How the server fails to encourage roleplay over money

[Christopher]

I look at it the opposite way.

 

I feel like everyone is so rich that there is no point in being a criminal outside just wanting to roleplay the part.

 

Everyone has everything they want, you can't be poor, and scarcity of businesses and houses is due to OOC reasons.

 

I would personally like to see money scaled back a ton with the eventual economy update.

[Mahiko]

My hope is the large economy update will fix this, there's going to be a paper trail for cash. And we're finally going to see people who play blackjack and poker a bunch be taxed by the IRS hopefully.

[Beholder]

You really hit all the talking points here. There is a huge gap of between working and upper middle class roleplayers. For new players, there is definitely an allure to grind for an Elegy Retro, and a Mirror Park property. And some of these people do sacrifice roleplay for the sake of the cash grind and it kind of is an issue at times.

 

My response to everything? So what. 

 

Do I wish that GTAW more accurate reflected the division of wealth and poverty in the USA? Sure. Am I going going get mad because somebody got home from a long day and wants to roleplay their very average character in their Mirror Park home with their Elegy Retro? Nope. Does everybody need a complete, fully developed, flushed out character. Nope. Even if it'd be nice, and even if that's the sever standard I'd love to have. Some people are going to chase that deep, rich character development and some people will continue to play their seemingly average rich kid.

 

At the end of the day, it is a game and a server that people get to be whatever they want to be. There are no preemptive measures to be taken, no way to really prevent these half baked, middle class, money chasing, roleplay deprived characters from existing until they've already sprouted. Just keep reporting the ones that break rules and let the others live in bliss. 

[Yoak]

Massive balls for this @TinPan. You've hit the nail on the head with this thread.

 

2 hours ago, mj2002 said:

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

Not too sure but as a community with the admins help surely we can put our heads together and get this fixed? Have the admin team anything to say on the matter where it would help us create ideas?

[Busch]

Listen, I see constant complaining about this. And to be honest this server is fine. Better than any other server can possibly be. There are ways for people to make money and they will find their ways. This is not something you can stop because subconciously a human wants more and more, and you cant sort who comes into the server by evaluating what his future wants and needs are going to be when he gets really exposed to the whole environment.

 

 

Edit: Of course you'll never have a desirable environment which satisfies everyone. It will never happen. But to be fair it's one of the best types I have seen.

Edited May 5, 2021 by Busch

[Ink]

The problem is definitely there, but we can walk it back a little bit more. 

 

So yes, the vast majority of people are uninterested in roleplaying poor, lower class workers. You definitely see some people playing these characters, but it's usually either A) a temporary alt to take a break from their "main" or B) a character intended already to join a faction. Very few people want to play entry level positions for long, and this makes it really difficult for those of us who are running more complex multi-faceted businesses with high RP quality because we need these people, and it takes us a lot of work to hire them, train them, and get them spun up to speed--and that work is wasted quickly when these people "trade up" for a sexier sounding job, or turn more of their character's focus on their development in an illegal faction, or just get bored of that character and move on to the next.

 

There's really not much we can usefully change about that. People roleplay what sounds and feels fun for them. We can't reasonably expect people to roleplay stuff they don't enjoy, as much as the GTA RP community has led itself to believe over the last 15 years that you should force people into unpleasant, aggressive, violent, and confrontational RP without cue, consent, warning, or an opportunity to escape.

We can, however, turn this discussion to something a little more immediately useful. This topic brings up the lust people have for getting money. This virtual money is the best carrot on a stick that we have to get people to RP roles which otherwise might not be too sexy or appealing.

 

What's the issue? The issue is that there are many sources for earning this money which require no real roleplay, and more importantly, that the prevalence of all these ways to make money means that the value of a character's labor is really expensive when it's not being paid for by the script.

