Limelight Forums

We would like to hear your input on LimeLight's economy. As you might have noticed many players are unhappy with the way how people earn money. You either sit in a room for hours while protecting contraband or you're just stuck to a job.


Please discuss the following aspects in a realistic manner:

• higher job-payout?
  
• tweak meth-production / make it easier?
  
• opinion on moneypacks?
  
• more legal ways to make money?
  

[size=1.45em]YOUR input is very important. [/size]

From my side of things, I am dirt poor. When I am online I am in the firefighter job.

I realize the job will never make me rich. But still, it would be nice to have options other than becoming a criminal in order to get some extra funds quickly. I have done some contra so I could afford the VW golf, the cheap one.

I would love to see a bonus or something for special tasks. Like putting out fires for firefighters, reviving people for medics, etc.

I also feel having non-illegal methods for cash would be good also. Farming and such.

I don't have a definitive solution unfortunately, but here is my side of things.

What economy, lol?


I understand some people want to be given a reward for their 'hard work' immidietly, however with the following suggestions in mind, it's about making the 'average player' normal, as they would be in real life. This means that they can't afford all the extremities which is currently in limelight, such as high performance cars within hours, just from contrafarming etc.

RE: Higher Payout on Jobs.

Yes. Any non-merchant jobs should get a substantial pay rise. They should rival the money gained from contrafarming. This would force all those whom just 'sit in a room' to seriously consider actually doing something, while still making very similar gains. Contraband should still offer a little more money, to not make it redundent, but it should defiantly be more interactive, require more maintenance or be more risky. (Increased noise, perhaps?)

RE: Tweak meth production

Current meth production system is good. Means people have to use the merchant jobs a lot, making each of them needed. The payout for meth should be a lot lower though. It's easily possible to make 300k in an hour if you have the right /chemical list.
That's simply wrong in my opinion. You can get the most expensive car, theoretically, within 4 or 5 hours of joining the server and extensively meth cooking  and contrafarming.

I propose that payouts should be a quarter of what they are now. (Perhaps tweaking the price of ingredients accordingly.) In addition to that, I also want /chemical to be nerfed. It's stupid how you can't use the meth system for days because of the stupidly high aluminium required, for example. I'd rather the meth system actually replace the contraband system. This would solve the problems which I outlined above, too. This could only work if the /chemical list was a little more friendly, perhaps having a max aluminium count needed of 6,000.

I completely understand why you chose to vary it, as you wanted people to actually be cautious about the cost and materials, and thus not just sit farming it 24/7. But I think it's a shame, that people can't use the wonderful and interactive system, potentially for days, just because of the /chemical list making it unprofitable.

But in regards to making it easier, it's fine. You do need to implement the guide into the game, however. (Whether it be with a /command, or in the F1 menu.)


Moneypacks

I'm sure by now, a lot of people would know my stance on moneypacks. Nope. Simple as. The server makes enough from the donations it currently receives. Moneypacks would only be there to serve the player's individual needs. The economy suffered on fearless, mainly as a result of this, and it has already suffered on limelight with the sale of donator status. (Which on the sellers perspective, acts exactly the same as a moneypack.)

If the donations to the server weigh a bit thin, then perhaps offer moneypacks occasionally as a way to boost funds, but it isn't needed currently to finance the server, and adding them would simply make the server pay to win.

Please don't turn the community into everything you was against with fearless.

Prohibit the sale of donator status, too.

More legal ways of earning money.

Yes. Defiantly needed. Can't actually think of many ideas right now, but it should offer money at a similar rate to contraband. But the mentioned ideas of farming, better fishing system etc is defiantly needed.


The idea of a player-controlled market would also need to be implemented, but I don't think I have a great deal of ideas in which I feel I can contribute towards that for now, so that's all i'll say on the idea.

Money Sinks


Vehicles

Ideally from my perspective, I'd like a complete revamp on the vehicle system, and it's pricing. I'd like cars to be priced (To the current equivilent) of:Average cars: $10,000 - $200,000
More luxurious 'regular cars', such as saloons. (E.G BMW 3 series.) $200,000-$500,000
High end cars (Equivilent to the current Audi) $500,000-$1,000,000
High performance cars (Almost supercars. An Audi R8 may fall into this, as would a Masarati, for example.) $1,000,000-$2,500,000
Super Cars (Lambo, Bentley, Ferrari) $4,000,000 - $8,000,000.
Very unique vehicles $8,000,000 +. Examples could be a yacht, Military trucks, anything which has unique functions etc.

Why? I understand to most, this seems almost shocking, but if cars were priced in a similar manor, you'd get the following:
Lots of lower value cars on the road, and the higher value cars will be very rare. This means when you see a lambo going down the street, you'd actually know that player has spent a lot of time earning it. I believe for the top tier of vehicles, only a handful of player should ever actually have it. It means high performance cars are an extreme rarity, and is almost unique. (Which allows the player's efforts to actually be noticed etc.)

