Drug Price boosting

[ash816]

The recent change that removed drug price boosting by cycling through the different drug types I believe is a bad choice, the reasons for that are:

As a faction that controls the import of the required chemicals, there is now no reason to provide these to people.
-Before the changes, if an independent gang said they wanted to earn favour and imports from us, we had opportunity / reason to 1) deal with them in the first place, 2) provide them the chemicals, 3) an opportunity to make money outside of just imports by utilising the boost cycling when they came back to us.

Now that drug influence is much higher making maintenance so easy, we turn away 75% of people bringing us product trying to earn a reputation with us so we will import for them , we no longer require anyone's help.
-Because of this, I feel a lot of RP opportunities are being lost and the real core of how gangs and turfs work is gone. The only thing that is left to decide or influence who to do business with or what rate they will get on imports is just how much you arbitrarily like them instead of how much they help your faction.

We no longer have an additional avenue to make money, meaning if things are as they are now, as a start out gang i don't see that if we get raided or started fresh we would ever be able to earn money to buy / run businesses to improve rp for our gang and the server as a whole.

We have no reason to help other people make money. With no use for drugs why would we bother supplying the chemicals? The downsides of taking the drugs far outweigh their usefulness in combat so they are still used exactly as they always were, as a currency. Unfortunately its a currency no one really needs anymore.

I understand it was likely removed to help balance however it has be a wholly negative change for everyone i have spoken to, the chemicals required to use the boost cycle are controlled and very poor economically to import in the first instance, but it provided us purpose both in and outside of the faction to make deals and set goals and adjusting it would have made alot more sense than what we are left with. If you managed to import, control and gain back those drugs you got a reward at the end of it. Maybe for some they used this to make themselves rich, however we as a faction invested our money into a business on the server for more RP opportunities.

What we are left with:

1. Faction controlled dealers seem to regenerate their rates very slowly, there seems to be some very very small boosting of drug price but it is negligible. Selling one type of drug seems to negatively impact the majority of drug prices of the others.
    
2. Independent or unowned dealers seem to have their rates reset every server restart, leaving a meta where we just leave the faction and sell a stack of drugs for max price. This doesn't seem to negatively affect the price of any of the other drugs for that dealer, however for faction owned dealers it does.
    
3. No reason to deal with any one
    
4. No way for people to gain favour with us
    
5. No other way to earn money, no other goal to strive for (previously we would focus on making the drugs we had the least of, or pushing independents to do this for us)

I just personally feel the mechanisms worked fine, maybe you could make too much money from it (in some peoples opinion? personally i don't believe it paid enough considering the work involved) , but people still had to make hours of deals, import 3 different types of chemicals, front alot of money, send people to the mines, encourage suppliers to create certain drugs etc, which has all been wiped away in exchange for nothing.

 

Edited January 10 by ash816

[John Nut]

+1