All things must come to an end.

[Pingster]

-

Clusterfuck was regarding iDavid's post, and only purpose even mentioning it was to make a point about difficulties with scripting shouldn't be used as an excuse to change the existing world. Glad to know that it's not an issue in this case.

Anyhow, ruining the economy, I've honestly no idea of the grand scheme of things in RS5's economy, so you'd have to address which parts of it would be drastically different with people keeping their money and people losing it. So far I can imagine the prices in shops (and other systems used to balance prices) would be higher, but that's about it.

It's a two edged sword, however. Players starting with little to no money would result in everything being priced really low. Might seem like a good thing, but that would also mean that the roleplay jobs would result in much less payment as well. Things like delivering stock to a shop would pay much less if the stock is resold at a low value. People would be unwilling to repair their vehicles 20 times an hour if it costs too much. Your usual roleplay is not going to end up you walking 10k richer, it'll end up you walking away $200 richer. And this is going to continue until enough money is brought into bank accounts from the main bank (which, as far as I can tell, is most likely going to be firemen completing missions more than anything else).

From what I've seen, the properties are overall more expensive than they currently are, meaning, unless you're extremely rich (which shouldn't be a high percentage of players), purchasing back the home you had would result in you having less funds to throw around. More so with allowing to purchase more than 1 property. The value of money would still be high as intended, though not quite as high.

But here's a better idea, instead of letting everyone keep what they have or removing it completely, do something inbetween. Let people keep a percentage of what they have. That way you would ensure that everyone wouldn't start with nothing and that people who didn't have extreme amounts of money would still have to work to make money. I'm sure you can create a quick script to check how much money is there between the active players and decide what percentage of that would be okay to remain in the economy. And then it's just a small matter of adding 1/x into the script responsible for translating current funds to the new format.




And yeah, I know, if everything costs less, then getting paid less is the same as everything costing more and getting paid more. But that's not how people think, specially not after years of RS4.

[SugarD]

The money isn't the most important thing, but it's needed.

Far from it. We roleplayed it in MTA:VC for years despite there being a scripted system. People were not greedy, so we roleplayed imaginary items, transactions, and activities, and paid for them via /me.

It is not hard to play pretend.

[RizzE.]

As argonath have alot of state vehicles such as helicopters, cars, bikes, trucks and many other vehicles that can be used for free, it makes money even less important.

[Mikal]

Numbers don't end.

[Teddy]

The drastic changes are in RS4 there is legitimately no economy, no economic models, unvalued currency, and making money is easy as hell. Took me only a few months to make a few million in RS4.

The entire structure of the economy in RS5 is introduced, by allowing any third-party sourcing you are going to make starting off harder. Remember I mentioned a complex algorithm that'll count the economic value and adjust accordingly. This means, as the value in the server goes up the price of gas, items, and etc. goes up. As the value in the server goes down, the price of gas, items, and etc goes down.

Do you see the problem with sourcing the funds now from RS4? You would have the "rich" spiking the prices of everything, and the poor absolutely fucked due to those spikes. In order to give a fighting chance, the "starter" money price will increase and decrease with the value of the market.

How is the market controlled? Same way the real world does it, control the bank funds. We want deflation, we remove money. Inflation occurs naturally and never is unbalanced.

tl;dr

By introducing the RS4 value into RS5 you would ruin the algorithms that inflate/deflate the economy causing it to become ineffective and create an economic shutdown nearly instantly.

[SugarD]

As argonath have alot of state vehicles such as helicopters, cars, bikes, trucks and many other vehicles that can be used for free, it makes money even less important.

Agreed.

[Hudini]

FUCK MAN Just in my birthday we will remain the ban time to RS5 to :S? from RS4 ?

[Pandalink]

The biggest failure of RS4 was with managers logging in doing huge events for millions, and giving away /paydays like they were a candy man at a child's birthday party.

Managers logging in and doing huge money giveaways saved the fucking economy, and the server.

This massive inflation made money in RS4 virtually useless. It was so easy to comeby and carries essentially no value.

That's how it should be. That's the ideal state of an RP server, where your money can be used for whatever the fuck because it's worth basically fuck all. That situation is conducive to roleplaying for the sake of roleplaying, rather than making money.

What does this mean? Money is something that the server is based on, its not required for RP but can be used in RP. Money is something that is valueless in RS4 but valued in RS5.

Until money becomes nearly valueless, you will have an early 2008 RS3 on your hands.

Quoting myself from fucking 6 years ago:

And also, in the situation all money is taken, nobody will have any money. Everyone will be abusing/exploiting (along with legitimately) making money. But the bottom line is those making money will not be doing the pure roleplay that comes with monetary satisfaction.

"I have 100k, so whats 1k spent on a RP session?"

will become

"I only have 20k now =\. I don't want to spend this money on RP."

well look who was right

[Teddy]

Then you simply do not understand the vision of what Gandalf had in mind then. I can assure you its not valueless economy.

[Pingster]

Sure, but Panda does have a point.

The only real upside of players not having any money is that shootouts with M4s, AKs and 2k armor are going to be less common, specially on the cop side (cheaper for criminals - load the weapon and buy extra ammunition rather than having to pay for the weapon as well as there's no option to load from cop side). Yeah, the grand plan of how the economy should be also will be maintained, but as far as roleplay goes, money is going to be a bigger goal than actually having fun.

