Economy Rework Part 1: Wages and Vending Machines

[UrsulaMejor]

Wanted to get some feedback on this idea before I went through all the work of doing it.

problem: the prices of things are way out of whack

many powerful items are cheap. many useless items are really expensive. nobody really seems to care about money, as you start with enough for basically anything you'd want to buy, except the things you cant already afford which are basically "go sell multiple gold bars" expensive.

I want to start touching a lot of the things credits are used for, and I wanted to start with the two most interacted with elements with respect to credits: payroll and Vending Machines

Step 1: stratify payroll tiers

essentially, each crew member's pay amount will be set to be not far off from one of these tiers:

Clown - 1
Pubbie - 100
Tradesman - 300
Doctorate - 500
Head - 1000
Captain: 1500

this firmly roots every job far enough away from each other and provides targets for costing things. A tradesman can basically freely buy anything targeted toward pubbies (cigarillos), but they won't be so free  to buy an item targeted toward a doctorate (cigars). head level items (gold leaf cigars) would be painful for them to buy, and they might not be able to afford one with just one pay check

Step 2: reprice a ton of shit (starting with vending machines)

for example, if you want pubbies to be able to buy 5 burritos a paycheck, I'd price burritos at PUBBIE_PAY/5. If a gold leaf cigar box is intended to be a head's whole paycheck, I'd price it at HEAD_PAY

Step 3: play with the numbers until things feel right

I want money, even pocket money to feel impactful. I want players to feel the difference between the job classes, and I want to be able to, across the board, lower some of the crazy high credit numbers we have to put things at in order to balance them. once this feels good, I'll move on to the next part of the economy rework depending on what things present the best opportunities

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fat fingered and accidentally closed this on mobile, whoops

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I know that the economy has a lot of work to it. Please try to focus feedback on the ideas and problems presented. This is going to have to be like putting on a bedspread: one corner at a time. Trying to do it all at once will just lead to frustration for everyone.

[vampirate]

So I don't know about giving the jobs with like... actual stuff to do less cash. Your average grey suit? sure. But like as barman I'll fly out to the space diner and grab a bunch of monsters when there is no chef early on. To be fair I don't know what they get paid now.

The weakness of this is also you're taking cash from people with the most time on their hands, so they'll either look for things to do to make cash, or have nothing to do and then that's a whole other problem when they start trashin the place (tho hopefully rare?).

HoP and Security should get paid the same amount cause we all know why.

Also captain and clown should make the same amount of money. There's no good reason for that lore wise and yet I know it in my heart.

It'd be nice if a person could raise their pay every certain amount of rounds of playing a job. Kinda like a reward tier. Stands to reason people would get raises. A high paid clown could be a medal.

[TheMaskedMan2]

All I have to say is I have played on a few other servers that actually have money mean something. It can be very scarce, a lot of things cost money, there's a limited amount of money in circulation for the round, and generally it has a lot of value. It's not a meaningless abstract number that is either

A. So low it might as well not even matter, have fun entering your pin number again.
B. So high that the only way you will ever get that item is if you have some insane income of money usually from cargo or something else.

Basically i'm not sure how to do it but I would genuinelly like if money actually mattered, give motivation to the crew to actually use those little cards to charge people for things. More for selling stuff, and adequate reasons to want money beyond gimmick overpriced merchant items.

[Sundance]

Yeee, economy rework is something I've been wanting for a long time, this has my full support.

There's not much I can really offer idea-wise unless I really see what is on offer in terms of vending machines. For me, it's less stratifying the price and giving players items that they want, or need. Why would I want a DD burrito, even on the RP server, outside some vague chemistry usage / brewing? It's literally poison.

There's a serious item bloat on the station and I think that's one of the major issues. Taking stuff and putting it behind paywalls / vending / markets will ruffle some serious feathers, even with the best intentions. Personally, i'd let the haters hate in that instance, players are far too used to their little meta and it's good to shake things up. To give an example, one could put a medi-vend instead of medipacks in areas where civilians can access. And those wall mounted fire/oxy/medical storages? It could cost 100 credits to unlock it.

I'll point that there's another big hurdle and that's how easy it is for someone with AA to make money completely and utterly irrelevant by stealing the budget. Bedspread analogy applies here so I feel tackling in this thread is not the correct time here, but i'm just throwing it out as it's the elephant in the room.

tl;dr: Economy good, vending items need is as important as price, bloat and AA a big problem to consider.

[Flaborized]

I like this, clowns currently are one of the only jobs where I actually *feel* the lack of money, because clown seems to be the only job that gates you off from buying things that are useful. Vending machines have a gap of Things That Have Actual Utility IMO, and it would be smart to add more things people Want to the economy system because I don't think the demand is high enough usually for people to really care. Stuff like medicine for non-doctors works great in vendors now, could add stuff like tools for non-engineers or (more useful) drugs for non-chemists (which we already have but that's a really underutilized feature!)

[Mouse]

I find myself hurting for money as a staffie, particularly if I latejoin and the payroll is already gone.

