On my criminal, I mostly cook drugs. Robbing people just isn't worth it anymore, in my opinion, and I have no real interest in joining a large official gang. I've had a lot of experience with cooking since the new updates came out for it. Now I can't speak for people ordering materials to make drugs that require imports, again because only official gang members can order these things (which I also highly disagree with. Anybody should be able to earn influence with the new NPC's and place orders for certain things IMO, but that's another topic).
So after the most recent update, it appears the the drug prices have been nerfed a bit. I run a pretty large setup for cooking, more than most. Even with my setup I could still make more money per hour going to the mines and just mining ores, mining oil, or damn near make as much or more depending how many tables you run just standing at the pier fishing safely. It makes no sense that I can make more money, much safer, doing these petty jobs than I can make investing a ton of money into drug tables, ventilators, and the huge risk of both PD and criminals being able to take it all at some point.
With cooking you need to go around and collect plants. It's not easy to do most of the time because criminals are watching the only 4 places you can get plants on the server. Very risky to get robbed. Then you need to collect other materials as well. This takes another hour. Then spend money on more materials. Add in all the time you spend driving around gathering materials, then take a hour to cook everything, and in that time frame I could have made more doing the other jobs. Once it's all finally back at home, cooked, and ready to sell, there is a huge risk of other criminals seeing the drug sale and robbing you for all the money.
The old system's pricing went higher at certain times. You still had to wait for a good price, and there's still a good chance other criminals would be on the lookout for you selling. It should be a high risk, high reward system. Right now I have all but quit cooking drugs on my criminal since the new update, because it's now a High risk, mediocre reward thing to do. Official gangs don't have any interest in paying more for it, they just tell me that the influence boost isn't worth paying more for the drugs to them.
For an example: Let's take Crack. The highest sell price for Crack I've seen since the newest update is $620. To make crack you need to spend $200 per crack. So that brings the profit to $420. I need to spend about an hour going around and collecting 4 bags of plants. Then I need to spend an hour collecting 4 bags of Sodium from the mines. Add 1 more hour for all of the prior driving, and driving to Humane labs to buy the 4 bags each of the 2 other materials needed. If someone uses 24 drug tables (again, most people don't this many even as it's a huge risk/investment) that takes 1 hour to cook.
By using the HIGHEST selling price available, in roughly 4 hours you can make 96 crack, and sell it for a profit of $40,320 (Remember, it cost $19,200 for the materials to cook, so minus that from the total sale price of $59,520) . So about $10k per hour for all of that risk, work, and investment? May as well stand at the pier and make basically the same amount fishing with a $500 pole. This is also using a 24 table system that most people won't be using, as it's a large investment/risk. If someone is cooking with even 12 tables, they are going to make considerably less than somebody fishing or mining. Doesn't make much sense to risk it anymore.
