Demonmit1

I agree to a point. raising the base pay would be a bad idea in my opinion. BUT, there should be some form of commission pay for the civ factions that actively interact with players and provide a useful service to the community. EMS afaik gets paid $500 per patient delivered. Weasel gets paid $100 per ad posted. Why wouldn't Mechanics get paid per car repaired, or Taxi get paid per trip? its not consistent. Faction civ jobs require so much more initial effort to get involved with, have strict rules IC, and for all that effort, you get paid half of what someone gets working a freelance script job for the same amount of time. clearly the significantly low pay is a deterrent, player interest and retention seems quite low. getting a roadside repair request is so rare, and often there isn't even mechanics on duty. New players get frustrated seeing a single taxi cab online, but not getting a response when called, and not being able to pull out a citybee because some taxi driver is afk. giving players financial incentive to actively participate in their faction job would draw more people to be sign up and be actively working at the jobs. The risk vs reward of illegal work, is generally the more effort you put into working at it, the more money you make. Faction jobs don't do that, you get paid the same whether you put no effort or all the effort. hell, some freelance jobs actively punish you for putting more effort into the job.

letting players fix their own vehicles doesn't fix the root of the problem. the root of the problem is there's not enough active mechanics. how do you fix that? pay them more to entice people to sign up and play as a mechanic. $5500 an hour is abysmal compared to the 10-14k an hour you can make on average doing freelance civ jobs.

to be honest with you, i have no idea how the business side works with paying players to work as a mechanic, so i dont really understand your question. im just saying gameplay wise, players working as mechanics should get paid for actively doing the game mechanics of the job, like doing repairs, upgrades, roadside repair, and tow truck driving, on top of their base salary. that shouldn't affect the income/profit of the business, it should just be a gameplay incentive for mechanics to actively engage in being a mechanic, and make more money for doing so, rather than being paid the same as someone who is not actively responding to mechanic requests. For example. player 1 and player 2 are mechanics. they're both being paid $5500 hourly to stand at the mechanic shop and be there if someone shows up asking for a mechanic to fix their vehicle, player 1 wants to be more active in playing as a mechanic today, so they decide their not going to stand at the mechanic shop and handle the drive in repairs, they're going to be out in the city actively looking for people to help with repairs and respond to roadside mechanic requests. player 2 wants to not be as active today and would prefer to relax while handling the drive up only repairs when they show up. Player 1 is putting in more effort than player 2, but they both are getting paid the same, so theres no monetary incentive for player 1 to be so active. player one should get extra pay from the game for completing more jobs than player 2. the reason why there's a shortage of mechanics is the pay is low and there's no gameplay incentive for people to play like player 1, when you can play like player 2 and get paid the same either way. People in here are saying the way vehicles work should be changed, or that players should be able to repair their own vehicle, but that doesnt fix the root of the problem. the root of the problem is theres not enough active mechanics playing. there's not enough mechanics playing at a time because the pay is not remotely on par with other options available in game to justify the effort to become and play as a mechanic. Edit: just to say, I actively enjoy RPing as a tow truck driver and doing roadside repair. its something i want to do. but im not interested in signing up to work at a mechanic shop and drive tow trucks and do roadside because of how drastically low the pay is compared to freelance work, while also knowing the person standing at the repair shop afk till someone drives up asking for a repair is getting paid the same for way less effort. If i want to chill and make a bit of money, i go fish with friends. if i want to drive around working, i drive trucks.

