TheCactus Posted February 14, 2022 Report Posted February 14, 2022 Hello Eclipse Roleplayers. Disclaimer: This topic is a result of 5000+ hours of gameplay on the server in addition to the opinions of many experienced people. These are current and past members of the community who played all sides of our server. This does not make their opinions unbiased, however, they did attempt to be as honest and fair as possible, since our aim is to suggest changes that will help all kinds of roleplayers that spend hours and hours on Eclipse Roleplay We believe that the current economy has been digging the server's grave, inch by inch. By grave I mean players leave or log off and can't find a reason to log back in. It's all exciting or even addicting when you start and the more you achieve, the more things you try, the more you buy, the less you want to log in. The server scripts and the economy are mostly static and as a result, people end up doing the same things over and over because anything else is less profitable (saying they're not profitable would be wrong because by the way the scripts operate, everything is more or less profitable). Doing the same thing over and over gets boring really easily and we all know the final result. With that being said, let's talk about what's currently making the whole EclipseRP experience so plain and what we can change/improve/remove. Solution 1, 2, 3, etc are not mutually exclusive. ------------------------------ APARTMENT COMPLEXES I still have to hear a good opinion about these since all the complexes got added. Currently, you can purchase a massive apartment with a 4G interior and 2 car slots for $400'000. Now tell me why would you buy any other property that is not a 3G for 400k. I have an apartment on each of the characters I play and I have them because not only are they worth every dollar. They are actually overpowered compared to any other property for obvious reasons: The interior is massive and 9/10 times the view is breathtaking; The location of most complexes are super-advantaged; 2 garages; No smoke can be seen if you cook drugs; For 1.2mil you get 6 garage slots in the same place and acres of space; Very hard to get robbed thanks to "new" robbery rules. You see what I mean? Give me a reason why a new player should not aim for an apartment instead of buying any other overpriced 1G/2G that may or may not even have a yard. The apartments are being so abused right now since a good part of them are actually small to medium-sized drug factories or impenetrable stash houses. I don't know about you but manufacturing narcotics in high-end apartment complexes doesn't sound like something people do in real life. I don't believe we, as a server and a community, should enforce this kind of activity. I wouldn't even call it roleplay because what are you roleplaying as? There’s no term for that. Just a guy that cooks drugs in a high-end apartment. Not to mention the fact that these apartments limit roleplay more than anything else does by having players sit in them and cook for hours and hours instead of interacting with other roleplayers. Some people may not have noticed but Eclipse Towers has over 600 apartments. Maybe it's time to stop? Solution 1: Remove the ability to place drug tables in any apartment or 4G interiors. It's unrealistic to use high-end properties to manufacture homemade narcotics. Solution 2: When an inactive player loses the apartment, remove it from the server instead of putting it back in the economy for a final price of 300-400k. The same exact apartment(s) can be added back when we have more players. ------------------------------ HOUSE RAIDS As of right now, completing a house raid without getting reported and punished is no easy task. PD and SD can place a warrant or enter your property for countless reasons (doesn't mean they can actually search it) but a criminal cannot raid someone's house for the same exact reasons. There are some things that I am going to discuss (mostly lack of realism) about the current methods and will also make an example of how such scenarios should be played out. Timing: At this time, criminals ignore the fact that they are raiding someone's property in broad daylight. That's a MASSIVE element that is taken into account in real life when stealing, robbing and doing all kinds of illegal activities. You can't just raid someone let's say at 5 pm, cause the building is going to be as trafficked as a highway. Imagine you are coming back from work and you see a dude with a balaclava and a bag going down the stairs or in the elevator. Well, let's say you're used to it but a teenage girl, old woman or any other concerned citizen will call 911 for suspicious activity/loitering and that's your plan out of the window. Vehicles: Sports cars, sports cars, SUVs and more sports cars. You know you are going to raid a guy's house and transport a lot of heavy stuff if you are lucky and you use your own vehicle anyway. Yeah, you are right: can't remove or interchange license plates + paint jobs are cheap but let's say you own your dream car in real life. Would you really drive it where you are about to commit multiple serious felonies? How many vans do you actually see on the server? There is a long list of untraceable scrapyard vehicles you can buy for cheap, usually have 150 vol trunks and can ignore speeding cameras. Those are the vehicles you want to use for transporting