Change mapping fees

[Mahitto]

This is a problem I've seen many people talk about ever since I started mapping, and something I have noticed myself. I'll try to keep this as short and relevant as possible while also giving some context for whoever's not (very) familiar with mapping and this problem.

 

The problem - if you want your property furnished, you can choose to get a basic GTAV/GTAO interior. This is the cheapest option but the worst of the three, as your interior will have 0 character, won't be unique and won't really help you too much. You can also choose to do it yourself. This is more expensive, but cheaper than the last option. If you don't have time, you're not passionate about this, you just don't want to do it, don't have donator etc., the result might not look very good. The third option is getting someone to do it for you, often someone with some experience and a portfolio, who can get you a much more detailed, personalized interior, something complex, with character, unique to your liking. This is, by far, the best option out there, for obvious reasons, but it has its own problems.

 

Mapping can be a lengthy and complicated process, extremely tedious, requiring imagination and creativity etc. You don't have to be talented, as most of the stuff comes with experience, but you do need that - experience. Different people have different styles, experience, processes and such. In order to hire someone to map your property, you'll obviously have to pay them. The payment is what this topic is about. It should depend on many factors. However, it only depends on one - the price of the furniture used. This is a major issue and it raises two big problems:

• It pushes people to abuse the system and farm up the price of furniture. How? Many ways. Some examples are using expensive items, hiding expensive items around the property (or super far away), duplicating walls to make them cost much more, among many other ways which I don't want to share here. Sure, this is against the rules, but it's extremely hard to catch, unless you have hours upon hours to go around checking every single item, and you'll likely not catch it. That's why it happens quite a lot but there's basically 0 reports on it. In many cases, it's also subjective - you might consider a more expensive item to be useless, while the mapper might say it is needed, and there's no correct answer.
  • It also works the other way around, with people deleting "unnecessary" items from an interior before paying and making a very complex, unique etc. interior cost a fraction of what it was before.
• It completely disregards for the mapper's time, experience, attention to detail, style etc. You can have an extremely complex, unique and amazing interior cost less than a box with windows and specific items.

 

I think this should be fixed as soon as possible. The price of mapping should not be linked to the price of the furniture. This way, people will use expensive furniture, or cheap furniture - whatever fits their imagination - since there's no incentive to use either. The project should be priced subjectively, based on all factors - how many objects used

 

What am I suggesting? - the mapper's fee should be the price of furniture used + whatever they charge, whether that is $10k, $500k or $10m, as long as both people agree on a price and are pleased with the result. This is similar to the recent changes to the housing market and will stimulate this niche market and produce quality work. It will also allow people to ask for the right amount and/or pay the right amount.

 

There's also a massive drought of mappers. We basically face no competition. This would probably stimulate that as well and get more people into the game, thus also improving the quality through competition. Right now, people end up waiting for months for an interior. That's quite ridiculous. One reason I've personally heard is that people don't want to spend weeks making an amazing interior for little reward. And it's unfortunately extremely valid.

 

An interior with 1000 objects, great attention to detail, nicely furnished, that took a week to complete by someone who had to do 100 projects to get to that skill level should not be priced the same as something done in 5 hours with 150 objects. It's basically art. For most of us, this is a passion, a hobby, but not for everyone - however, everyone wants to be properly compensated.

[K3V]

Couldn't agree more with this suggestion; you hit the nail on the head when you referenced the recent change with how houses can be sold. Change is required, people should be paying for quality of the mapper not quantity of furniture cost.

[Tiddy]

You can always report the mapper if this is something you encounter, using expensive items and hiding them behind walls is against the rules.

[Mahitto]

Just now, Tiddy said:

You can always report the mapper if this is something you encounter, using expensive items and hiding them behind walls is against the rules.

Of course you can, but how many such reports are there? Not many. The problem is that it's extremely hard to find if that happens.

 

That's not the problem, though. Mapping fees shouldn't be linked to the price of furniture in the first place @K3V put it nicely.

[Tiddy]

20 minutes ago, Mahitto said:

Of course you can, but how many such reports are there? Not many. The problem is that it's extremely hard to find if that happens.

 

That's not the problem, though. Mapping fees shouldn't be linked to the price of furniture in the first place @K3V put it nicely.

I think it's a great suggestion, but I don't think it will fix the mapper drought at all, I think it'll make it worse, to be frank. It's really hard to estimate how much an interior will cost to map because of the mapping catalog and the different prices of all the objects. I think a better solution to this would be to lower all the prices above $250 in the catalog to down to $250 to completely eliminate the expensive items that can be abused. Another side effect that I think this suggestion might have are those few mappers that only do it for the money and charge ridiculous prices but leaves the person with a quickly put-together interior that doesn't meet up to their actual standards.

