Economy Overhaul

[MrJangoon]

$-INTRODUCTION-$

See, before you tell me to get a better job or to "grind for cash" hear me out.
The ECRP economy is disproportionate. Don't get me wrong here, this is an amazing server and it is miles ahead but the economy is something I still think could use some work.

$-RETAIL-PRICING-$

This is the main issue I find with the economy, you can get water for 250$ at a convenient location and most of the time I don't plan to go all the way down to Grove Street, navigate through a maze of buildings to find a cheap shop that isnt marked on the map while I am dying of thirst. So 250$ for water would be completely fine in any other case but when most base jobs pay you 3k at max per shift, its hard to keep a constant GPS, Water Supply, Food Supply and then all the additional charges incurred by Los Santos premium Living.

Another issue with this is that a base level car can cost 10000$ which makes sense since one would have to save up money to buy a car but now look at this, a bottle of water costs 2.5% the cost of a car, so for every 40 bottles of water you drink, you could be getting a car.

An easy solution to this would be to either make a car more expensive(which would then require higher pay to keep a car affordable) or to make retail goods far cheaper in order to stabilize the market.

$-ALT/LUXURY-MARKET-$

For my final point, consider the price of housing, 1million for a 1g is too much, even with a fancy LSC Payment Contract or whatever. And I can understand that this may also be attributed to how large these can be, then you get to business level stuff; all your furniture costs upwards of 1k, so even home furnishing can destroy you even though proportionately you would be paying 100s of dollars for this stuff and the more expensive end would reach 1k. From there you get to the vehicle market, this one is relatively stable, with shipments coming in regularly with low inflation and pretty much good prices. On the note of inflation, the houses are extremely inflated, I wasn't there to see it but I have been told of some "glory days" when a house was pretty cheap. An easy solution to this would be to add more houses and apartments, bloat the market to the point where the price is somewhat average.

[Ash]

Just to play devil's advocate, what exactly is the suggestion here? Just a general overhaul or something more specific?
Something you have to keep in mind with a lot of the points you mentioned is people are raking in $100k-$300k from government jobs per IRL week, which means that the kind of high prices you mentioned make more sense.
The "base jobs" you mention that pay $3k an hour, I assume you mean the freelance jobs? They're meant for new players to maybe get their first cheap car and bare essentials to cover them until they hit that 5k exp mark, are no longer new players and can get a more 'beefy' job that pays better. 

'An easy solution to this would be to add more houses and apartments, bloat the market to the point where the price is somewhat average.'
This already happened when apartments were added, many more 2g properties at a much lower cost were added. 

I totally agree that the scaling is a bit off when comparing housing, cars, furniture, and general items. But at the same time the economy is very stable and is not really an issue at the moment. I could maybe support a down-scale of everything for more realistic numbers but honestly I think as it is, there's not much that needs changing.

Edited November 9, 2020 by DrPathetic

[Speed Racer]

While I sympathize with the issue here having started playing at the beginning of June this year, it's just the nature of markets run almost entirely off of resell. It's why we see cars that can still be bought in dealerships remain at relatively stagnant prices on the used markets, but residential and (especially) business properties continue to inflate indefinitely in price. If there's not a constant supply of a good to meet the regular influx of new players on the server, then prices will only continue to inflate - even more so when you consider the fact that supply is actually decreasing given that players who own assets get banned or leave the server but their assets remain in their possession for a considerable amount of time.

Unfortunately though, due to the nature of resell markets, simply restarting the stock supply of these assets will not help anything. If a new batch of houses/business properties were introduced on the server, the rich would simply buy them up ASAP and the resell prices would barely decrease, if at all. Only a lucky few who actually want to use them would likely get to purchase them for the fair stock amount that the server lists them at. The only real solution I see to this is to flood the market with such a large quantity of these assets that it would be impossible for the still-interested rich players to buy them all up for resell. While this may not be an awful idea for residential properties, this is definitely not suitable for business properties as it will just provide too much competition for anyone's business to be worth the investment they've put in.

I'm pretty sure the server staff are taking a stab at this issue by creating money sinks in the form of staff auctions/raffles, but I'm not entirely convinced it's enough to fix the issue. The auctions only take large sums from a small number of individuals, and the raffles pray on the poor and stupid by costing so much per ticket while being relatively ineffective on the rich.

While it's frustrating to see players sitting on millions and have the ability to get millions more just because they bought a car for a few hundred thousand and can now resell it for millions without it being available in dealerships, there's just not a whole lot that can be done without also hurting players who have participated in the resell market up until now (imagine buying a comet retro for $6mil+, just to have it reintroduced to dealerships at under $1mil). I feel it's just an unfortunate reality that we have to come to terms with at this point in the server's life.