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how and why are there so many rich people


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I mean, us in the senate can absolutely set up taxes, utilities and everything a normal person in a economy irl would be paying (insurance etc)

 

The problem is, how many players do you think will be upset about it or try to shut it down via OOC means? And it would also require script support. 

 

All that takes a long time to go through the channels and make sure both the management/PM/FM/players are behind it. It's not a quick solution

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55 minutes ago, knppel said:

If veterans piling up money would stop treating the irl dollar as if it was the gold standard that'd fix half the issue as it would adjust the money's value (by inflation).

People just have no fucking clue of actual economy , pardon my french, and think slapping a "realism" stamp on a totally arbitrary value and backing this claim by some constructed reference and comparing paychecks to irl paychecks but adding zero's as a 3 year old tutorial said that is here that way-

just no.

 

This mentality causes only more unrealism and bullshit:

 

The problem is that we have no actual currency ig- see comment above, people treat it as ooc resource to justify it piling up when their character shouldn't pile money- so this phenomenon can be seen all over as people then, lacking the economic incentive to spend money, dish out random tips to whatever they deem worthy to receive support- completely ignoring whether it fits the other party to get paid so much they have to quit their shitty job.

 

This isn't just limited to this, scripted paychecks (not only factions, but public or privately owned businesses with /startshift) influence this further (as anyone who offers bartenders less than 4k base can experience).

 

Unironically, these very people then justify this metagamish behaviour claiming they do community service by spread up gobbled money and yes, @mj2002and @Mecovylooking at you two here namely, actually suggest stuff they'll benefit from in their rp mostly when this lobbying should take place ic (I am still royally pissed my lobbying for higher club funds got taken ooc, on that behalf. This was a plot so Carry would make more money, not something that will actually "help the greater good" as I said first ic and then was seriously proclaimed on the suggestion leading to doubled opening support).

 

My char just wanted more of the cake because people's mentality ensures bartenders end up eventually tipped more than the club manager can net by average even in a booming club.

This was not supposed to be taken ooc.

And most of all it wasn't seriously supposed to actually happen as it's not like filling a club with people regularly wasn't making any money ic.

IF we had 1000 active characters who each had their 200k that'd be a total 200m which is safe to assume was debunked in ds cars and furniture over the past half year alone.

 

The issue is people repeatedly creating new characters simulating the 200k as money making scheme "for the sake of rp", and some doing so way too frequently (I got no exact numbers but in theory without donating I can this way create 800k in my first month playing and 200k monthly then WITHOUT to ever delve into character developement or coming up with a job, an actual money making scheme or whatever).

An extremely complex economy can't happen and wouldn't be fun, having been part of many servers where funds were always 0 across the board for the whole playerbase, I can tell you that something that costed 2000 at day one would cost around 6000 to 7000 in four months or so.
A game economy is simply unfixable and wouldn't be fun to RP in (or not for most imho) but that shouldn't mean we should give free reigns over the game economy.
I've seen a sandwich go for literally 3$ as well as 200$ it's just immersion breaking more than anything which is what I'm complaining about, I don't care if you're a Davis gangsta and have 1bln in your bank account as long as you limit yourself to whatever assets your character would have, at the end of the day it's just a number that you don't really see, MONEY IS USED TO FUEL ROLEPLAY but some people just don't seem to understand it, I personally spend money on the dumbest most passive things that would make sense to own, books, cologne et cetera but right now there is no "standard pricing" for anything which is odd, the economy fluctuates pretty hard.

edit: If you're ICly rich and SCRIPTLY poor just rp as being rich and vice-versa, at the end of the day RP is all about imagination, just a play of façades of pseudo realistic character portrayals, nobody should judge your poor character for having 1bln in their bank or your rich char for having 5k, that is just a bad practice and not roleplay.

Edited by Eestino
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6 hours ago, knppel said:

Amen to that, and this is why I am so strongly against cutting starter funds (repeated new characters of established community members that make new chars to get 200k again is a different matter).