stolen goods, not your sports car or SUV. Appearance: This is not as common but since we're here, let's talk about clothing. Wearing black during a robbery is kinda clichè. Yes, you are sketchy and yes, you stand out a little cause people on the server dress like they fell from the sky and slid down a rainbow. Let's say black is whack but dropping colors and wearing things that you may have to dispose of after a crime is no shame, it's called being smart. Work smarter not harder. Fewer headaches if nobody can recognize you after committing a crime. Proving you did something wrong is fast and free, proving that you are innocent takes time and money. Solution: I believe server administration should be a lot more lenient when it comes to house raids but at the same time, enforce realism while doing it. Ballin reviewed a report recently and his conclusion was exactly what I would like see: the guy selling a gun said he had more in his apartment so he got raided. Quite fair from my point of view. If everything is done in a realistic manner and the player(s) have proof of suspecting that the property was being used to store items that are worth the time then why not? Basically what police do but criminals have to wait for the right moment. Examples turn concepts into ideas so I'll drop some. Bad example: I know that Jay Gamble owns a house on Didion Drive. Next time I see him there I will hold him at gunpoint. If he pulls out a gun I will shoot and continue the robbery like nothing happened, maybe even BLS him because he's the leader of a gang so he must have expensive stuff in the house. What's wrong?: The house could be used simply to store vehicles. No valuables. It has to be done at night with no witnesses and more than just one accomplice. Shots attract police attention. No house raid should take place if shots were fired and cops may get involved. Good example: I see Bruce Wong leave his Vespucci Beach house and tell my buddies. One says that Bruce Wong's Contender was seen at a shootout 10 minutes ago and a man looking like him had a kevlar vest and an AK with a silencer. I save pov or even record in case of a report and proceed. I drive around the house with a stolen go postal van at night for a couple of hours (the van is used to blend in and be less suspicious). I call the homies as soon as he gets in the house. Bruce Wong gets out of the house and while it's dark outside, we rob him and raid the house. We use the stolen van and an untraceable scrapyard vehicle to drive towards the stash house (which is not a massive apartment in the city center) while avoiding trafficked roads. Now with that being laid out, let's talk about what makes this even harder. ------------------------------ SAFE DOORS Safe doors are that one item that costs $1000, is 5 inches x 12 inches and can store 200 vol. Not only that but there's no limit on how many you can place in a property. If that's not enough: it has 10000 combinations. Yup. Balanced. Did you ever raid a property just to see a house full of wall safes? Like 100 of them? I don't believe you all did but what if they are all locked and you don't know the combination? That's not really my problem because as PD I just call SWAT and blow them all up. That's not fair though, is it. The item itself isn't fair. Why would I buy furniture that costs $3000, is as big as my character and can only store 50 vol when the safe door exists? It's no easy task to enter someone's house as a criminal but how are you supposed to steal anything if every single item is locked behind a 10k combination Narnia metal drawer? Solution: Like it or not, it either gets a massive nerf or this item has to go. I'd say devs can post an announcement about it becoming a simple decorative item in 3 months and all the contents of any safe door is going to poof. This means you will have plenty of time to buy actual furniture or real safes that have realistic prices and are bigger. After 90 days, the item loses its attributes and their contents vanish. ------------------------------ SCRIPTED JOBS We all did scripted jobs at least once. If you say they are fun, your concept of fun is kinda off. Despite the fact that we all tried GoPostal or Money Transporter, a good percentage of the players did not try them all. Maybe it would be a good thing to see how they all are? Maybe it would be even better to balance them based on how much people do them, risk/reward, the investment it takes to do them, and the time it takes to do a single "run". Here below are the times I could do for every run. Keep in mind that I did these jobs for at least 6 hours in total so before writing these numbers I actually tried to see if I can get better times or remain as constant as possible. Garbage: 1250/6min City bus: 1100/9min Paleto bus: 2112/15min GoPostal: 1850/15min UnionDepository: 1550/15min Fish: 1786/16min (prices changed?) Mining: 5800/25min (prices change) Oil: I did not write it down but the money is better than miner Hunter: depends on RNG. My best was 9900 in 22 minutes Trucker: depends on orders. Some are 4000 every 4 minutes, others are 1000 in 25 minutes Lumberjack: 980/5min Coroner: dead/999min Farmer: I hate farmer. Pay's not too good Feel free to send me a forum PM and I will update Farmer. Too good: From these numbers, you can already see that the Paleto bus route pays well. I never ever see someone work garbage when I do it, so the money is