11-03-2011, 12:48 PM
What you are proposing are missions, not businesses, but in an extended form. As an attempt to define the two:
Business: Feature that will keep the player occupied for days, if not weeks, by allowing them to grow a new born company to a competitive entity that will influence the entire server. This needs affection, organisation and help from other players in the form of employees.
Mission: Feature that will keep a player occupied for hours, allowing them to spend time running errands for fictional entities which are strongly isolated in their scope.
The addition you are proposing to missions is that the missions' companies can have owners, which take part of the profits. That, essentially, is something we already do with people owning the bank.
What I am proposing goes a lot further, it are businesses. It's a deep form of role-play that requires planning and discussion between players. Setting up a company and earning some money is nice, but it'd have a Return on Investment (ROI) of months. You need it to grow by dedicating time and planning and investing money in order to make more money. You need employees to maximize your ROI. When successful, all players within Las Venturas Playground will notice your progress. In case of my Garbage Collection example, people will notice bins popping up throughout the world. When you employ other players, people will notice garbage collection vans driving around, briefly stopping near the bins. By having multiple "instances" of such a company, one per city for example, you create competition.
To define criteria for a good business:
Yes, this is tough and it will take a fair amount of time to implement a company. In the longer term, however, when we have, say, 20, we can open op a stock market for them, allowing people to buy parts of a company and thus gaining ownership. These are just very rough outlines, but if we have more ideas like the Garbage Collection idea we have a definite killer feature.
Maybe it's wise to split up this topic in Extended Missions and Businesses, as I think they are fundamentally different.
Business: Feature that will keep the player occupied for days, if not weeks, by allowing them to grow a new born company to a competitive entity that will influence the entire server. This needs affection, organisation and help from other players in the form of employees.
Mission: Feature that will keep a player occupied for hours, allowing them to spend time running errands for fictional entities which are strongly isolated in their scope.
The addition you are proposing to missions is that the missions' companies can have owners, which take part of the profits. That, essentially, is something we already do with people owning the bank.
What I am proposing goes a lot further, it are businesses. It's a deep form of role-play that requires planning and discussion between players. Setting up a company and earning some money is nice, but it'd have a Return on Investment (ROI) of months. You need it to grow by dedicating time and planning and investing money in order to make more money. You need employees to maximize your ROI. When successful, all players within Las Venturas Playground will notice your progress. In case of my Garbage Collection example, people will notice bins popping up throughout the world. When you employ other players, people will notice garbage collection vans driving around, briefly stopping near the bins. By having multiple "instances" of such a company, one per city for example, you create competition.
To define criteria for a good business:
- It needs active involvement from the owner over a longer period of time.
- It must have a valid way to make money from other players.
- It must have a valid way to spend it's money, to maximize its income.
- It needs to have a way to involve other players as employees to maximize its income.
- It needs to have visible impact on the whole of Las Venturas Playground.
Yes, this is tough and it will take a fair amount of time to implement a company. In the longer term, however, when we have, say, 20, we can open op a stock market for them, allowing people to buy parts of a company and thus gaining ownership. These are just very rough outlines, but if we have more ideas like the Garbage Collection idea we have a definite killer feature.
Maybe it's wise to split up this topic in Extended Missions and Businesses, as I think they are fundamentally different.