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The current situation with garages


Aquila

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I'm quite pissed because I had so much written down to post, but the forums didn't save my post as a draft, and my PC logged me out. Great.

My repliest to the following may be lacking in quality as I have to rewrite everything.

🙃

 

 

 

11 hours ago, Woona said:

The same argument could be done about the ten minute to one hour roleplays from cops or criminals. Why should a civilian roleplayer be forced to go through a robbery, or why should a player be held up for a hour in medical roleplay because of a car accident?

 

With all due respect to you as a staff member, I feel this is a moot point and not a good comparison.

 

I had two examples prepared with much better detail, but due to some issues my post was not saved as a draft at all. But with that being said, a robbery or medical situation can have big impacts on a character, while going to a garage is a lot like going to a store to buy milk, or going to a barber to get a cut — both scenarios are simple errands, much like going to a garage, but the difference is that going to a store or barber are regular occurrences. There's really no big impact on a character when they go to a mechanic.

 

Let's say that my character had a lot of drinks one night and decided to walk home by their self, and then suddenly they got robbed by three masked individuals. Let's presume, for the sake of this point, that the robbery was well planned out, well roleplayed, and executed successfully. My character would be traumatised, and paranoid to wander alone. They've been impacted negatively by the robbery.

 

Similarly, let's say my character was hospitalised due to a hit and run. My character is paralysed as a result of this, and has to be in a wheelchair. One character in my group was actually shot and hospitalised, resulting them being put in a wheelchair for a couple weeks (their choice), and it was great RP, until they got shot again while they were in a wheelchair.

 

These two scenarios have a much bigger impact on the environment and characters than a simple visit to a garage. When you modify your car, it's rarely ever going to come up in conversation. Furthermore, going to a mechanic in real life is a chore and not always pleasant — I'm an average person and I like to get my car in real life modified, but nobody has ever asked me "what was your experience like with your mechanic" or "where did you get it done?" because it's irrelevant. The car is modified, and that's it. If I was shot, or robbed, or hospitalised, then it's going to stick with me forever.

 

 

 

11 hours ago, Rohan. said:

 

You see, mechanic roleplay involves player to player trade. It's one of the biggest sources of income in the server. It wouldn't be justified if the thing was just NPCed and people were allowed to get modifications without any roleplay.

 

The garage would still earn money and make profit while nobody essentially worked for it.

 

But the problem is that mechanics don't have the drawbacks of real life mechanics. In the real world, cars are not that simple — mechanics usually come across problems one way or another. On this, we just modify a car and it's done. It seems like mechanics have to RP for the sake of it.

 

Garages back in 2018 have been greedy, I don't know if it's like that now, but I still believe they should be adapted to the new vendor system we have.

 

7 hours ago, Browneboys said:

Hi there! I’ve been monitoring this thread all weekend and have not been able to properly respond as I am away from my computer until Monday, and I probably have a lot more to type out than I can on my cellphone, but I have been the lease holder of a garage on this server for almost a year now. I am fortunate to have some dedicated employees at my garage and for us the issue isn’t that no one wants to work, it’s that we literally can’t keep the garage stocked. 
 

As many garage leaseholders know, they upped the amount of components needed at garages to 1.5x the previous amount if my memory serves correctly. I don’t know what the situation is at other garages, but truckers do not come anywhere near my garage unless I am offering bonus pay, and even then it’s still an absolute struggle to stay stocked. It takes literal hours to restock the garage and work now requires so many components that 3 or 4 cars can completely tear through a supply of components in an hour that took half a day to stock. 
 

The end result of this? My mechanics cannot work even though they’re all itching to and at the time of this post my garage is currently sitting at -6500 components, which ultimately means it’s going to take even longer to open just to probably work on a single car before going back into the negatives. 
 

I have a lot more to say about the entire garage situation in general, but as I said before, I am currently away from my computer. I hope to follow up more in a day or two 😊

 

 

Sounds to me that trucking wasn't well thought-out then. I understand why truckers are feeling demotivated though, but overall this system needs a change from the perspective of customers, and garage owners.