[Sundance]

I find myself hurting for money as a staffie, particularly if I latejoin and the payroll is already gone.

That's actually a really good point. Latejoiners are almost always short of pocket and if we're going down the route of cash is king, it's something we should consider.

I feel latejoiners could be subsidised (NB: completely separate to the payroll), calculated as such:

(Starting pay) + ([Base pay] X [Amount of Payroll] / 3)= Subsidy.

So if we use the  Pubbie example of 100 creds per payroll and it's been 5 payrolls then you get the following:

(100) + ([100] X [5] / 3) = 100 + 166 = 266 credits.

This simple math would effectively mean that all latejoiners would automatically spawn with 1/3 (when compared to someone spawning at round start) of their allocated funds already in their bank. 

This additive effect separate to the budget also means that latejoiners actually secrete money back into the station economy!

EDIT: The number 3 was just plucked out of thin air and could be changed to lower or higher depending on balance.

[KikiMofo]

Honestly the only thing I ever buy from the machines is Highpowered flashlight modules. So I have no idea about the other things. Oh also gene modifications but those prices are set by genetics so I dunno

[Sundance]

Honestly the only thing I ever buy from the machines is Highpowered flashlight modules. So I have no idea about the other things. Oh also gene modifications but those prices are set by genetics so I dunno

Yep, that's one of my main points. But there's many avenues you can approach here by locking stuff behind paywalls that is a net gain for the station, so long as you have dollah dollah billz. We need to be smart about it. Gene modifications is an excellent example of how people can buy things and how that money benefits geneticists.

Here's some spitballing:

- Add an oxygen vendor to the arrival shuttle, with a number of emergency oxygen tanks starting empty. If you use my above example of people starting with subsidies, then latejoiners could grab some oxygen worry free... for a price.

- Replace the chemical storage locker with a chemical vender. This would be balanced by the fact that the vendor has more base chemicals than the locker... for a price.

- The Medivend and the Garden gear could have options for better chems/botany stuff... for a price. There is already a price thing already implemented here, it's that everything is priced at zero. Hacking the machine to malfunction will not spit out priced goods.

- Higher priced foods, drinks and smokes come with the benefit of being very nutritious (giving you generous buffs) and addiction free (in terms of smokes and coffee)... for a price.

- Rockblox is excellent, as was genetic stuff. But while the latter does feed back into the genetic budget, the former only goes back into the Miners pockets. Thing is, Miners never really need to buy stuff, this could be looked into.

- All money spent in vendors go directly into Shipping budget (where does the money go actually). This creates a feedback loop.

[UrsulaMejor]

- Rockblox is excellent, as was genetic stuff. But while the latter does feed back into the genetic budget, the former only goes back into the Miners pockets. Thing is, Miners never really need to buy stuff, this could be looked into.

- All money spent in vendors go directly into Shipping budget (where does the money go actually?). This creates a feedback loop.

Just want to clarify that the first thing isn't true (the money goes to the shipping budget based on taxes set by QM as well as the miners' pockets) and the second thing is already the case (although it's not all the money, only half of it)

[Sundance]

- Rockblox is excellent, as was genetic stuff. But while the latter does feed back into the genetic budget, the former only goes back into the Miners pockets. Thing is, Miners never really need to buy stuff, this could be looked into.

- All money spent in vendors go directly into Shipping budget (where does the money go actually?). This creates a feedback loop.

Just want to clarify that the first thing isn't true (the money goes to the shipping budget based on taxes set by QM as well as the miners' pockets) and the second thing is already the case (although it's not all the money, only half of it)

I had a feeling I was wrong about those points. Good to know, edited my post to reflect.

The vending thing is a true outlier in my knowledge, this isn't mentioned anywhere. I'm assuming the other half goes into the payroll budget?

[Technature]

Economy rework definitely needs to be a thing.

Especially on the RP server, where running out of money if no one is selling anything by the half hour mark is stupidly common and should reasonably be something that matters to everyone.

[Leeanei]

My suggestion is that half the current payroll should be a "performance bonus", which comes from a payroll budget. The other half of the payroll is automatic and always comes in from Nanotrasen.

[DJ-Fireball_did_this]

What if instead of barring things that can be accessed/produced easily already there was more of a focus on vending (or cargoing) things without a good way to get? Maybe not new objects entirely, but things that don't generally pop up. That way the station can still run "normally" as it already does, but these reworks can still happen. Less salt, probably.

[Technature]

I feel that the budget should simply be increased. Or maybe better, base it off of how many people are at round start, rather than have the pay come directly from NT. Not having pay is a good RP drama creator and I'd hate to take that away from the RP servers.

My idea is have the budget start with enough credits to pay everyone at round start for an hour, and increase the budget by half a late joiners expected pay of that. This way a basically competent crew can increase the budget before it becomes a massive issue AND new people joining won't suddenly drain the budget of its expected pay.

So if a Staffie gets paid 100 every five minutes, the budget would have 1200 to pay them over the course of an hour. A late joining staffie would add 600 credits to the payroll budget.