[Mahitto]

1 hour ago, Tiddy said:

I think it's a great suggestion, but I don't think it will fix the mapper drought at all, I think it'll make it worse, to be frank. It's really hard to estimate how much an interior will cost to map because of the mapping catalog and the different prices of all the objects. I think a better solution to this would be to lower all the prices above $250 in the catalog to down to $250 to completely eliminate the expensive items that can be abused. Another side effect that I think this suggestion might have are those few mappers that only do it for the money and charge ridiculous prices but leaves the person with a quickly put-together interior that doesn't meet up to their actual standards.

 

Those are some good points. I think it's a similar situation to the housing market issues that we used to face - people were hoarding their houses/unique properties because they couldn't ask for enough money. There were similar concerns there - that removing the cap would turn the server into LS-RP v2 when it came to housing, with normal stuff going for 1-2 mil and more unique ones going for 40+ mil or such, but that didn't happen whatsoever. Instead, we now have a working housing market. People pricing their stuff too high get ignored or laughed at. I think this is the exact same situation, except the assets (real estate) is replaced with skill and effort.

 

What's likely to happen is that more people will join in or dedicate their time to this, and the ones who already do it would focus more on one property instead of skipping through them. Right now, there's absolutely no incentive to spending 10 extra hours placing 500 random items and straining your eyes doing so in order to make a place look more lively, if those items are $3 each and all that time adds a whopping $3k to your total payout.

 

Your last point is also a good point, but that's another issue, and it also requires being looked at - people not being pleased with their interiors or the designer not taking the job seriously. If the designer is doing it on purpose, they should be punished. If they did their best and the person isn't pleased with the result, they should still be paid for their time and effort and the property should be completely wiped (so that people don't claim poor work but still use the interior). That's a different issue, though, although I do agree it has to be looked at.

 

I'm sure some people would charge ridiculous amounts, but if someone wants to pay that, it's on them, just like it's on them if they buy a $50k car for $150k. People could still choose to wait for a decent price/mapper, like they do now, but would likely have a higher quality of work, more effort and time being put into their property, more options and a much better result. A few days ago I talked to someone who's been played around by two mappers for the last 5 months for a simple thing. They couldn't find anyone. That's a big problem.

 

I agree that the prices of some items should be changed (hell, make everything cost the same!) but the price of mapping should have absolutely nothing to do with the price of the objects used. It's extremely hard to price an interior fairly, but after all, it has nothing to do with how much the items cost. You can have 2 people use 500 items to make an amazing, lively place or something that looks really bad - same amount of items, same items, same price. The factors that should be taken into account are the effort being put into the build, the attention to detail, the little stuff that's being added, the floorplan, the style, how much time has been put into it, and much more but most importantly, the experience of the person. A great project, like most of yours are!, don't take 10 hours to make - they take months over months of experimenting, and hundreds if not thousands of hours. All of this should come into play when designing something, not the price of the furniture - that's irrelevant. And the only way to fairly price these interiors is by letting people charge and pay whatever - this way, an equilibrium will automatically be found, between the minimum someone would do a project for and the maximum someone would pay. It's the only way, really. What we have now doesn't make much sense.

[Lomadias]

2 hours ago, Tiddy said:

I think it's a great suggestion, but I don't think it will fix the mapper drought at all, I think it'll make it worse, to be frank. It's really hard to estimate how much an interior will cost to map because of the mapping catalog and the different prices of all the objects. I think a better solution to this would be to lower all the prices above $250 in the catalog to down to $250 to completely eliminate the expensive items that can be abused. Another side effect that I think this suggestion might have are those few mappers that only do it for the money and charge ridiculous prices but leaves the person with a quickly put-together interior that doesn't meet up to their actual standards.

 

This.

[Hood]

2 hours ago, Tiddy said:

I think it's a great suggestion, but I don't think it will fix the mapper drought at all, I think it'll make it worse, to be frank. It's really hard to estimate how much an interior will cost to map because of the mapping catalog and the different prices of all the objects. I think a better solution to this would be to lower all the prices above $250 in the catalog to down to $250 to completely eliminate the expensive items that can be abused. Another side effect that I think this suggestion might have are those few mappers that only do it for the money and charge ridiculous prices but leaves the person with a quickly put-together interior that doesn't meet up to their actual standards.

I agree with Tiddy on this one!

Edited February 6, 2022 by Hood

[Cufta]

On 2/6/2022 at 7:32 AM, Tiddy said:

I think it's a great suggestion, but I don't think it will fix the mapper drought at all, I think it'll make it worse, to be frank. It's really hard to estimate how much an interior will cost to map because of the mapping catalog and the different prices of all the objects. I think a better solution to this would be to lower all the prices above $250 in the catalog to down to $250 to completely eliminate the expensive items that can be abused. Another side effect that I think this suggestion might have are those few mappers that only do it for the money and charge ridiculous prices but leaves the person with a quickly put-together interior that doesn't meet up to their actual standards.

I agree.

[ENDREAS]

+1. How much a mapper charges should be up to them. If the customer agrees, what's the problem?