 

5 hours ago, Sush said:

 

My that logic though you shouldn't need a mechanic to work on your car at all as honestly routine maintenance isn't difficult and any mods that don't require an ECU reflash or engine teardown can be done by someone with the right wrenches and 30 mins on youtube

 

Agreed with this. I know absolutely nothing about cars, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be.

 

You're more likely to be able to fit new lights into a car than assemble a PC. If I managed, then anyone else can. If anything, garages are actually dying out. It seems to me that many Americans change the oil of their car by their self instead of going to a garage, and a lot of the modifications can be done by their selves too.

 

In the UK, garages are mostly there for MOT and servicing, the latter of which could be done without the need of a mechanic, but it won't be certified. ECU flashes could be done without the need of a mechanic now too — Bootmod3 for BMWs, for example, is all about using the cloud. As the years go by, the need for a garage becomes lower and lower.

 

 

1 hour ago, shaobadman said:

I know this is a completely different thing but taxi drivers face this too, and it's ridiculous.

 

And I'll say now, same with truckers, that it's nothing to do with us losing out. It's the waste of time that comes from poor RP that's only happening because that player wants to "win". I've not really lost much at all from either occasion, but when people call taxis, providing them with their real name and number before robbing them, you know that this branch of criminal RP needs staff investigation. I don't even know how these people get onto the server, one of them had over five complaints on him and mine was the icing on the cake to get him banned, I'm sure there are many like him as well. It's ruining taxiing for me as I'm sure it's ruining trucking for players. At least for taxis it would make more sense to rob a driver without using the /taxi command, and maybe truckers will be saved if every payment is done by bank. 

 

There should be a rule against robbing truckers. This random trend is something you'd expect from the bad days of NGRP and not a heavy text RP server.

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13 hours ago, TiffanyMeeks said:

It's not just an issue of truckers being lazy, it's also an issue of truckers being targeted more and more. Most people do not see what happens to truckers on a daily basis, they get robbed, pulled over, mugged, etc. The whole quarter-mile pretty much. To add onto this, there's also tons of people that go out of their way to harass truckers along their routes, I've seen this countless times myself.

 

This is 1000% what causes truckers to stop trucking. And security, police ,etc. Is not a solution because of the fact that if they do get caught, they'll go to jail and once they're out they just go back to robbing all over again, it's the current meta of RP that is the problem, as in going around in an all black outfit, black helmet and black motorcycle and chasing truckers around to rob them.
It's shit RP tbh, and it's annoying. And the fact is lots of these people that do target truckers with this shitty type of RP get away with it too, because they call it fair RP for their character to constantly rob truckers, and they're well aware of the chain robbing rules and they dodge around this rule by on purpose waiting their last robbery out before targeting a new trucker.

This type of roleplay meta; dodging server rules and providing toxic RP, where it makes no sense to have a character dedicated to rob 24/7. It's shit RP, it shows zero development of your character as a whole, and I think if you're one of these people, you should rethink why you're playing on a RP server with a play to win mentality.
You're the cause of truckers to stop trucking, hell you might even be the cause people quit the server, it's at this point of time a server continuity problem in my eyes as well, because I can see it degrading further and further where in maybe a couple of months from now you'll barely have any truckers, barely any truck companies. 

 


The most true thing in this thread. As a trucker, I completely relate.

I've been robbed during trucking shifts more than simply walking down the street in a crime infested area. It's crazy. I've been ambushed at drop off points, followed by blacked out criminals on dirtbikes, everything. 

And I feel like one of the biggest issues is just the fact that Truckers get paid in cash. Now, I know that when the economy update finally releases, trucking money will finally become banked money, so that won't be an issue for long. But let's be honest, 90% of criminals who go after truckers, are metagaming the fact that us truckers, especially the ones that driver bigger trucks, are usually carrying well beyond the robbery cash limit. It makes us the perfect target. We have 5k on us at all times and our pickup and dropoff points makes it extremely easy to ambush us. And yeah, it is kinda demotivating to actually go trucking due to how vulnerable we are. 

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On 7/24/2021 at 5:27 PM, 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.

 

A lot facts have been said in this thread but this sum it up very well. When you want to get your car modified you have to way for days or sometimes more than a week, and when you finally see an open garage you have to deal with a lot of people there, nobody roleplaying but just waiting when being semi-afk which is understandable because of the quoted comment. 

