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The current situation with garages


Aquila

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1 minute ago, Morseon said:

I have been working at garages almost since I first got into this server, and I have been owning one for over a year and a half. And although my garage isn't one of the most actives nor with the most mechanics (the first intention wasn't to make money out of it, but as a meeting spot for the car community where each driver could work on their cars for a low price), I have always seen a pattern whenever a car update came.

Normally, such update would bring, let's say, 10-15 cars. So every mechanic and garage owner know that during the next two to three days, the business will be booming. This has always been the case, before and after the first garage revamp (where the components were changed and the lease price got raised).

 

However, these past few days it's been different, I believe, because of different factors.

 

First, we have received over 30 cars in less than a week, making more people want their car(s) serviced and upgraded.

Second, there has been an important decrease in the number of truckers, specially knowing that the garages aren't the only ones that need components, but so do other kinds of businesses.

Third, there are less and less garages active. This might be caused by what other players mentioned earlier (components revamp leading to mechanics making less cash, players with play to win mentalities getting the leases over players invested in heavy roleplay). The problem is that because there are less garages, the people flood the ones remaining whenever they open. In my case, today, we only opened once (to do different cars for friends), and people passing by took the opportunity to get their car done, which we gladly did. In the end of the day, we didn't even need to post a single ad to get our components completely wiped out.

 

If we add all this up, we get to the situation we are today. A garage opens, they get wiped out, no one refills, and no one gets their cars upgraded/serviced.

 

P.S.: Even to do the maintenance on a car, we need components. 

It would be funny to get to a stage where all the cars needed to be serviced, but none could. BMX life.

I'd say, make upgrading and modding cars like a supplier program. Not every garage irl specializes in modding cars, majority have business by servicing and maintenance. Not every mechanic is engine expert and a racer. Open standard garages for repair and checks and lower the mileage needed for an oil check, so they have some business. Remove /vpark fixing car damage, so people are forced to fix their cars in garages. And lastly put modding under a license, so not every garage can do that.

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2 minutes ago, Engelbert said:

I'd say, make upgrading and modding cars like a supplier program. Not every garage irl specializes in modding cars, majority have business by servicing and maintenance. Not every mechanic is engine expert and a racer. Open standard garages for repair and checks and lower the mileage needed for an oil check, so they have some business. Remove /vpark fixing car damage, so people are forced to fix their cars in garages. And lastly put modding under a license, so not every garage can do that.

I like the idea about /vpark.

What about doing some kind of "separate" NPC garages for fixing your car and having it maintained? Something similar to 24/7s and that would only be open when no other player-owned garage is open (something similar to what was done to the car wash).

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9 minutes ago, Engelbert said:

I'd say, make upgrading and modding cars like a supplier program. Not every garage irl specializes in modding cars, majority have business by servicing and maintenance. Not every mechanic is engine expert and a racer. Open standard garages for repair and checks and lower the mileage needed for an oil check, so they have some business. Remove /vpark fixing car damage, so people are forced to fix their cars in garages. And lastly put modding under a license, so not every garage can do that.

 

So your solution about how it's impossible to get your car worked on is to make it even more convoluted and time consuming? If we were going for true realism upgrading your car to 'max' performance mods should take months then.

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17 minutes ago, Engelbert said:

I'd say, make upgrading and modding cars like a supplier program. Not every garage irl specializes in modding cars, majority have business by servicing and maintenance. Not every mechanic is engine expert and a racer. Open standard garages for repair and checks and lower the mileage needed for an oil check, so they have some business. Remove /vpark fixing car damage, so people are forced to fix their cars in garages. And lastly put modding under a license, so not every garage can do that.

I'm pretty sure the only reason /vpark still fixes damage is because they can't keep accurate damage logs and apply them yet.

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The way I see it is half the people in this thread don't know how a car works in real life, how much time goes into modifying them and don't even know how the script works to begin with. If put into perspective mechanics should be the ones complaining.