This system would only work well, if more support for the 'average' cars were given. Much more variety, and a further cost incentive which I'll go into later.

Vehicle Repair:

This would act as a further incentive to use the 'average' cars. Essentially, you would have a tiered 'repair' cost per car. The higher end cars, if crashed, would cost say, 20k to repair fully, whereas a 'family car' would only cost $50, for example.

More complex fuel system?

This would be a fuel system which dynamically changes depending on the vehicle. High performance cars burn through petrol fast, much faster than an ecological family hatchback, for example. For this idea to actually make a difference to the economy, there would have to be a price increase for petrol. This would be increased substantially, but keeping in mind the duration of driving before needing to refuel would also increase, depending on vehicle of course.


I'll probably update this section in the morning.





Donator Status.#

This is something, not sure if it fits in this thread, but i'd like to mention quickly, regardless.

There should be no in-game benefits to donator status, other than vanity and aesthetic goods.

This would mean people shouldn't feel like they NEED to donate to keep up with the current donators.

So I would propose that the double salary perk, as well as the 50k monetary addition would also be removed. Keep it to the system in which you donate to gain access to Swat, Suits, Military suits, A vehicle or two? There'd still be ample reason to donate, without effective the economy in any way.






TLR Make the server's economy one which offers various branches in which one can gain money. You can get slightly more payout the illegal way, at a risk of being apprehended. The Legal way would be safe, and arguably more fun. Money sinks would eat a lot of players' money, meaning having 'lots of cash' would be a rarity, and hard earned through other means. (Such as starting a business, be it farming, fishing, flipping items etc.)

Something does need to be done. The current economy is not only pay to win, it's boring. Items are just items, and have no value. (Not economically, but they have no time-value.


If there's any grammar/spelling mistakes, excuse it, as it's been a long day. lol

Thanks to Jono for reciting the length of the bible for me.
jk

How about a cash reward when you put out a fire? Like $250 per fire or something.

I think that a reward for reviving players and putting out fires would be a small but significant start.

As far as I'm aware contraband earns a player $1250 every 5 minutes. If we put a timer on paramedic bonuses of around 2 minutes to stop abuse, and make the payout $400, then every 5 minutes you can earn $800 ($900 on average). Add the paramedic's salary and this is almost as good as basic afk contraband, though not nearly as effective as cooking meth. The same would apply for firemen. We should also boost salaries around the board - the problem with the economy on FL was never low amounts of money, but the fact that over the years millions and millions had accumulated. I'm not even sure if money-packs were the problem; there were simply never any good money-sinks and we only started to add them at the very end.

Regarding Meth:

The payout at the moment is way too high, I think that aluminium should be easier to retrieve, e.g. chop shop system etc. But meth payment should be scaled down, even halved to what it is now. For example the meth recipe today was 2000 aluminium I had over 20 boxes of aluminium from farming them over a few days I was able to make over 20 batches of 80% meth gaining me 600k in under 3 hours. Its ruining the economy. Maybe brining the max meth payout to 30,000 or even 25,000 and if aluminium is easier to acquire half it. 

The current meth system and payout is fine.

I have spent days and days of stocking up on aluminium, making deals with people and having people work for in me in order to get the 28 aluminium I had yesterday.

I have chosen to not cook meth (I bloody love it) until the recipe was right and yesterday it finally was. The total profit of my cooking was around 550k. That is indeed a lot of money but it shouldn't be forgotten that it is the player's decision when and how to cook meth. I have spent over 3 hours doing the same risky process over and over by myself, fearing for cops and crashes.
Reducing the maximum payout would give no profit at all most of the time considering the high material costs, making players go even crazier when the recipe is good.

Tl;dr: Meth is a high risk high reward business that can be done if players make the right decision at the right time, whilst also taking the effort to learn the process. The total equipment costs combined with the fear of cops and crashes are well worth the average 30k payout.

(Aug 22, 2015, 02:48 AM)Faustie link Wrote: [ -> ]I think that a reward for reviving players and putting out fires would be a small but significant start.

As far as I'm aware contraband earns a player $1250 every 5 minutes. If we put a timer on paramedic bonuses of around 2 minutes to stop abuse, and make the payout $400, then every 5 minutes you can earn $800 ($900 on average). Add the paramedic's salary and this is almost as good as basic afk contraband, though not nearly as effective as cooking meth. The same would apply for firemen. We should also boost salaries around the board - the problem with the economy on FL was never low amounts of money, but the fact that over the years millions and millions had accumulated. I'm not even sure if money-packs were the problem; there were simply never any good money-sinks and we only started to add them at the very end.

The problem with this is that it's then reliant on there being a large number of car crashes and injuries being reported. Sometimes you can easily sit around for 10-20 minutes with nothing to deal with. This would be where contraband still has an advantage over doing a lower paying government job.