 

The customers don't enjoy it.

The mechanics don't enjoy it.

 

I don't see how a change in this is not happening. When you actually want to enjoy mechanic RP, people finds a way to avoid an open garage because RPying something like that in a garage during an actual opening is impossible.

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3 minutes ago, Macarroncito said:

 

A lot facts have been said in this thread but this sum it up very well. When you want to get your car modified you have to way for days or sometimes more than a week, and when you finally see an open garage you have to deal with a lot of people there, nobody roleplaying but just waiting when being semi-afk which is understandable because of the quoted comment. 

 

The customers don't enjoy it.

The mechanics don't enjoy it.

 

I don't see how a change in this is not happening. When you actually want to enjoy mechanic RP, people finds a way to avoid an open garage because RPying something like that in a garage during an actual opening is impossible.


image.jpeg.37322b62be1ab8730ee2ee4bf24ad7c3.jpeg

 

“Alright, who’s next? Need a catalog?”

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Some random suggestions;

 

  • Create more costs associated with modifying vehicles. Either with increased upkeep, less reliability, higher insurance rates, anything to make it less than a straight upgrade without any negative side effects. Right now, the demand is unrealistically high.
  • Allow modifications to be purchased when buying a new vehicle, perhaps with an additional mark-up over normal modification costs. This reduces some demand as well.
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15 hours ago, BigSmileLing said:

 

 

The robberies have been out of control for too long but nobody sees it, the server looks more like a Brazilian Favela than America, you are safer among hungry lions than in LS..

 

 

 


I personally have kept it IC and made my main (and legal) character move out of the city & stopped spending time in-game since 2 months or so. I only roleplay coming to Los Santos on weekends & that's about it when I log on my law abiding main character. I think if more people were willing to do such sacrifice, the thing would only grow more & more obvious and something must be done to fix it.

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Back when I ran a garage there were plenty of others around our location, two literally right down the street. Since I ended the lease because I got fed up of supplying good roleplay standards while others that I won't name got away with doing a complete car rework in 10 minutes they seem to have dwindled down, whether the others gave up the lease or it was taken away by bad standards, who knows. But in short, yes there needs to be more garages open to cater for the different timezones and hopefully there will be some now that lease requests just finished with one or two of the garages up for grabs.

 

Garages die because the roleplay standard isn't a level playing field. Some will take a long time and provide very detailed roleplay, others will swap out an entire engine and put a body kit on in ten minutes.

Yes, you can say "just report the shit garages" I have done, countless times and the owner has stayed in charge while they go around driving their 540,000 car.

 

Standards need to be set and harsher punishment to those that aren't following it, aka loss of lease. At the end of the day it's up to the lease owner to make sure the workers are up to standards RP wise and enforce punishment if they aren't. Not everyone see's it that way though.

Edited by Jura
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2 hours ago, mj2002 said:

Some random suggestions;

 

  • Create more costs associated with modifying vehicles. Either with increased upkeep, less reliability, higher insurance rates, anything to make it less than a straight upgrade without any negative side effects. Right now, the demand is unrealistically high.
  • Allow modifications to be purchased when buying a new vehicle, perhaps with an additional mark-up over normal modification costs. This reduces some demand as well.

Creating a parts store where people have to go purchase parts before getting them fitted at a mechanic shop would perhaps be a good step. 
 

more roleplay, more shops, more reason to spend money which this server badly needs. 

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1 hour ago, Jura said:

Not everyone see's it that way though.

Personally to me, if somebody spent ten RL minutes doing emotes about upgrading my car, i'd file that under "pretty well RPd".  I know it would take hours in real life but in my mind, certain things can be "good enough" in GTAW to represent the activity without it being 1:1 mirrored with RL.

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30 minutes ago, Paenymion said:

Personally to me, if somebody spent ten RL minutes doing emotes about upgrading my car, i'd file that under "pretty well RPd".  I know it would take hours in real life but in my mind, certain things can be "good enough" in GTAW to represent the activity without it being 1:1 mirrored with RL.

No, it's not good enough by any means when the main website states that the server is "Heavy Roleplay", 10 mins to completely change everything on a car is piss poor standards.

Edited by Jura
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