 

You can still comfortably get started with $175.000 after 35 hours, and with $500/hour instead of $800/hour.

Cutting the starter funds from repeated newly created characters has actually a lot more impact, but you'll also receive a lot more pushback on that idea.

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Cutting starter funds will have a lot impact on everyone's roleplay. I played on the server with no starter funds. But everyone who did not have a character there already, had to start rpg-wise. From zero to hero. Which was considerably harder if you had no people to play with there. If you didn't know anyone etc etc.

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6 hours ago, mj2002 said:

 

You can still comfortably get started with $175.000 after 35 hours, and with $500/hour instead of $800/hour.

Cutting the starter funds from repeated newly created characters has actually a lot more impact, but you'll also receive a lot more pushback on that idea.


Firstly the unemployment pay check is already $500. If you’re getting $800 then that’s because you’ve signed upto a script job like mechanic.

 

I’m not sure what benefit reducing starting income from 200->175k has. In the grand scheme of things it’s peanuts and it penalises new players which should be the last group of players you seek to make the server difficult for.

 

That said, I do endorse player agency and players being able to select their starting amount (upto 200k), meaning if they want to start with less, they can choose to do so.

 

The baseline imo to solve some of the servers economic woes is to:

a) At least have the server able to support its government agencies without a huge cash injection from LFM each quarter.

b) Do so in a fair manner.

 

In my opinion, the best way to do this is have every character taxed ~1% of their total assets per week regardless of time played.

 

By doing the tax per week (rather than paycheck), you don’t penalise players based on playtime and by keeping it a flat tax, you do not penalise any group of players over another.

 

Assuming there is 4-5bn in total assets (not unreasonable, it’s likely a lot more), then this would be sufficient to meet quarterly budgets. If the total wealth on the server is far more than this then such a tax could be reduced proportionately.

 

To give some idea of how much this means per player, for someone with 200k, it would be a weekly tax of just 2k.

 

 

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8 hours ago, mj2002 said:

Cutting the starter funds from repeated newly created characters has actually a lot more impact,

No shit it's not the newbs fucking up economy it's the veterans playing the money-spawn game!

 

8 hours ago, mj2002 said:

but you'll also receive a lot more pushback on that idea.

I could really live very well knowing people who want to rp cool self insert drug dealers and rely on repeated 200kto pretend that "makes realistic profits" (sic) would be mad.

The real question is, why are we catering to such types?
Obvious answer, unintentionally as the design is made for people like me who will put character (starting) funds to efficient use to equip a character right, but can just as much be used for "efficient gaming", i.e. spend the money very target oritiented (up to keeping it in the family ooc).

 

And further more what I said above still counts for this:
While I would advise to limit repeated character creation funds stricter, I'd definitely not just implement it just on its own without to also adjust other economic factors -

Keep in mind what side effects our economic setup causes, LS must be the only city in the world where people do not white- or greenwash their businesses, but brownwash them, pretending abundant funds stem from drug trade when actually drug trading makes peanuts for most dealers (in comparison with what a standard paycheck can make ic) and it's safed up funds from other businesses roleplayed as drug money.

 

Ah, brownwashing. What a word.

Seriously speaking, as was mentioned above by others already, indeed here the ingame economy shows its biggest flaw: From a standard 4,000 paycheck in any 24/7, without any actual ic boss paying me and without any obligation to actually satisfy a customer- I can roleplay a total douche and piss everyone off and will still get paid automatically, mind you!- I'm able to afford myself enough cocaine to poison half my family, if I rp with one.

 

summa summarum, I get I sound like a broken record, but the point is, looking at each economic factor that produces money individually without to take in account how prices affect each other, any attempt to improve the economic performance for a broad playerbase to be a more enjoyable experience is doomed to fail if the follow-up effects are not taken in account - this ignorance will cause unpredictable side effects then (which one could have predicted if taking all or at least more affected factors in account).

Just to name the core point again, it's about the buying power of the dollar (and this varies greatly, the coke-dollar is strong while the car-dollar is fairly weak etc.)