 

For instance, I've hired personal assistant characters, office workers, janitors, and other such services in the past. GTA:W's fair market value for an hour of labor is approximately $4,000, give or take a little bit. An hour of work in a 24/7 (which requires only running in and hitting /bjoin) yields $4,000 plus 30% of all sales as commission--the sale of a large dufflebag means a bonus of $400 and if they're lucky enough to sell a mask or boombox they makes a cool $1600 bonus. An hour of entry-level trucking easily yields over $5,000 an hour. The problem comes in if someone wants to hire a character for a job which doesn't benefit from the startshift bonus, or which doesn't have any tangible profit behind it. 

 

This is the more harmful way the server's current economy hurts. This is where the IC and OOC issues really clash in the subject of money. You see plenty of people on this server who care more about RP than money and who are willing to do RP jobs for free or for "realistic" amounts of money ("Just pay me like $200 an hour it's fine") -- and that's all well and good, commendable even, but it's actually breaking character. The $4,000/hour payments are declared to be IC. The $40,000 openbusiness bonuses are IC. The fact that this character can go and get a dead-end job at a 24/7 and make $12,000 in a day is IC. The rules specifically say we must remain IC at all times, and all of these payments are ICly logged by the IC government and presented as being an IC disbursement of social welfare. These aren't OOC abstractions.

 

So why is a character willing to work for $200/hour? And more importantly, if it comes out that your character is paying someone $200 an hour for labor, it can be ICly taken as your character exploiting a poor sap for cheap labor. 

 

I ran a restaurant where it cost me $50,000 in labor expenses per opening because we didn't have a /startshift auto-pay script. We'd make about $5,000 in revenue. Technically, anyone could call my character out on how stupid she was for running such a poor business model, even though it was a perfectly realistic restaurant venue and it was fun roleplay. Fact still stood ICly my character was losing the equivalent of a family sedan every single time she opened the place up. 

 

When I hired a personal assistant or any other number of IC services (such as janitors, handymen, and so on), I'd pay about the same amount of money because it was only ICly and OOCly fair to do so. Now someone might point out "what's the big problem? You make a lot of money, so spending an occasional 4k here and there shouldn't be a big deal." The issue comes in with repeat employment. To start, it costs about 40k and up per week to have an employee (that's 10 hours of labor over 7 days of the week). Factions like Aurum tout paying 80k+ a week. A person willing to do 3 hours of /startshift pay every day of the week makes 84k. If I want to hire even just 3 employees, I need to be willing to pay at least 150k a week to support this. That's 600k a month. Just for 3 employees. 

 

That's where the problem kicks in. That's one of the most harmful parts of our economy at the moment. That's how this economy really kills a lot of roleplay.

 

People are willing to RP these roles. Not tons and tons of people, but a solid amount. But why would they, ICly or OOCly, want to RP doing a job which is challenging and gets their character no actual gain when they have many hundreds of options to make their 4-5k/hour for much less effort? These players deserve having their characters make a return, and they deserve having the options to develop their characters. It makes no sense that a character who is a personal assistant to a successful person, for instance, would make less than a 24/7 employee, and even without buying Elegy Retros or Mirror Park houses they still will face day-to-day expenses in their IC adventures through Los Santos which require script money. 

 

That, to me, is the biggest way how this server poorly incentivizes the money/roleplay balance.

Edited May 5, 2021 by Ink

[verrevert]

I think really it is just a product of the present gaming environment. You look at the top games being played on Steam and the majority are competitive multiplayer games that promote winning to unlock lootboxes, skins, weapons etc - the enjoyment comes no longer from the playing experience, but from the thrill of not knowing which item you will get. Now you have a generation of gamers who have grown up on said games (and older gamers who have adjusted), and ultimately the enjoyment of games for them comes from acquiring resources. In my opinion that is what we see on this game, the only difference being that we have the added element of it being a role play server. You only have to look at the report player forum (28.3k posts) to see the competitive nature of players and how afraid people are to lose their items.

