Economy

[Jay]

It is quite simple why the economy on LVP is so fucked up: Players aren't going to bother trying anything else because it's to easy to make money from properties.

This needs sorting out. Its deeming a lot of the other features useless and generating a boring atmosphere for players because they don't realise that they have lots of other things to do and play with.

We should take steps to reduce players' money:

Week 1 - Banking - THIS THURSDAY'S UPDATE

Shouldn't go to hard the first week. We'll reduce the bank limit by 25% from 2,000,000,000 to 1,500,000,000 and we'll make property earnings payout every 2 minutes for regular players only.


We'll then see the outcome of this for the next update 2 weeks later and decide the next step accordingly. If anyone disagrees or has any comments, please reply asap because the next update is due on the 30th, so this will need to be implemented asap.

[thiaZ]

I totally agree with that, Matthias, Fireburn and Me also created a table with all money things some weeks ago, i don't know if someone still has it.

[Matthias]

What thiaZ said

[Dennis]

I agree, there is too much money ingame and it's way too easy too make money.
That's why the LVP economy needs a major overhaul.
Only reducing the banklimit by 25% and changing the payout interval a little bit doesnt do it for me. We should start with a few simple but effective things.

I have the following, easy to implement, suggestions:

• Because the earnings of most properties are way too high, either those earnings need to be lowered, or the time between the payouts. The second option is probably the easiest to implement, so I suggest you do that. The payout interval is now 2 minutes, right? Then I would like to see that changed to 5 minutes for regular players, and maybe 3 minutes for VIP's.

.

• Change the /loan options. It should no longer be possible for new players to simply loan 1 million or even more. First of all because it can be abused quite easily. For instance by creating another account and using that account to loan money and transfer that to other people, friends or the own account. Secondly, because there are several properties ingame that have (much) higher earnings than the interestcosts for the loan.
  I would like to see that the loanoption becomes unavailable for people who aren't registered, and be set to a maximum of 100.000 for regular players and 250.000 for VIP's.

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• Remove the possibility to bank and withdraw everywhere. It's now way too easy to drive to a property, do /withdraw and buy it. Or to get cash from a property or by killing someone, and immediately doing /bank. This totally eliminates all the excitement of quickly having to bank your money before you get killed, or not getting killed or otherwise losing your money on your way to buy a property.
  In my opinion there should only be 3 levels, depending on the amount of pluspoints.
  1. Only use the bank
  2. Use the bank and the 24/7's
  3. Use bank, 24/7 and all ATM's (maybe there need to be a few more ATM's then)
  

When these 3 things will I implemented, I think it will have a positive effect on the gameplay. Because then money suddenly becomes more important, and you have to carry around bigger amounts of it, with the risk of getting killed and losing it.

There are a whole lot more things that we can do to change/improve the economy on LVP, but this would be a good first step imo.

[Jay]

You wasn't around when we tried the harder quicker approach, where you?

Last year I decreased the bank limit significantly for one update and the outrage was.. well it's hard to explain with words, but there were a lot of people complaining both in general and personally to me. In the end after discussing it with Fireburn we just reverted it.

The reason I'm suggesting we do it in stages is because hopefully people won't feel it as much. At the moment the following changes have been applied:

- Bank limit has been halved to $1,000,000,000 (in oppose to 1.5b as previous suggested).
- Property earnings are paid out every 2 minutes, in oppose to 1 minute.

For the next update I was going to suggest some more harsh approaches:

- Bank limit decreased to $750,000,000
- Property earnings paid out every 3 minutes
- Introduce an income tax system - For anyone earning more than $100,000 in total from properties, 95% of any additional earnings get taxed.

And the final update, which would be the most harsh:

- Bank limit decreased to $100,000,000
- Decrease the prices of many of LVPs services: Bombshop, Imports, Properties, Minigames, Weapons
- Maximum property price: $1,000,000
- Maximum property earnings per property: $20,000
- Remove the admin /p id cash command to prevent any abuse
- Decrease prizes such as the amount received from a /chase and ship payments

I like your banking idea although I don't think it would be a good idea for new players only being able to access their bank from the main bank building - not many new players would understand this after being used to 24/7's on other servers. We would have to think of an alternative to this, perhaps just removing the 'on the fly' banking for Platinum Account holders. Together with this, we would need to add a lot more ATM machines (at the moment I think there are ~ 100. Perhaps we could aim to add another 100).

Not a bad idea with changing the loan system too. Personally however, I think it would be better to remove the loan system all together. LVP is the only server I've actually seen with such a system and from the experience I have of being a player for so many years who loves to buy his properties, I'm aware of the implications and abuse this system brings.

[Matthias]

I like being able to bank everywhere . People wouldn't like it if that was removed afaik. Also, /p id cash should stay, it's not like admins can't be trusted with a full bank lol.

Also, this would mean the actual database amount should be decreased too. (We would need MrBondt for that)

[Jay]

I like being able to bank everywhere . People wouldn't like it if that was removed afaik.

Most servers don't even have ATM machines. Take Littlewhitey's for example.

Also, /p id cash should stay, it's not like admins can't be trusted with a full bank lol.

Admins can use /my cash. I've seen on many occasions admins using /p id cash to give out prizes (Yeah, I'm guilty too )

Also, this would mean the actual database amount should be decreased too. (We would need MrBondt for that)

That's really easy and doesn't need any queries if it's done right. It can be handled from the gamemode.

owned

[Matthias]

Most servers don't even have ATM machines. Take Littlewhitey's for example.

Admins can use /my cash. I've seen on many occasions admins using /p id cash to give out prizes (Yeah, I'm guilty too )

That's really easy and doesn't need any queries if it's done right. It can be handled from the gamemode.

owned

This is LVP, not LW!

Agreed @ /my cash

I haven't seen you implement that system yet then

[Dennis]

Sorry for not posting a follow-up to my initial post earlier, but I forgot about it. 

@Matthias: Of course people wouldn't like it if the ability to /bank and /withdraw everywhere is removed. But this system has long been an eyesore to me. As I explained in my previous post, this system makes it much too easy for players. You kill someone -> /bank. You drive to a property, stand in front of it -> /withdraw /buy. It takes a lot of excitement and danger out of the game, because you no longer run a risk of losing money. And as long as there are enough ATM's ingame, I don't see a problem in players having to drive for a minute again to reach a place to bank or withdraw their cash.

@Jay: I indeed wasn't around at that time I guess

I don't think we should limit the bank more than it already is. There's no real point in doing that, and people like it to have as much money as possible in their accounts. What we can do is run a query to set the limit of all bankaccounts to $100 million. Everything above that gets evaporated, meaning that people have to start all over again with the stricter rules, smaller property earnings etc. So it will be a lot harder to get to $1,000,000,000 again.
We could also limit the amount possible to bank for a short while, but I think eventually it would be best to make it 1 billion or more again.

I agree with you that it might be annoying and hard to understand for new players that they can only bank at one location. Only removing the on-the-fly banking possibilities would therefore also be fine for me. Maybe we could later think of some new feature to give to platinum accounts holders.

When we would limit the loans to a maximum of $10,000, it gets a lot harder to use for buying properties or abuse in any way, but still is a very nice feature to have when a player wants to sign up for a race but doesn't have any cash at that moment.
If it would be removed alltogether, I also wouldn't mind though.