I had brought this up in a recent post i made a week ago: I go into more detail in one of the comments in that, but one of the things i had brought up is Faction jobs like Taxi or Mechanic should have some sort of system that pays the player commission for doing the RP job, on top of their base salary. for example, as a mechanic, your starting wage is $5500 an hour if you're signed in. other than that, theres no real gameplay incentive to do any of the job requests or work. obviously theres IC and OOC rules that need to be followed, but there should be some sort of gameplay mechanic that incentivizes players to also do the work. (outside of weekly bonuses / employee of the month/week) My idea for mechanics specifically was they should get a % of the fee for the work they do. so, a car pulls up and pays $850 for a repair? the mechanic that does that labor gets $425. a mechanic is out driving around doing roadside? they should get $1250 of the $2500 roadside repair fee. obviously specific numbers need to be worked out, but right now there pay for working at the faction jobs actively discourages players from signing up and going through the effort required to join and RP as a faction job player, where Freelance pays double the amount for no upfront RP effort required.

well yeah, there lies the problem. Taxi and Mechanic RP can be quite a lot of fun but people are turned off from getting involved in it due to how drastically low the pay is across the board compared to freelance civ jobs, not to even mention criminal income. Faction jobs require a significant amount of more effort to work for and require a base level of RP capabilities, but the in game reward for the job doesnt match the effort required. Lower population on the server would mean theres fewer players in the civilian factions to compete for the extra commission, so it would more or less balance out. all the factions should still be making their base salary, but should be incentivized and rewarded on top of their base salary for completing tasks for the job. (taxi getting % on driving fee, mechanics getting % of repair fee and roadside fees) yeah, that's a fair argument. I can see that being discouraging for people within management roles. while they do have a higher base salary, its still considerably low compared to way lower effort freelance jobs. we'd have to brainstorm a way to work some commission system in for managers, without them having to take job requests. Maybe there's some way to set up a system that managers get some commission based on how active each of their subordinates are that are actively working, or maybe they get a bonus if they delegate a job to a worker, and that worker completes the job, the manager gets money for that? some competitiveness isnt a bad thing in a job. actively participating and playing the game should reward you with more pay. with faction jobs, at least everyone is getting a base amount of income, and if you want to make beyond that, you can be active and be a bit more competitive on responding to job requests for players. Managers should be able to manage whos taking what jobs, and IC guidelines can be created to spread out the workload if the work is coming in slowly. Overall, how the faction jobs play is great, but theres not much incentive gameplay wise to put in more effort to play the role, vs standing around and passively collecting salary chatting. a big part of my original post was wishing there was more co-op ways players can work together on freelance jobs, as my complaint was so many are either entirely competitive for work, or actively discourage people trying to work together by paying less than doing it solo. Faction jobs encourage working together, thats what they do great.

yeah, that would be great. it just feels like right now, a vast majority of the jobs either force players to compete with each other directly for the pay, have entirely no mechanic for group play, or actively discourage group play by making everyone's income lower for working together. which is the complete opposite of Criminal gameplay and money making, which seems to actively encourage group activities, which draws more people to play that.

I suppose so, i must have had a poor streak when i was gauging how much on average i was making per hour. In my testing i was making just under $9000 an hour on average over about 5 hours of Road working. its definitely not on the low end like Couriers or Money transporters, but from what i experienced its not up near the higher end from my testing, where Trucking, Bus Driving, and Farming were averaging around $12,000 an hour, and garbage pickup was closer to $14k an hour. It doesn't happen that way due to how extremely fragile the market is to a small amount of oil being produced. it seems a bit excessive that $22,000 of oil DRASTICALLY lowers the selling price of oil. The system significantly discourages groups from working that job and being efficient at it. Realistically, the job should not be effective for a single person to do by themselves, which it currently isnt, but its significantly worse to do it as a group, which is a bummer. If there was a decent price floor that oil barrels (or ore for mining) would sell for, that would keep the effectiveness for individuals to work by themselves low, but groups could be formed to work together to optimize the job, having dedicated miners and delivery drivers. Which I feel is detrimental, as LSC is regularly dead and no one is working there (more people prefer Paleto for being more active) Taxis are regularly short handed, and getting roadside repair service is like pulling teeth sometimes. I've talked to a fair few people who are interested in joining those CIV factions, but are reluctant to join due to how drastically lower the income is compared to working other jobs. Thats not to say the base salary should be drastically increased, or even increased at all, but it would make sense to me to incentivize players working in those factions to actively work in the job, and get paid commission or something extra for being active in doing the job, rather than passively collecting salary sitting around all day. I think that would be a overall benefit for the server in general, as mechanics would be more inclined to accept roadside repair requests which typically get ignored, and taxi drivers would be more inclined to pick up players farther out and get paid for the extra time.

