a poor guy you most certainly can. I have seen a guy who bought a few cars using the 200k paycheck and he sold it to my friend for 5k because he wanted to RP a poor guy. You can also RP being poor even if you have 200k + script money. It's a roleplay server and you can avoid certain aspects of the script to create your desired roleplay environment.

[jcat]

The server lets people do as they please, really.  Any failure to roleplay comes from the players, not the server.  I've done a lot of excellent roleplay on MMOs where there's no roleplaying support whatsoever.

 

Now here's what there was on those MMOs:  an engaging base game for people to play.  The best times were playing an engaging base game while staying in character.

 

There needs to be more activities for people to do on the server, there really does.

 

On this server, police characters have a good solid base game to play:  they go out and police.

Next up are EMS and criminals.  The difficult part with criminals getting their base game going is that is depends on finding other people to commit crimes against.  Sometimes there aren't any opportunities, and sometimes it damages the rp the other player was doing.

Everyone else is pretty much left to their own devices to find something to do however they can.  That's why there's always mallrats, car shows, clubs and bars.

 

In every story, there has to be character but also plot.  On GTAW there's plenty of character, but people have to work very hard to create plot, and a lot of the time it's just not working out.  Then we get the pointless slice of life type of stuff.  That can be fun, but it gets old.

 

Give people things to do so they can be in character and rp while doing them.  Otherwise it's the issues we see now: pointless socializing because there's nothing else to do, the same kinds of businesses because that's what's within reach of players who want to do businesses, things like that.  I'd like to be the change I want to see, and I would readily volunteer to play a disposable ped skin character for someone's rp.

 

People do what you let them do.

- Tommy Vercetti

 

I think the biggest improvement to these problems could come from an effective economy update.

 

Economy:

• Eliminate runaway accumulation of wealth by balancing incomes and expenses.  Use rl Los Angeles as a baseline, and look at the proportions between average salaries for different types of jobs, and then look at rents in different LA neighborhoods.  That can reveal a ratio that might help in balancing incomes, rents, expenses, etc. on the server.

• Balance Income - Work:

  • Eliminate grinding and the runaway accumulation of income by limiting pay for script jobs to 3 hours every 24 hour period.  Each in-game hour could represent 4 hours, so after 3 hours of playing working at a job, the character has just worked his ass off for the equivalent of 12 hours, and there are no more hours in the day for him to work.  That's the limit of work hours for which he gets paid, part time, full time, whatever.  Or, alternately, you could even give each character 60 hours per month to work at script jobs, to make sure that players who can only play on weekends or who can't be on every day will be ok.  Bear in mind, this would be a maximum amount representing working 12 hours a day, and people can always work less.  The key concept here is limiting work hours so people can't grind their asses off to make money to cause all the problems people have been discussing. 
  • Create more script jobs of various socio-economic levels.  Create looping anims for people to use at these jobs, so they can rp with  each other as coworkers while they do their work anims.  Choose a building, make an instanced office, and let people work there.  Here's an example:  Say there's a job newspaper reporter.  A character can join that job, go to the Weazel News building, go to the office, and do a /anim sitchairandtype anim as his work anim.  The building would light up telling players online the business is manned, just like a 24/7.  People could go there and interact if they wanted to.  Characters couldn't sit there all day and grind because after 3 hours the pay turns off.  Think about how this could connect things.  A white-collar job that pays more per hour could require a degree from USLA.  Characters could work a low paying job to make rent in a shitty apartment with a bunch of roommates and pay for tuition.  After a sensible about of time (a degree should be a long term project in game) the character is then qualified for a higher paying job.  So we drive student rp, roommate rp, shitty low paying job rp, and white collar job rp.  This all depends on the absolutely vital balancing of income and expenses.
  • Limiting pay to 3 hours a day would eliminate the need to be overly concerned about people grinding jobs while afk.  If someone comes to their rp job business and they're afk, the person can report it and the afker can get busted as per the server rules.  If not, and he can't grind anymore, so it doesn't really matter as much.  It would also relieve players who are not afk of having to type something every couple of minutes to get paid.

• Balance Expenses - Housing:

  • Eliminate property flipping/speculation and runaway property prices and rents by only allowing renting from NPC/server instead of purchasing (people who buy properties usually get a 30 year mortgage irl, so it's not really different).  This will help immensely with balancing income and expenses, since rent is usually people's biggest expense.
  • Make more use of instanced apartments in big buildings or hotels for more housing, or even in smaller buildings and motels (not as realistic I know, but it would help ease any shortages).  
  • Bills like utilities etc. can be included in rents.
  • Allow people to suspend automatic expenses like rent when they tell the staff team that they won't be on for a while because of real life reasons.  It's discouraging to be away and come back and have lost everything that you built up.

