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IFM — Supplier Census Results & Information


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CENSUS RESULTS & INFORMATION

ILLEGAL FACTION MANAGEMENT


Beginning of census: July 15 2021

End of census: July 25 2021

 

In order to prepare for the amount of applications we were expecting to receive as part of the supplier program, IFM put together a census to gather information about where the illegal community is at with the current economics of the illegal flow on the server. This thread will be split into 3 parts.

 

We have tried to keep this as concise and accurate to the information we were given. This thread is an informative reference.

 


PART 1 — THE STATISTICAL RESULTS

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DRUGS

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WEAPONS

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PART 2 — THE WRITTEN RESULTS

In total, out of 224 submissions, 146 had a written response for a total of 11,358 words. While the importance of this is absolutely 0 in regards to the census' goal, it's to help understand that while all responses were read, we may not have specified it within this section due to similarities to others, duplications, or just not fit for the thread. Some of these will include notes from IFM where able to, some of them will be covered in part 3.

 

Text from IFM will be in green, the majority will be covered in part 3.

 

This will include suggestions and general comments, feel free to discuss these suggestions under this thread.

 

  • [Suggestion/Feedback] — Suppliers should be more than just spawns and drops, there should be roleplay about these. They need to be roleplaying smuggling, their positions are so easily abused. - We are currently aware of this issue, as of 2 weeks ago, we began collecting supplier stories again and have been slowly creating the roleplay around the drops rather than instant spawns. There are so few of us that timezones don't always match up, but it is happening where possible.
  • [Suggestion] — "I believe that we should resort to the single-auto locked rifle system and have weapon techs be able to 'unlock' these weapons. Everybody and their grandmother having full automatic submachine guns and rifles is just silly and ruins immersion."
  • [Feedback] — Factions that deal heavily with drugs, deal with the same types. They then find it easier to get a hold of SMGs rather than low caliber weapons such as pistols which is what they want.
  • [Feedback] — Do more to remove the OOC dealing market. - This was pretty much in every other response, we're going to be heavily trying to work on removing this culture.
    • "I feel like a small group of suppliers have concentrated their power at the top and have wielded their positions to scare the community away from any suggestions that might loosen their control on the market. The changes that need to be made would cause massive price drops and major ripple effects on the server that I feel are ultimately necessary for the servers future success."
    • The market is currently a monopoly (guns).
  • [Feedback] — Larger weapons should become more of a scarcity due to the degree of oversaturation.
  • [Feedback] — Gangs currently have more SMGs and rifle calibers than low level pistols and use these instead actively for minor firefights.
  • [Feedback] — Marijuana
    • "When it comes to drugs I personally feel there is not much to complain about. One thing that irks me however is marijuana. This is THE most widely used drug in North America, whether we like it or not. Prices on the West Coast of America are INCREDIBLY low in order to combat legal marijuana. Anybody and everybody can find seeds in real life and start a grow, which leads to my next point. I feel inflating the marijuana scene beyond control is a harmless yet important act of business. Flood the market with seeds and copious amounts of marijuana, causing for a competitive market. If the price drops to 100 a gram, even 60 or below? So be it. We’re looking at a drug that costs $10 in real life selling for just under the price of cocaine in game, whereas cocaine in real life is closer to $80 a gram, even $100 in some cases. That’s at least 80x the price. It doesn’t make much sense, roleplay or not."
  • [Suggestion] — Act as IFM in order to inflate the market for pistols and low weapons.
  • [Suggestion] — "My 'take' on guns and drugs is less focused on the scripts themselves, and more-so the people distributing/using them. From the perspective of an LEO role player, specifically a gang investigator in OSS, the general quality of gangs on the server is at an all time low. To even call some of the members of these gangs 'role players' is a stretch, as they are either blatant self-inserts or just created to DM. Unofficial factions are completely unmoderated and given 200 'second chances' after seriously terrible roleplay and DM. It demotivates not only the LEOs that are meant to roleplay with them, but also other gang roleplayers that put in actual effort. As long as these unofficial factions are allowed to run rampant and do as they please, it does not matter how expensive the scripts are, or how available they are in the market. They will be abused for the sole purpose of DMs; guns to kill and drugs to make it harder to kill, without any meaningful roleplay around the acquisition or sale of either." - We don't have a direct comment for this, but it seems to be one of the few LEO/Legal perspectives that we received and wanted to share that.
  • [Suggestion] — "We need some suppliers to be factionless to help reduce the circle of friends when it comes to gun supplies. Make pistols really cheap but keep some exotic full autos harder to get. Sniper rifles should be easier to get than a full auto. Semi automatic weapons should make around 90% of all weapons."
  • [Suggestion] — "Make knives and switchblades available in hardware stores with a minimum of 100 hours of playtime. Knife robberies always had higher quality roleplay than the regular aiming a gun and /b showitems."
  • [Feedback] — There is so many shootouts right now because people have some form of automatic weapon on them, they shoot due to wanting to keep it rather than roleplay reasons/fear.
  • [Suggestion] — "In my opinion IFM should make a small team of REGULAR players (who can apply on the forums or on the ucp) to help judge factions based on their quality and give their recommendation for supplier status, as IFM is a small team and there's alot of people who'd be more than willing to help." - This is something that already exists, the "IFM Council", we are working on revamping it so we don't have much information about applications or access to joining until it has been revamped into a stronger group. This has been spoken about by Bospy in his previous threads.