Just to preface this, I've been playing on the server for two weeks, so I'm likely going to have some misunderstandings of how some of the Jobs work in the city. In my experience trying out the different CIV jobs available, I've noticed that the jobs that typically pay the most for the time you spend are secluded solo jobs. Some of the jobs you're even having to directly compete with other players working, or are on edge worried about getting robbed for the work you've done grinding out the job. To point out some jobs that you are actively punished for RPing and working together with people on would be Oil Drilling, Mining, and Trucking. Putting a group together to all go oil drill, having workers drilling, and people doing deliveries back and forth from the fields to the drop off, is a great situation that encourages RP, having to organize people to work together, people all in close proximity to chat and hang out, etc. But when three people in 30 minutes worth of mining can drop the price of the entire oil market by nearly 35% (oil barrel price went form $115 to $84 from just selling $22k worth of oil) , the job is actively punishing you for the time and effort it takes to organize teams to run oil work. Mining works the exact same way. the market crashes so incredibly fast if players put any effort into organizing. Trucking at its core discourages group interaction, as the whole job system is highly competitive. only a certain amount of jobs come in, and certain jobs are more valuable than others, and only one person can do that one job. I'm not really sure how to fix this one, i just wish there was a better way for groups of friends to be able to do this job and work together, without having to compete and directly impact each other's income. The faction jobs I personally haven't tried, but ive talked to a lot of people who are involved with that, and there's some things that just don't make much sense to me. First off, its good RP if the player working there wants it to be. you have to sign up with another player, RPing the situation. you have to go through training, once you're hired you're job is to interact with other players on the server. thats great, the jobs do a great job of encouraging RP in that way. BUT, then the problems start to show up. All that time and work spent into RPing your way into a faction job, and your compensated by being paid half or less than half of what a freelance civ job would pay. ($5500 starting salary for mechanics vs $10k-$14k for the better Civ jobs) While, it makes sense that Faction jobs pay less because its salary and its 100% ensured you'll get paid that amount every hour you're signed in, It just seems really low for the effort it takes to get that position and provide good RP with other players. I was shocked to hear that taxi drivers and mechanics don't make commission on top of their salary pay for doing work either. A lot of people are frustrated with the taxi service, as getting one to show up can be difficult. Taxi drivers should be incentivized to actually drive their taxis around for people, by getting a percentage of the charge the player is paying to hire the taxi. The same goes for mechanics. They have no incentive to actually respond to mechanic calls, and people are amazed if one actually shows up to assist you, due to how uncommon it feels to get a response from them. Mechanics should be encouraged to respond to roadside service calls by getting a commission pay based on the percentage of what the work costs. it blows my mind that's not how the system currently works, cause right now the system encourages mechanics to stand around at their jobsite, semi-afk passively generating their low salary income. To point out two Civ jobs that i feel work correctly, would be Road workers and fishing. Roadwork job is great. it actively encourages player interaction and cooperation. large groups can finish jobs faster and more efficiently to make more money, and players are in close proximity to each other to encourage interaction and conversation. Though the pay is on the lower end of civ jobs, the core mechanics of how the job works is great. Fishing is extremely popular. It can be extremely social, or extremely secluded, or anywhere in-between, and you can chose what level of social interaction you want to be involved in by fishing in different locations. The job is entirely non competitive if you're nearby other players. while there is nothing specifically encouraging cooperation with other fishers, there's nothing actively discouraging players from fishing together either. The only downside is the profit per hour is quite considerably low compared to most other CIV jobs available. Anyways. that was my wall of text rambling on about how Civ jobs work and how i wish they would be better and encourage players to RP within the civ jobs more. If theres anything i got wrong, more than happy to learn and fix things. let me know if you have had similar experiences with jobs, or your opinions on how you would like to see some of this get changed. thanks