 

1 hour ago, Alyssa McCarthy said:

a) At least have the server able to support its government agencies without a huge cash injection from LFM each quarter.

b) Do so in a fair manner.

There's one very significant obstacle here that makes this incredibly tricky to establish on a full ic base funded by for example taxes substracted from our ic bank accounts:

Predictability.

 

In real life, states or communities typically have long lasting records and, no matter if rising, dwindling or stable, to a degree the ability to predict how many people will likely pay how much taxes over the next X years.

Based on this calculation they also take up debts, using this estimated future tax income as security and so on- without to go in depth here, the base for this is an upfront estimation how much money you'll rake in (if you have this you can also consider changing taxesin a way that will be received as fair ic, and fill your coffers).

 

Obviously in LS this is absolutely impossible, even if each of us just played one single character and no one repeatedly used starter cash- we've went from 400 to 900 player tops in a year, if someone actually had to deal with these numbers as state treasurer they'd gone insane long ago over constantly having to re-adjust their budgets to the ups and downs in the playerbase!

 

Indirectly this counts sadly for the legal faction budgets (and the criminals' coke sales too, ti-hi):

Making them dependent on how much taxes actually get paid ic (no matter if in the current setup or in a reworked one) might just not work out as planned.

I have no insight in how much money is withdrawn as taxes but my nose somehow tells me even with our current booming playerbase it won't come up to the few douzen million we need for the LEOs alone.

 

Additionaly a wealth tax on money or assets will be a drop on the hot stone here, I feel- might just be me who's playing as a character that generally hates paying taxes and thus attempts to keep them as low as possible already without actual financial incentive (just for the rp, you know!), but I just strongly doubt this will cause profitable effects- same as in real life, those with money will only be encouraged to keep it together even tighter rather than to invest it, while correct me if wrong on this but I think a majority of characters does not actually have millions in the bank and just doesn't drive a Cheetah as it doesn't suit their role, so the actual profit on a wealth tax, while calculatable unlike population income, will likely be way less significant than one would think from the point of view of the one having a few unused millions aside.

 

8 hours ago, Engelbert said:

I played on the server with no starter funds. But everyone who did not have a character there already, had to start rpg-wise. From zero to hero. Which was considerably harder if you had no people to play with there. If you didn't know anyone etc etc.

Thanks for illustrating why it's such a terrible idea to force new players to grind.

 

If looking at over all money, a single individual's 25k more or less might seem neglectable, but we need to look at the meta here, not just the plain numbers.

Going from my own example, I can tell you that with 25k less starter funds at hand- which I too knew I would get, being briefed upfront by veterans here-, I would:

 

-still have bought a Peyote, as you kinda need a car to get around ic

-still have rented an apartment for the first month after some days as motel rooms are too shitty for Carry once she wakes up sober (which would have happened immediately in this scenario, see below)

-still have spent a whole lot of money on tiny scriptwise charges you gotta pay to let's say try around with outfits, makeup and so on- minimal, but it sums up.

 

I would not have:

-immediately started to foster my character's scriptwise cocaine addiction

-spent a little money on baubles in shops , engaging in a dynamic rp scenery there right away too (and finding yet another motivation to get a job to buy more coke shoes ic)

-had the easy position ic to deny those 9/10 job offers that are morally questionable at best to then eventually find something halfway suitable

-constantly spent money on entry fees and alcohol

 

Edited by knppel
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10 hours ago, Engelbert said:

Cutting starter funds will have a lot impact on everyone's roleplay. I played on the server with no starter funds. But everyone who did not have a character there already, had to start rpg-wise. From zero to hero. Which was considerably harder if you had no people to play with there. If you didn't know anyone etc etc.

 

RPG =/= RP

In a perfect world you'd let everyone pick their starter money & assets based on the role that character is. In reality that doesn't work as people lack restraint and maturity. The 200k is a compromise - its doesn't allow you to by default have the assets of many roles, but it allows you to put together the basics for a majority of "average" roles in society.