 


PART 3 — THE RESPONSE FROM IFM


Firstly, I want to start by just thanking everyone who took the time to give their piece as part of the census, we are a small team and we are trying to go through as much of this feedback as possible but we will not always be able to create bridges without taking time to build the scaffolding and structure to begin that process. 

 

Many of the concerns brought forwards, through the direct statistics as well as the feedback and be broken simply down into there being a much higher demand than there is supply. This also ties into there being a majority of participants in this census speaking on there being OOC favoritism where it comes to supply and a monopoly around this.

 

Despite there being an overwhelming amount of feedback about the above issue, we were provided with very few suggestions on how to combat this. We are not magicians and we cannot promise we can remove this issue, but we can start knuckling down and taking more severe action in order to ensure that this issue does not continue to grow.

 

So what is being done?

 

This census was done before we have opened major small supplier routes, this means this data has been collected before the first action in our itinerary has been conducted. Please take this into consideration, the first step to try and rectify this has already been taken.

 

I also want to directly quote what Bospy stated upon his reign over IFM: "Historically, supplier has been abused by people arranging OOC deals. I will say outright I have a zero tolerance policy for our suppliers breaking any rules. From hereon, any violation of rules, up to an including an ajail, will result in a loss of the supplier status. This is a very important and critical role for the server. A supplier wields massive power in who they choose to sell to and who they associate with. Suppliers must set a positive example for the server." from this thread. This is something that we did get a lot of feedback about, there will be no exceptions. This is a policy we plan on enforcing and if anything manages to slip under the radar, please bring it to us A-S-A-P.

 

We are also going to be working with Nervous directly and the development team to monitor these suppliers, there are regulations that they are all held to. Our exact plan of action for this is somewhat 'curtained', the reason for this is because knowing the internals of how we will be monitoring this may be abused and/or may promote work-arounds to be figured out. This is something that will remain within IFM solely, and not be shared inside or outside of the team to absolutely ensure its effectivity. This is a work in progress as we begin combatting these issues.

 

What about minor suppliers?

 

I have had many a messages about the recent supplier applications, "when does melee open?!", "when does electronics open!?", "when will I get a response on my application?!". 

 

Melee is due to open once we have processed all the new major applications that will be coming in, and seen how this impacts the economy, the illegal community as well as if law enforcement is able to combat this. Roughly late August to early September. 

 

Electronics is something we do not want to flood the server with, but we will not be gate-keeping either. We recently have had a few openings for this position so this will open once we have handled all of the major applications, this will not wait for impacts but be rather soon after. Roughly mid-to-late August.

 

Everyone who applied for weapon specialist or tobacco supplier has received a response now. If you didn't receive a response, you were not accepted.

 

THE RESPONSE FROM BOSPY (Head of Illegal Faction Management)

 

"This census was an excellent step in determining what kind of suppliers we need right now and what is important to the illegal community. I foresee many anonymous surveys like this moving forward to ensure your input is being heard and we can have a more equitable system within the illegal faction community. One of the huge issues mentioned time and time again in these anonymous responses was the feeling that certain items or types of suppliers are hoarding their goods and supplying it only to their friends. These are not realistic criminal networks.

 

I won't sugarcoat it - it's an open secret that some weapon suppliers have wielded their status for OOC gain. This will not be permitted moving forward and it won't happen under my watch. We are keeping a very close eye on all of our weapon suppliers and intend to encourage them to be active on their supplier characters. Our plan is to ensure the market is saturated by firearms from people who are just there to roleplay and keep things IC. We will be cautious not to flood the market. Our plan is to be conservative, but to ensure the guns are going to the right hands of people that would realistically have them.

 

Our intention is to make the minor supplier roles powerful in their own ways as well. I want to have electronics and tobacco suppliers be something useful. I've been debating adding certain kinds of "specialist" roles beyond just weapon specialists.

 

In general, this supplier wave should give us a good spark to the illegal community. A more equitable gun market, more specialists, and more unique drugs flowing. Some drugs almost don't even exist in-character yet! This isn't a good look, and we want to flood the server with drugs to reflect the real-life black market networks."

 

Edited by honey.
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Coming from someone who was mainly an illegal roleplayer most of their time roleplaying on other servers it’s nice to see that the team is collecting and listening to feedback from the entire illegal faction community rather than select groups. It’s nice to see transparency, more stuff like this is definitely a good thing, props for the team for organizing it and sharing the data and responses.

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5 minutes ago, mattmocz said:

Coming from someone who was mainly an illegal roleplayer most of their time roleplaying on other servers it’s nice to see that the team is collecting and listening to feedback from the entire illegal faction community rather than select groups. It’s nice to see transparency, more stuff like this is definitely a good thing, props for the team for organizing it and sharing the data and responses.

 

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Well put Honey, Bospy & Co.

 

To put together a survey such as this one is one thing, but to delve into each & every members written response and provide feedback on such is really taking things to another level, much appreciated.

Edited by Gucci
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