You mentioned RP opportunities to make money in RS5 without the use of scripted jobs. If you can elaborate on that, okay, if not, I do not see how is this going to work when players have very little money. As Panda said, if I have 30k on me, I'm not very likely to be giving away 10k to a street sweeper, specially when I still have to make money to purchase a vehicle or two and then start thinking of properties. And I know the go-to argument here, you don't need vehicles and properties to RP, but that's not going to work. People still want them regardless if you need them or don't.

[Teddy]

I think Gandalf already put some examples of methods of entrepreneurship in RS5, as well as the new economy and ideals behind it.

An example would be:

A delivery service company, while delivery is scripted consider the following.

Since some areas might have high interest for mafias, they might try and extort businesses. In order to do this they'll need to create a reason for protection. Thus, a method might be attacking delivery trucks. The owner of this company would be responsible for their drivers, in turn they might hire another company which specializes in protection. The protection details could get a percentage of the awards for delivery. While protection convoys and such aren't scripted directly, they are a non-scripted service which could present reward.

[Pingster]

Such roleplay would be unlikely to happen until people are already on their way to making money anyway, which would only be realistic by doing jobs that get paid from the main bank. Which goes back to my earlier point about having armies of fire fighters or whatever else job there is going to be that pays well and is paid by the main bank, instead of roleplaying.

By the way, speaking of that, the whole point about this was that there would be no money spawned in and no money being removed from the economy. I'm assuming that means all the scripted jobs are paid by the bank and that there's a possibility, however unreal it may be, that the bank runs dry. What happens then, all the scripted jobs stop getting paid until people start buying weapons and paying taxes? Do you add more money to the bank? If so, does that not defeat the purpose?


PS: The past 20-30 posts really should've been at the Economy thread, but man, at least we got a productive discussion going here D:


PPS: Love the editing, also, what about the retaining a percentage of the funds, low enough to keep the algorithm working efficiently, high enough to keep the players happy? Would that not work?

[Teddy]

Such roleplay is likely to happen actually as long as people don't have your attitude about it.

A economic collapse is possible, we would not spawn money into the bank for the hell of it. There is mayors that'll be involved with this, there us also emergency reserve funds. It also suggests algorithms should be in place to detect a collapse and automatically making budget cuts. Currently in the event funds start looking... low, the bank will suspend loaning services automatically. We could develop a system that'll reduce the payment for government jobs. This would lead to players protesting their mayors to do something about the economy situation, strikes for police duty and etc... would be an interesting scenario to be in.

Keep in mind the bank does make money as well. Factories are also planned, they could print money.. if needed #AmericanStyle

[Pingster]

Eh, it's hardly my attitude about it, I'm just taking that position for the sake of that actually being more productive than me enthusing over all the ways we can work now, which would lead to nothing. So far I've found out about infinity more than I did from Gandalf's posts (with no offence meant, they revealed almost absolutely nothing that you couldn't put together yourself... At least I didn't find out anything I didn't suspect/know already :3). Take this as my beta testing your vision of economy, if you will. :P

Anyway, be as it may be, I just hope that this turns out to be more than just a vision, we're attempting to move a community of people, who's vision of making money (which they already have millions of) is driving around, waiting for random pop quizzes all the while the weed is growing and the next fire mission is on it's way, to a situation where they have to actually work for their money. It's going to be some difficult times.

Good talk bro, good job with the scripts (if you've finally finished them!), and have a shot of vodka on me when your day's done.

[Leon.]

Oh lordy, why are you guys so crazed about the role of money on the server? Let me just clarify as objectively as possible what the role of money here and any other roleplay-based community is:
It helps you buy shit, it helps you bribe people... It's incentive, it's competition, it's reward, it's risk. It gets you what you want while making you work for it, and above all, it makes things interesting. That's it. Money here is not useless or completely unneeded (as some of you imply), nor does it form the core of the server (as others imply). You theoretically do not need money to roleplay, but you have to realize that this is 2013, and we are making the most advanced and developed form of playing pretend there is.

And this is regarding what Sugar said - We are not just going to stick with /me all the time and expect everyone to be happy with an un-immersive game of pretend. Wouldn't you agree that pretending you're a knight if you were a kid would be 10x more fun if you had a toy sword to swing around, rather than just pretending it was in your hand? If we could just pretend everything, why don't we just pretend the TV is there playing a pretend broadcast of pretend Family Guy? SOUNDS LIKE SO MUCH FUN.
Money plays the role of being more immersive. Since GTA:SA is pretty much based around real life-- and I emphasize, based on real life, not is real life or a replica-- a lot of roleplay in a multiplayer version of it is going to be based on or reminiscent of real life. You can preach however much you want about Argonath not being a real life server, which someone is bound to do sooner or later and am very well aware of (despite the fact that I made any notion of Argonath having to be a strictly realistic-based roleplay server), but like it or not, we're still running around with human-based characters and driving around with vehicles based off of real life ones... and yes - spending currency, a real life human invention. The commands, the money, the animations, the system of properties, the scripts - it's all about immersion.

I do hold high hopes that the ideas behind the new economy for Argonath will work in practice, and create a whole new level immersion.


And on an unrelated subject, I must mention as a general note, this polarity of philosophy in Argonath is other than fucking annoying ridiculous. No one ever wants to meet in the middle, everyone has to have one opinion or another, as if it were American politics. After all these years, I'm beginning to believe that people are simply playing Devil's advocate for the sport of argument.