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I've successfully held together a good auto shop for about a year. There's quite a few strains on the system as a whole:

  • There's little incentive for role-play around cars; it's instead incentivized by $. $ in game has devalued in the last year and a half or so. It's not interesting to grind.
  • There's little quality control from either Property Management or the administration in general when it comes to role-playing auto shops/automotive stuff in general. Thirteen used to be the best at this because he's got first hand knowledge and during his era as HoP/HoL, no unfit garage owner was left to exist on the server. The standard has dropped simply because people are competent to write an application but do none of the things they set out to do, and PM is incredibly strained to be able to look into the quality aspect of something. The only time the server's administration has verifiably stepped in (Glass Heroes, Kazanov, etc.) is when the situation was tenfold worse or there were obvious wrongdoings (i.e. Glass Heroes raking in $1.2M cash a every 2 days and giving people /me's to copy paste off their Discord).
  • There's little incentive for someone who knows and/or enjoys car role-play to do the actual role-play. /bad costs the price of Gold Donator to be able to open the business, whereas the community as a whole doesn't want to bother having to wait for car modifications to happen.

The best solution is to make a system that allows a player to modify menial things on their car by themselves at the cost of in game $ and role-play. Menial things range from wheels to simple QoL mods (rust liveries for someone trying to role-play a clapbox). Other things, such as perhaps making garages have permanent map blips, or generally developing a script that lets a shop keep a car for an amount of time in the interest of role-play may be beneficial.

 

The idea behind a market for car parts as actual /inventory items is worth looking into as well. The only way it works is if it benefits the entirety of the people on the server — custom parts get created by a shop, custom parts are part of a vehicle once installed, and custom parts can be stolen or taken when a car is chopped. This has the potential to develop itself into something beautiful, and car theft rings/the parts black market/aftermarket shops catch on.

 

The real problem is the average player isn't interested in the role-play behind a vehicle. They're just interested in getting the modifications done and having fun with the vehicle. The server has somehow normalized absolutely needing all the performance upgrades on a regular car, when in reality, stock cars are what you find the most.

Edited by liq
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2 hours ago, UTOPIA said:

I'll keep my statement about garages blunt and simple, nobody actually cares about the RP being done on their car, they just want their vehicle modded and want to leave. Garages are the only script businesses that require players to keep them open, which leaves players who play at odd times out of luck, it is not player-centric whatsoever. They should treat garages like any other script business and let players use them while there are no employees opening them.

nothing else needs to be said

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1 hour ago, UTOPIA said:

I'll keep my statement about garages blunt and simple, nobody actually cares about the RP being done on their car, they just want their vehicle modded and want to leave. Garages are the only script businesses that require players to keep them open, which leaves players who play at odd times out of luck, it is not player-centric whatsoever. They should treat garages like any other script business and let players use them while there are no employees opening them.

This is something I've wanted to say but thought I'd get bombarded with disagreement, because surely if it's a feature then the majority must be fine with it.

 

They just don't work very well. Even in 2018 when they required a mechanic's presence, basically everyone had the mechanic job just so they could mod their cars.

1 hour ago, Bridget Schmidt said:

As a person that works as a mechanic the money is nice but I also enjoy being able to work on cars in a roleplay fashion as I generally have a love for cars and the work that goes into them. The wait time is because we are required to do the proper roleplay required to replace said parts. It's not a fast thing to completely replace an engine, paint the body of a car, install a turbo, make the new manifolds, etc. These things take hours to days in real life, so simplifying it down to just ten to twenty minutes if someone wants /everything/ replaced on a car isn't that bad in the long run of things. It's not as simple as *pulls engine out and replaces the parts before putting it back in*, they want quality roleplay, it falls under the same rules as trucking where you can't just go about script wise delivering items. On a second note it's also a supply chain issue, trust me there are garages that want to be open right now but finding truckers to deliver the comps is neither fast nor easy.  

I don't think the RP itself is the problem, you do what you have to and nobody can fault you on it. The issue definitely comes from how the server handles it. It's overwhelming for mechanics, it's tedious for players. It needs some balancing, it's overly dependent on other players right now.