Well perhaps you could implement the option to purchase more contra for example; 4 Money printers and 8 drug labs, or more money could be developed with the conta that is already in place. I also agree with gaining money more legal ways such as farming where one can grow crops and such before selling them to people. If you did go down with this route you could purchase a small crop yield zone from the market place and the header could come under farming where you have to purchase a watering can, Pitch fork and what other items are needed, I'm no farmer in real life... some of the items cold be bought from the chef others yourself.

Another way could be changing the way how we obtain fish. For example once the player spends a long margin of time sitting fishing  there could be a NPC vendor who you can actually sell your fish to giving the player the option to keep the fish for food or sell it to make a profit.

RE: Jamster

We originally planned to make the meth payments quite a bit lower rgan what it is today but during the progress we were told that the payout we had planned was too little, and it was feared that people wold just ignore the system and go for contra instead, this happened several times

Yes, we need more ways of makin money, if I log on some days, I find over half of the citizens are criminals or simmilar, where as passiveRP is not done for the cash, its done when you have enough.

So obviously we need to make passiveRP more rewarding, however there is a very fine balance to hit between nice payout and how easy it is to make. Since "legal" ways of making money is essensialy without risk we need to make it "challenging" to do, but not so challenging that people go the criminal route since its just plain easier.

There has been good suggestions about making money legally, however many of these systems cant be inplemented properly as some core code in the gamemode is not built to handle it, hence we cant implement it as people want.

Currently the devs and us contributors have our hands full with projects, as you may have seen on the recent updates and announcements thread faustie posted, so right now we do not really have the time to re-code a very core system in the gamemmode

TL; DR: Due to GM limitations we cant make some of the very good suggestions on making money legally, but there is still some great things in the works

The meth system and payout is fine. Due to the fact aluminium is currently expensive as f*ck, plus all the cyfluthrin, methylamine and other costly resources required, and the chem tank + Stove is still a lot of money. If you are just starting out or have just been caught for meth and your equipment is destroyed, that's 17500 already gone on another stove and chem tank, not to mention the other stuff I mentioned. I believe the payout should be max 50k imo. It's noisy, dangerous, and expensive.

Money packs are a nono. They will literally destroy the economy. Players who are better off can just open their wallets and have millions in 20 seconds.

Jobs should get a higher payout. Civilian should also get a payout as well, because the merchants get 150, and they can sell stuff to make money. If you are a custom job that is focusing on the RP you aren't making any money.

Legal ways to make money should be added, I'd like to farm some carrots or strawberries in the forest or whatever. It was proven during the first few days that the best way to make money, was to steal that money from the other poor players. Different ways to make money would discourage everyone from being a criminal 24/8.

(Aug 22, 2015, 11:37 AM)Jonataane link Wrote: [ -> ]Well perhaps you could implement the option to purchase more contra for example; 4 Money printers and 8 drug labs, or more money could be developed with the conta that is already in place. I also agree with gaining money more legal ways such as farming where one can grow crops and such before selling them to people. If you did go down with this route you could purchase a small crop yield zone from the market place and the header could come under farming where you have to purchase a watering can, Pitch fork and what other items are needed, I'm no farmer in real life... some of the items cold be bought from the chef others yourself.

Another way could be changing the way how we obtain fish. For example once the player spends a long margin of time sitting fishing  there could be a NPC vendor who you can actually sell your fish to giving the player the option to keep the fish for food or sell it to make a profit.

Contraband is a problem, so adding more to the amount you can make is bad for the economy. So would a fish NPC as the money comes out of nowhere, not from another player.

higher job-payout? all jobs should be raised a bit..

tweak meth-production / make it easier? Not at all. Meth is so easy to do. Just make the "random recipies" like maximum of 12.000 Aluminion because its not worth if its more then that xD

opinion on moneypacks? Don't do that. I know that it could give alot of cash to development but it will ruin the game.

more legal ways to make money? I dont know how, but this could work.

I've had a lot of complaints about the alu being 20k or so. The reason it flys so high is so people don't do meth all the time. If we allowed it to always be between 1-10k then everyone would literally be making millions as there would never be a bad time to make meth.

The way it works at the moment, means you can't always do meth as it's far too costly, and means it can't be farmed 24-7. I'm happy to take a vote, but if we lower the recipe for alu to about 1-15k then I will be dropping around 10-15k of the payout of meth as otherwise people are just going to farm meth every single day.

(Aug 22, 2015, 02:12 AM)Jono link Wrote: [ -> ]The economy suffered on fearless, mainly as a result of this, and it has already suffered on limelight with the sale of donator status. (Which on the sellers perspective, acts exactly the same as a moneypack.)

That's not how it works. Let's use a hypothetical:

>Over the portion of the week I accumulate enough money to buy one donator status with in game money.
>I purchase the status, thus transferring[b] the money from [b]my wallet to the seller's

It is not the same as a money pack:

>I purchase a moneypack via the website
>Poof money appears out of nowhere

There is a big difference, in one scenario the player transfers his money and in the other he just magics it up.