 

Also, look at your last sentence, that type of system just favors OOC networking - which is and will always be an issue on RP servers - but a scarcity of resources only makes people lean on those connections harder, creates insular have-and-have-not servers, and once more massively favors people who can play all day/every day, which then creates a server culture where the only people with any influence/traction have zero RL. That's not a fun community.

 

16 hours ago, Eestino said:


-edit: I'm not against having a start-up money, just not 200k which I think is pretty high, you need to have some sort of money to get your first car and apartment, I'm just baffled by the general lack of people rping their finances as they should (namely the mallrats) and the fact that the economy fluctuates a lot because there's no real "standardized price"

 

I don't see how changing it to 150k, or 100k, or the like, is going to stop "mallrats" from roleplaying poorly.

If someone doesn't roleplay in an adequate manner you won't ever change it via the script. Its either within the realm of bad but tolerable RP, as so many things are, or its so bad it deserves admin action.

 

10 hours ago, mj2002 said:

 

You can still comfortably get started with $175.000 after 35 hours, and with $500/hour instead of $800/hour.

Cutting the starter funds from repeated newly created characters has actually a lot more impact, but you'll also receive a lot more pushback on that idea.

 

$500 is the default unless you're taking a script job with a higher pay-out and not roleplaying that job. Its $495 when you consider $5 tax is inescapable.

How is reducing starter funds by 25k going to make a significant impact to property scarcity or "mallrats" not adequately roleplaying their wealth?

 

If people are abusing the starter 200k by creating characters over and over, transferring that wealth in a way they can access it on another char, in order to amass over 200k on any single character, I'm pretty sure that's outright rule-breaking and should be treated as such & not have the whole system altered to punish new players because veterans find a way to abuse it.

 

Ruining things for the average because the outlier abuses it makes for a shitty environment.

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30 minutes ago, SunPuddle said:

How is reducing starter funds by 25k going to make a significant impact to property scarcity or "mallrats" not adequately roleplaying their wealth?

 

It works because the average player, like yourself, misjudges the impact of $25.000. For a single character, it will not matter much. Ending the checks at 35 or 40 hours, most will not even notice because by the time they are this far into a character, they will usually have found some means of income. Overall however, it does matter. Every month, hundreds of millions of dollars are injected into the economy through pay checks, of which new player pay checks represent the largest share by far. Take out 12.5%, and you are talking about dozens of millions, per month. This is significant, because it means there are dozens of millions of dollars less for richer players to siphon away from the economy.

 

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2 minutes ago, mj2002 said:

 

It works because the average player, like yourself, misjudges the impact of $25.000. For a single character, it will not matter much. Ending the checks at 35 or 40 hours, most will not even notice because by the time they are this far into a character, they will usually have found some means of income. Overall however, it does matter. Every month, hundreds of millions of dollars are injected into the economy through pay checks, of which new player pay checks represent the largest share by far. Take out 12.5%, and you are talking about dozens of millions, per month. This is significant, because it means there are dozens of millions of dollars less for richer players to siphon away from the economy.

 

 

Too much generalizing and assuming. Show me the step-by-links from that 25k, and how it feeds direct issues to do with wealth portrayal & inflation. I don't entirely agree with your series of assumptions. I'm not convinced that the 25k in question here is more liking to be "siphoned off" by the richer players versus getting spent on vehicles, consumables, or wind up facilitating RP via door-fee's and purchasing drinks.

 

If the core issue is these hyper rich players "siphoning" off money, and a need to remove quantities of money from the economy to target "richer players", why is reducing paycheques a preference over a wealth-tax/cap or another solution that directly targets the rich players?

 

What specifically is the issue? If its role portrayal reducing starter money does nothing, that's an issue with the players themselves. If its wealth accumulation at the top of the food-chain, reducing starter money is arguably inefficient and indirect and puts the burden of regulating the rich on new players/characters. If my issue is with people who are established on the server, my solutions should be targeted at them - not newcomers.

 

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