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IFM — Supplier Census Results & Information v2


khadijeh.

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Excellent work.

 

One question I am curious about is the purpose of weapon specialist scheme (the removal of serials, in specific) if scratching serial numbers from PF weapons is considered abuse. I personally think that that, as an incentive, is as close to a "strawman" as the server can get. If civilians buy the guns and criminals scratch them off, isn't that generally how it works?

 

 

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I'd prefer the Discord for IFM to be more open for non faction leaders and have a quick discussion ground for ideas to pool together.

 

I'm positive to see that IFM is taking a mature and serious response to the community as a whole instead of what has been done the last 10 years in RP. Mainly friendship cliques and OOC dealings, please continue this endeavour.

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This is good information. 

 

Let's hope IFM looks into the current state of suppliers and those who get accepted. A lot of the lack of weapons and drugs would be solved if the supplier role was given to deserving factions. Those who actually want to create a proper aesthetic and have genuine roleplay behind these items instead of keeping it within an out of character circle. 

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13 minutes ago, i dont wanna od in LA said:

That clarifies a lot. I thought you'd instantly jump to removing it. If that's not the case then great.

No problem, I apologize if that wasn't clear.

 

3 minutes ago, Chuckles said:

Excellent work.

 

One question I am curious about is the purpose of weapon specialist scheme (the removal of serials, in specific) if scratching serial numbers from PF weapons is considered abuse. I personally think that that, as an incentive, is as close to a "strawman" as the server can get. If civilians buy the guns and criminals scratch them off, isn't that generally how it works?

The weapon specialist has 2 commands that they get given access to, which are /unlockweapon and /removeserial. The part regarding the PF licenses is regarding people supplying their own people, and then their own people scratching those serials, and them then selling those now clean guns as if they were brand new. Historically, guns have not been locked, this means automatic weapons are locked to being semi-automatic until someone with that role unlocks them. There will be an influx of guns that are going to be locked moving forwards. This was an oversight.

 

8 minutes ago, Mythology said:

I'd prefer the Discord for IFM to be more open for non faction leaders and have a quick discussion ground for ideas to pool together.

 

I'm positive to see that IFM is taking a mature and serious response to the community as a whole instead of what has been done the last 10 years in RP. Mainly friendship cliques and OOC dealings, please continue this endeavour.

The Discord at the moment is limited to faction leaders, however, we can look into some way to bridge this. The issue that mainly happens, is people then treat IFM as pager admins, and it can get very overwhelming. We do want to be more transparent and have a common ground for all of us to work together though, this will definitely be considered and we will at least provide an alternative if this doesn't turn out to be the best option. 

 

6 minutes ago, Iovino said:

This is good information. 

 

Let's hope IFM looks into the current state of suppliers and those who get accepted. A lot of the lack of weapons and drugs would be solved if the supplier role was given to deserving factions. Those who actually want to create a proper aesthetic and have genuine roleplay behind these items instead of keeping it within an out of character circle. 

In full agreement.

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There is a large gap between players' role play interest in drugs (which this census marks to be "high") and their actual end-user consumption in the script (low). Bluntly put, many people likely would rather portray the drug dealer who wins instead of the drug addict who doesn't. Addiction is also a difficult thing to portray properly. These are both things that will probably always come through in drug RP and elongate the duration of the supply chain,

 

That said, I believe if the gameplay applications of drugs were different by script, they would find wider use. They currently serve, as a whole category, two active purposes and provide one detriment.

 

Active Description: They create descriptive lines to be read on /examine, saving the player the trouble of continually updating a set of symptoms.

Active: They buff your health.

Passive Detriment: Addiction makes you lose HP.

 

Health buffs are useful in combat, that's about it. This leads to a specific type of demand that encourages end-of-chain buyers to stockpile, specifically ones engaged in violent crime. Drugs are something they want to have for themselves and their people when needed (like when you're about to engage in a conflict), and don't want to a. forego at an IC loss to themselves (selling for less than they bought the items) or b. abuse ICly to the point where it becomes a detriment to their character and/or ability to operate in combat. At the end of the chain, just because of how drugs are designed and tend to find their application in the server among most chains, there is a disincentive either to sell them or personally abuse them.