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1 hour ago, shaobadman said:

  

This is something I've wanted to say but thought I'd get bombarded with disagreement, because surely if it's a feature then the majority must be fine with it.

 

They just don't work very well. Even in 2018 when they required a mechanic's presence, basically everyone had the mechanic job just so they could mod their cars.

I don't think the RP itself is the problem, you do what you have to and nobody can fault you on it. The issue definitely comes from how the server handles it. It's overwhelming for mechanics, it's tedious for players. It needs some balancing, it's overly dependent on other players right now.

Not really what I was saying, I enjoy doing the roleplay and the only thing overwhelming about it is the fact people cry when it takes too long which I get it's your time but it's also mine and this is what I enjoy doing on the server. You turn it to automation and you're cutting out an entire community in the server. Don't like waiting for beer at a bar? We'll just make it like a 24/7 and you can just interact with a script and get it. Don't want to wait for food a restaurant that's open? We'll just make a script menu and get rid of the waiters.

It's what I get on the server to do, it is the enjoyment that I get from being on GTA:W. If things turn to just being scripted with no one needing to be around to roleplay it'd literally kill my drive for playing, I'd need a whole new character with a totally new concept. Why? No one would want to wait for the roleplay to be done anymore, lets be honest. They'd just wait till there aren't any active garages just to go up and click a few buttons and have it be done then. Yes it's a waste of time for some people, to others it's the reason they enjoy roleplaying on this server and it constitutes a good 60%-70% of what they do because it's something they like. 

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4 hours ago, mencurry said:

I have a couple of things to say about this, I've been leasing a garage down in Vespucci for almost a year by now in August, there were almost over 35+ players that I hired and I could safely say for myself that none of these people cares about the mechanic nerf at all because I specificly looked for people who doesn't want to money farm and only in it for the roleplay. I would say that there are reasons on why garages haven't been open lately, which these are:

  • Less garages. Property Management has been cracking down most of these garages that did subpar roleplay and money farming attitude in the past, I wouldn't name names but there were over 15 garages or something along those lines and as of right now there is only OVC, Autoholics, Tomahawk, Glass Heroes, and Elysian that I know of. Maybe Property Management could share how many garages there are in the server and how many that are active. Though Property Management's been opening up garage leases for Re-Perez and MAD customs so that's good.
  • No truckers. This is a big problem for the shop that I'm currently leasing, most of my employees WANTED to open but we literally can't do that when we have low components, I did everything that I could to compensate for this by having an IC contract with multiple trucking company and put up $300 (extra pay) per crates for truckers, and still with these attempts we can't open the shop constantly because we have less truckers nowadays. When Kazanov and IMEX was active a couple of months back I never really had components problem. To further add into this point, let's say I have 80,000 components total that could last for about two to four hours during a shift and by the time that it takes for us to get refilled up back to 80,000 components could be 3-7 days depending on how active the truckers are.

I honestly think that these two points that I raised above are the main thing on why garages aren't open, I can't say for other garages but I as I mentioned earlier nobody in my shop actually gives a shit about the mechanic pay and they would open everyday if we could and if we have the components but the reality is we don't have that, Believe me if we could open everyday we'll do that and the players that is currently working with me are from various timezones from GMT-5 to GMT+8.

Also, to add into the mindset of players not giving a shit about the RP, it's true lol. The amount of people that have appreciated the roleplay or simply staying around during the RP when mechanics are doing their thing are small, most people don't give a shit and just afk while we were RPing and I can't really blame them for that. Also especially with the idea of other garages telling people to piss off if they want to see their cars and what not, it's just discouraging to see mechanic RP right now. I've been enforcing my employees to just do 20-40mins RP per cars if possible if it's a long list but even then at that point we're kinda rushing the roleplay, and people are being imaptient IC and OOC.

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Ngl, I feel like the issue with truckers is the same issue with mechanics. Low pay, doing the same stuff over and over, the same /me's that nobody will see, and a lack of interaction. 

I don't really know how to fix it either.

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