quite easy but doing it for an hour is incredibly boring. Balanced: I believe that the most balanced at this time are GoPostal and UnionDepository. They are both safe and the money is acceptable. GoPostal is not what you come for when you join the server so you already know you are going to do it for a couple of hours and then quit for something else. Revamp: Nothing to say about fishing. Same ol'. Could use a revamp, wink wink. There are enough amazing suggestions on the forums so I won’t go into detail. Buff: City bus routes are more exciting than Paleto routes and you have to be a lot more careful but they pay less because of the distance. Mining is slowly becoming more profitable because it’s not receiving the attention it used to receive. You obviously require a vehicle to do it. Same if you want to extract oil but a good amount of players are doing it. Lumberjack requires a good vehicle and fuel in an area where fuel is not cheap. Risk is medium, especially at night. The coroner job doesn't have the required tools to make in profitable. There's only one HQ in Paleto and calls get removed if you walk away. People don't really call police or coroners when they see a body so if you want to make as much as any other job per hour, you have to hope for a shootout. Questionable: Maybe I am not a good hunter but sometimes I spend 30 minutes and find no animals. Solution 1: where possible, balance the pay of some of the jobs based on the ratio of players doing them. Solution 2: Jobs that are competitive such as coroner, miner and oil should be paid just a 5% more. Coroner deserves a massive buff, more than any other job. Garbage should give 66% of the money it gives now because the risk is not too big. City bus should be paid a little bit more per kilometer. Paleto bus should give 2000 per route. There's zero risk and it's pretty chill. No new player would go up to Paleto if it wasn't for the bus route so I'd keep it high but at the same time, remove 200ish dollars. Lumberjack should receive a 5% because prices drop fast and if two people are doing it correctly, it starts being less profitable really fast. In addition to that, you can get robbed in the woods at night and you need your own vehicle to do it. ------------------------------ OVERUSED VEHICLES Elegy Retros, Shinobis and Issi Sports are everywhere. Some vehicles got nerfed to the ground so people stopped buying them. Is that the approach the developers have to take to make us buy normal cars? It's clear that there's an overabundance of cars in the market. In real life they stop working, arent worth fixing and get scrapped. Here, for a car to leave the server, its owner has to. Also I bet we would all be pissed at some point if we had to scrap our favorite car. Same feelings if your favorite car gets nerfed. I would not want to see my Sultan Classic get nerfed after spending 70 euros to have it. Cars such as the Club cost around $300’000 for nothing more than a 30k Brioso R/A can offer while vans and sedans are being forgotten unless they are the best of the category. Solution 1: the only thing that is viable in my opinion without upsetting anyone is to make overused vehicles less affordable while making unused vehicles more affordable and giving them a little fuel consumption buff. Developers can examine the numbers (cars sold in dealerships and owned by people) and start raising prices on those that are everywhere. The cars that aren’t used at all such as Oracle and Sentinel should get a fuel consumption buff compared to the others that are way more powerful and make them slightly more affordable. Solution 2: IncreaseI Mechanic Repairs & Mors Insurance costs for overused vehicles. If many individuals own a good that can deteriorate over time, replacements become more requested. This means spare parts will be more and more expensive and hard to find. ------------------------------ NERF SALARIES A cop said nerf salaries? I haven't always been roleplaying as a cop but yea. Spawning money ruined the economy during the years and salaries have always been static. As a result, people that do 50 hours a week for a faction where players aren’t really needed, make a shit ton of money for doing little to no work. Players that work a lot in a faction where they struggle with activity and filling the gaps will have to work hard while making as much as the others. All the spawned money slowly deteriorated the economy and what we have now is the result. Salaries have to be more dynamic. Solution 1: Salaries match the need of employees. If the LSPD has 150 cops, the minimum salary will be 2000 per hour. If they have 75 cops, the salary will be 4000 and so on. Same for every other faction. Set an ideal number with a certain salary and then work with those. This means certain jobs will always get paid slightly more than others. Maybe even set up a government branch that works on this with 4-10 employees? Solution 2: Go for straight cuts or raises on salaries every month. Cops are draining the government funds? Cut. DCC is draining government funds? Cut. Bayview makes a lot of money and doesn’t spend a lot on salaries? Raise! ------------------------------ REMOVE A 0 Last but not least, to make numbers look more normal, I think it’s time to remove a 0? I don’t know about you but when I talk to people it feels dumb to say I get paid 5000$ an hour and giving someone 1 million like it’s 200 real-life USD is a sign that we have too many zeros. The title is the solution itself and I know it would take time to edit the numbers in all the scripts and I know it takes a little bit extra time to edit numbers in the faction handbooks. If other servers and in real-life countries can do it, I guess we, as a roleplay server, can do it too. As a result, we will deal with more realistic sums and treat them as such. ------------------------------ Thank you all for your attention. If you have any suggestions about what you want to add or edit, feel free to send a forum PM and work on it. If you simply want to agree or disagree, all the topics have a title so feel free to rate them. The staff team now has a Suggestions Team so let’s show them what we need now and what we could use later! 3 1 Quote