 

There is also little variety between drugs. They primarily serve the same functions, with tweaks on the extent to which they buff a player and consequently debuff them. This leads to a hierarchy of drugs which somewhat accurately mirrors real demand: "soft drugs" that don't leave damaging impact relative to their buff tend to be the ones in high demand and circulation.

 

I think an easy fix would be to acknowledge the purpose that most drugs currently serve on GTAW is for combat, but that all drugs don't need to do that. And to that point, if crack cocaine suddenly offered a nutty temporary buff, were reasonably priced at the distributor level, and found high quantity of distribution, the shit would be all over Davis RP.

 

I think a holistic drug system could look more like this. I'm not sure how feasible these tweaks are, but I trust our developers! I believe the potential of passive effects has been massively underexplored.

 

Active Description: This is good as it is. If anything, I'd encourage fleshing out each level of addiction by substance with more unique descriptors.

Active: Some continue to increase total HP. Some increase the movement speed of your character (+/ 5%, a small change). Some temporarily increase your melee damage (maybe PCP). Active animations/intrusive screen effects should return for psychoactive drugs like psilocybin or LSD. That's just part of the subjective experience.

Active Detriment: Some drugs reduce movement speed. Some drugs reduce melee damage (fragility, physical fatigue). Some drugs force the player into particular walkstyle animations for the duration of effects. Personally, I'd consider that a benefit for an RPer, but the combat-focused would look upon a PCP-frantic animation as a detriment. It's still faithful to the drug experience and loss of control.

Passive: Some drugs increase total possible HP for the duration of addiction. Some drugs increase melee damage for the duration of addiction (small % buffs possibly in a tiered fashion, think steroids, progressing in physical strength). 

Passive Detriment: Some drugs decrease total possible HP for the duration of addiction. Likewise, some drugs decrease melee damage for the duration of addiction, which I believe would be a realistic passive detriment for many drugs. Some drugs decrease movement speed passively through addiction. Some drugs should leave character descriptions beyond their active effect. A heroin addict is still distinctive even when they are not high.

 

If there is going to be demand for each unique drug on the market, they should provide objective and subjective effects in novel, unique combinations. Otherwise, they will continue to be relegated in an objective hierarchy based on their end-user pros versus cons, all based around combat. Drugs that are already scarcely circulated will continue to be stockpiled and sought in lesser quantities if they remain objectively inferior to other drugs in a system that revolves around a very small table of benefits and detriments.

Edited by pogoyo
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Feedback on supplier apps would be a great addition to transparency. I understand that you guys are inundated with applications and don’t have time to write detailed feedback on every application - but even access to the logs of IFMs discussion of the app would probably suffice. For factions that have been around for a while and applied multiple times for a major supplier role to no avail it can be disheartening not to know where you’ve gone wrong/what you need to improve. Especially knowing it could be another 12 months before those applications open again. Something as simple as - your application was denied because there are already too many suppliers in your field of roleplay with that supplier status, would suffice. This would stop factions holding out for that elusive major gun supplier role when they’re realistically never going to get it due to over saturation, regardless of how good/bad their application is. Given that you can only have one major supplier role, these factions may be unknowingly shooting themselves in the foot by holding out for gun supplier, which they will unknowingly never get, when they could’ve applied for drug supplier instead. I don’t know if I’m speaking for the majority of people here, or if it’s only my faction in this boat, but this situation has lead to our faction (18 months old, biggest faction in our “scene” with over 60 /invited members) having zero major supplier role. Granted, IFM has been very accommodating with other types of schemes, and we’ve done quite well as middle men and we have never been short on roleplay, but I feel like we could have potentially missed out on other opportunities that a bit transparency around supplier apps could have opened up to us.  OR we haven’t missed out at all, and our applications have just been trash, which feedback could have also explained. 

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