 

If I was to make a change, I'd introduce mandatory character stories both for new applications and for name changes. I think if people were made to think more in-depth about their character before they are created they would have a better base to develop that character when they are actually playing. I'd also allow people to buy/sell/trade houses without having to go through a property request - I think putting houses behind the UCP is bad for the housing market as it encourages hoarding, and creates unnecessary work for property management which they could really do without (vehicles included), and also restrict people to one house/apartment. And then try to create new money-sinks, right now you can only really spend money on property, vehicles, or weapons.

Edited May 6, 2021 by verrevert

[Christopher]

People would be more willing to roleplay lower class if it wasn't harder to be poor than it is to be rich.

 

We all agree that roleplay is the most important thing, but in the end the game requires some kind of progression that helps promote the roleplay. If that wasn't true, there'd be no reason to even have an economy or not give people everything they want when they create their character story.

 

Having nothing to strive for in game kills the incentive to do things outside of socializing with friends.

 

It's an unfortunate side effect of (what I feel is at least) a lopsided balance between needing to "grind" and roleplaying. I've always felt like making money is a big part of how your character progresses, just like in real life. When it comes too easy, there is less progression to be made, less story to write.

[TinPan]

1 hour ago, Ink said:

The issue is that there are many sources for earning this money which require no real roleplay.

Absolutely this.

As I mentioned in an alternative post, there would be an enormous influx of players working at player-ran businesses if a huge number of server-owned jobs were completely removed from the server to the point where the only ones left are jobs that are either essential or directly support player-owned businesses (EG: Trucking). Doing this in tandem with promoting business owners to hire individuals as staff (maybe even a cash bonus depending on the number of working employees during a business opening) would literally be nothing short of the ideal situation where player-ran businesses become built around hiring staff to provide a service VS how some businesses operate one-man operations in the name of making maximum money.

But I know full well that it's a pipe dream to want to have as many server-owned jobs as possible removed. It's never gonna happen; it's something too drastic that I acknowledge the developers would never do or want to even consider doing despite the benefits that it'd offer.

[Trupiano]

35 minutes ago, TinPan said:

Absolutely this.

As I mentioned in an alternative post, there would be an enormous influx of players working at player-ran businesses if a huge number of server-owned jobs were completely removed from the server to the point where the only ones left are jobs that are either essential or directly support player-owned businesses (EG: Trucking). Doing this in tandem with promoting business owners to hire individuals as staff (maybe even a cash bonus depending on the number of working employees during a business opening) would literally be nothing short of the ideal situation where player-ran businesses become built around hiring staff to provide a service VS how some businesses operate one-man operations in the name of making maximum money.

But I know full well that it's a pipe dream to want to have as many server-owned jobs as possible removed. It's never gonna happen; it's something too drastic that I acknowledge the developers would never do or want to even consider doing despite the benefits that it'd offer.

This, make all businesses player owned so that every job requires at least some RP to get hired. An additional benefit of making all businesses player owned is it would allow business owners to create RP hubs around their businesses. I used to run a 24/7, I found that if you just hire a new player to work behind the counter and just hope that they'll stick around and RP they'll leave within 48 hours. But if you build a community around your business that your employees get to RP with new players almost always stop focusing on chasing money and start focusing on RP instead. You have to give them something to occupy themselves other then the job. 

 

Another short term change? Maybe a warning message can be added to the different dealership menus and properties. Something along the lines of "Warning: Just because you have the money to purchase something doesn't mean it makes sense for your character, if you want to proceed with the transaction are you sure that this asset fits your character? You may be subject to staff inquire if it doesn't." Just something at least to remind people while they are building their characters assets, hey we're here to RP seriously.

 

Ultimately though, it's going to have to take staff intervention. Let's be honest, we've steered way off course. Mentalities don't change overnight but a few quick punishments start changing mentalities real quick. Roleplay Quality Management is supposed to be a thing yet I don't think I've ever seen them do a thing about this issue. 

Edited May 6, 2021 by Henning