Melody Frey Posted February 14, 2022 Report Posted February 14, 2022 Mixed feelings about a lot of these changes you want. Starting from the top, I strongly agree about apartments being overpowered. As a criminal main, the constant personal lab usage to gain money is relatively sad because it’s the best and most risk free way to make money without massive amounts of jail time and fines unless something goes astronomically wrong. Property wise, I don’t want fewer apartments because there is a limited amount of real-estate on Eclipse, and taking apartments away would simply cause the rich to get richer. Any property that isn’t an apartment would skyrocket in price if they announced this change I feel, but apartment labs also have to stay because we currently have no place else to reliably cook. (The drug update is changing this though, I think) House raids are very high risk and high reward when done properly and from what I understand, police must also do a thorough investigation and have substantial evidence to raid someone. I could be wrong about that, but that’s what I’ve been told. The inventory system with safes is definitely something to be worked on, but I don’t want combination safes; I would prefer we have safes that we get keys to. Scripting that would be probably very challenging, but I like my things to be safe when I’m not around. I like the fact they’re... well... safe. Freelance jobs are typically very dull and I think they are a massive reason that the server lacks a lot of civilian RP. Most people are a LEO of some kind and the rest typically are criminals, so much so that if you see someone at the pier; selling them a gun is going to work 9 times out of 10. I would love more government/faction civilian jobs to help with this, as being a mechanic, cab driver, or medic is a cool thing; but we do need more. A huge suggestion to this would be to simply add the coroner’s job and office into the city and make it an hourly paid job. 3k and hour plus 500 per body, and on top of that begin to run Weazel ads advertising the number and I believe you would have a boom in that field. Bus routes need an overhaul of some sort, I would love to see ECRP gain marked bus stops on the map for drivers to go to as they do now, but show up on everyone else’s GPS as a smaller blip to not clutter the map. Upon being picked up, it could charge you a fare depending on where the passenger wants to go. There are a lot of overused vehicles, but I strongly dislike nerfs. I would rather see buffs come in similar fashion to what you said. Criminals will always use the best available option to escape LEOs, however. With crim vs. cop, it’s sort of a competition of meta vs. meta and it’s fairly okay in my opinion. Police have access to the Shinobi, as do criminals, and the standard police cruiser and scout typically perform fairly above average. Plus with Air-1, heavies, and armor that police have access to at a moments notice; I have no major complaints about either side. We get to buy fun stuff, they get free stuff. I like it how it is, plus some factions will dedicate to not using those vehicles actually. An example is mine, who primarily only uses sports bikes with a few of us using off-road bikes for lore reasons, and none of us use sports cars unless necessary. I believe Ballas and Vagos also do things very similar to this, strictly using lore-friendly vehicles even though it puts them at a massive disadvantage. My last comment is about salaries and money... I try not to compare money irl to money in ECRP. While we are heading in a more realistic direction, yes; I honestly think lowering the amount of money people earn this late into ECRPs lifespan would just cause people to leave. Once again, the rich would simply get richer. Those with supers, 3Gs/4Gs, and millions saved up would quite literally run the economy and be powerhouses even beyond what they are already now. TL;DR: I like these ideas, but definitely could use some changes. I want more added and fixed before we push for changes, mostly. So, no +1/-1 from me either way 2 Quote
Jorge Compass Posted February 14, 2022 Report Posted February 14, 2022 (edited) +1 Regarding the house raids, as a primarily Crim player I feel like it takes way too long to gather enough proof. Currently if you house raid and don't have POV of why you are raiding them, you are kinda screwed. It seems like you need piles upon piles of proof for a house raid and regardless you will most likely get reported in hopes that it gets accepted and the person can get refunded. Edited February 14, 2022 by Jorge Compass fixing spelling mistakes 2 Quote
