hey so here's my problem

[Russell]

Why do we require a certain number of hours again for a Premier Account? The costs themselves already are fairly high.

Players with a Premier account can use the banking commands (i.e. /bank, /withdraw) no matter where they are - they don't need to be at an ATM: https://sa-mp.nl/about/frequently-asked-...ce-banking - I like this because it gives something for players to work towards, a goal, if you like. One of the problems with some servers is that they make everything available as standard - the ability to spawn cars, for example. We allow this, but only once players have earnt the ability with 100 tags. Players may have the attitude "that sucks" -- but the reasoning is good, we're more likely to retain players by giving them something to do, and aim towards. 

I understand this, and progressive advancement in the features available to a player is a great motivator for having them return. What I'd like people to think about is how we progress feature availability.

Is saying "you must have been here for a hundred hours" really the best thing we can do for a feature that brings such fundamental capabilities? Could we consider using multiple criteria, for example either having a hundred in-game hours or having bought a certain number of properties?

I know that when I started on LVP, I got excited about each of my 10 hours, because that meant I got a pluspoint (pluspoints were used back in the day, 20 being the maximum). And for each pluspoint, my bank limit increased by...some figure, can't remember what it was. Each time I'd then go and hunt for properties to fill my bank up again. This really did spurr me to keep playing, and playing...and playing.

Plus points were a disaster for many reasons, but I do agree that the reward and retention aspect of them was motivating.

Rockstar achieves this in offline GTA through the player's statistics that continue to get better— shoot a lot with a Desert Eagle and your character becomes more versatile in handling it. Other games, for example Far Cry, allow abilities to be updated by gathering things— collect rare animal skins in order to get a larger wallet.

All of these contribute to the re-engagement goal we have as a server, while they, arguably, are much friendlier to players.

The Banking system is pretty good as it is - perhaps I'd be tempted to make the following changes, though:

• Increase the limit on Normal accounts from $400.000.000 to $500.000.000 (doubling that limit for premier makes more sense IMHO)
  
• Decrease the opening costs for a Premier account from $150.000.000 to $100.000.000 
  
• Decrease the limit on Premier accounts from $2.000.000.000 to $1.000.000.000
  

I would like to see us remove the limits for Premier completely. (Well, give it a maximum of 2^53, or $9,007,199,254,740,991.)

Creating an in-game economy is difficult and something we'll have to think about very carefully. Most games, for example EVE, achieve this by making sure there are very few venues where money is created. We have tons of places where we violate that: reaction tests, races or just standing on the ship.

A first step will be to sanitize the current numbers. I see that you have found my topic where I propose this.

Players have too much money - so much so they've no idea what to do with it - they give it out randomly to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

Agreed!

Do we only re-assign the properties when all properties are still available? That definitely sounds like something we could be better at.

To the best of my knowledge, we re-assign whatever hasn't been purchased by someone else. If someone purchased the Mt Chiliad and LVP Headquarters prop, for example, quits and rejoins within 10 minutes, both properties will be restored. If someone else purchased Mt Chiliad during that time, only LVP Headquarters will be restored. I hope that makes sense

Yes, that makes sense and matches my understanding of how it should be.

If you need 100 hours then people will just pause and kill the fun, please remove the hours criteria

I too am concerned about the number of regular players who idle for hours at a time, which includes administrators. It artificially inflates their statistics.

One simple change we can make here is allowing them to continue to be in-game, but simply stop counting their in-game time when they're active. Quid pro quo.