Support homeless roleplay:

• Have an NPC gym where characters can buy a membership so they can shower and work out any time, and no, not everybody wants to work out outside at muscle beach.
• Create a showering anim for houses and gyms and a bathing anim for so characters can wash in lakes, pools, and streams.
• Add needs information to the information displayed by the /stats command.  It would have no in-game effect, and only serve as a reminder to people who want to include taking care of character needs in their rp.  Example needs:  Hungry, Thirsty, Hygiene.  Sleep can be taken care of when the character is offline.  Levels of needs:  Feeling good > normal > feed the need > Feeling bad > Feeling terrible.  Example:  I get in game, check my character and think wow my character's hungry, I better get him something to eat.  So I head to a manned rp job store or a player run business to get something to eat.  That's how it would drive rp for for people who want to do that, and it would not affect anyone who does not want to do that.  If some people are so against needs that they don't even want to see it in their /stats, then create a command like /checkneeds or something.

 

 

 

[Paenymion]

Seems wrong that money and assets are more of an OOC than IC thing.  I mean, even if your character gets CKd, you just rename them and retain all the previous money and assets?  Maybe if cash and assets were less permanent (e.g. lost on CK), people would be less obsessed about farming them.  We might also see better RP because there's an actual consequence to dying.

[jcat]

And CKing would be even more of a threat against people who put effort into their characters.

[.Pluto.]

1 minute ago, jcat said:

And CKing would be even more of a threat against people who put effort into their characters.

play stupid games win stupid prizes 

[Smilesville]

39 minutes ago, .Pluto. said:

play stupid games win stupid prizes 

Considering the state of CK appeals, this is not a reasonable position to take.

[books]

On 6/12/2021 at 2:59 PM, SugarDavis said:

Server needs more money sinks. Right now you get paid (with very little taken out for tax) and then just sits. In reality, people have various bills they have to pay. For example, in my real life I have to pay...

- Rent
- Utilities bills (water, electric, internet)
- Personal bills (phone service, discord, netflix, etc.)
- Insurance
- Debt (car payment, credit card)
- Gas for my car
- Groceries

I'd say I have a solid 30% of my paycheck left over after I pay my taxes and all my bills. Compare that to GTA:W where I get paid, and unless I'm renting a property, a solid 90% of my paycheck will be left over. The only way that money will get taken from you is if you get a speeding ticket or someone robs you. Income taxes need to increase, right now they are hilariously low. There needs to be a mechanism to pay for utilities (such as water and power) on properties. Right now, Aurum Energy is trying to get a power company up and running and has a voluntary option for people to pay power bills. It would be awesome if people had to automatically pay their power bills and it was some auto generated amount (like .025% of scripted property value + .005% for every hour spent in the interior). It would be nice if people actually had to eat so there would be an incentive to go buy food for your character (another money sink). There's many options on the table for getting extracting money from the server but its a matter of how badly people care to fix it. At this current rate, people get their hourly stimmy and that money just continues to get pumped into the system and it leads to hyperinflation.

 

I disagree with this a great deal. Money is indeed incredibly easy to come by for some people who are in well supported factions (LSPD and so on).

 

That's simply not the case for people who aren't and who are roleplaying something a little bit more non-standard. Unless you're willing to trash your depiction and farm scripted jobs, the only money you'll ever really get is the original 200K.

 

 

Edited June 14, 2021 by MotionSickness

[pateuvasiliu]

On 5/5/2021 at 9:35 PM, mj2002 said:

So what are the proposed solutions? I'm not seeing many of those yet. Players mentalities are not so easily changed.

Tax people for EVERY property owned, so that people don't hoard 5 houses on 1 character. 1-2 is enough.

Give people the 200K faster so they can start their desired roleplay. Possibly look to increase the 200K, because that's not enough for a lot of characters.

[mj2002]

17 hours ago, pateuvasiliu said:

Tax people for EVERY property owned, so that people don't hoard 5 houses on 1 character. 1-2 is enough.

Give people the 200K faster so they can start their desired roleplay. Possibly look to increase the 200K, because that's not enough for a lot of characters.

Property taxes are being considered/planned.

 

In what is 200k not enough?