Businesses

[Joeri]

To attract role players and make the gamemode more interesting properties should be replaced with businesses.

A business is a plot of land bought by a player where they can build there own property.
This property is their base of operations. When a players opens a business they can select a field of operations, there could be: Paramedics, Drugs runner, Bugler, Trash collection, Courier, Car dealer, Gun shop.

A business gives the player an income, the amount can be increased by doing missions.
When the owner decides it time for change, they can upgrade the property to a bigger building, this enables more difficult missions and so higher income.

The interior can be personalized with an simple editor, purchasable furniture, decoration, electronics, butler bot or a stripper bot which the owner can place.

The owner also is able to hire other players as employees to do missions, there could be some coop missions, maybe 2 business have to compete over who gets the shipment of drugs? These players receive a share of the earnings.


To keep business interesting for DM'ers, they could be seen as a gang base, a drug runner might be able to buy weapons for a discount. Also they could try to take another gang's business over with an attack (see video).


I know this is a lot of information, I tried to summarize is a much a possible and still keep it clear. This could be the killer feature of LVP.


More info:
How empires work in GTA VCS

A video explaining empires in VCS, notice the upgrade menu @ 1:41

GTA:Vice City Stories PS2-Empire Takeover(HD)
What an attackt could look like


Locations I scouted for businesses


Smalltime interior

[Russell]

You described what a business is in offline GTA, now try to translate that to a business in an online environment.

There are some critical differences:

• The game normally stops when a player leaves the game. In an online game, it continues 24/7.
  
• Most of these games are based around a single player with the computer arranging the orders. For this to succeed, we need a system that has cooperation in its core. What good is a paramedic in an online game where people just respawn?
  
• Offline has no concept of employees. What can they do? How can a boss give them jobs?
  

The example I talked about yesterday, collecting garbage, has an answer to most of these questions:

• Money can be earned by placing garbage cans around the map, for which the government pays you some money.
  
• Collecting garbage from the cans increases the amount of money the government pays you, giving you room to pay employees.
  
• There can be competition: one garbage collection company per city who can expand all they like. Buying garbage cans of competitors is possible, but at a much higher price.
  
• The garbage won't be picked up? No problem -- no bonus money, but the system continues.
  

There are more things to keep in mind. What happens when the owner of a company decides to leave it as a "money generator"? For that, we need to solve the problem of idleness - penalties or being kicked from your own company if you aren't spending attention to it. Do companies need co-owners? How does one control what employees are being paid? What stops someone from hiring someone and firing them immediately after? Do employees have a stake in the company?

I think that the idea is realistic, in fact, I will start working on a Garbage Collection company (actually, three). The ideas as to what kind of companies we can have needs to be much refined, however. Having a "drug running" company is fine, but how can it make money? No one is going to type /buydrugs or /selldrugs. The focus must lie on Multiplayer.

[Joeri]

The  missions I imagined are those typicality found on side missions in GTA games. The objective is go from A to B, get something, go back.

• A paramedic gets a 911 call, goes to a location to pickup a NPC and drives back to the hospital. Each round the time gets shorter and shorter.
  
• A drugs runner recieves intel that a shipment will be dropped from an NPC piloted helicopter in the desert/sea, multiple gangs go to the location of the drop.  The amount of money is determined by the amount of packages retrieved. Meanwhile, everyone is shooting at each other.
  
• A Courier must deliver a package, trailer or briefcase, to a location far away. The amount of money rewarded depends on the time it took to get there, minus 'damage' to the package
  
• Gun shops/Car dealers are a shop other players can purchase weapons and vehicles, those have to be restocked (not 1:1) with retrieval missions. Prices, or a factor for the sales can be set to change the payout so multiple shops can compete.
  

The earning(or stock) from these missions would go to 'storage'. Employees receive their paycheck every ~5 minutes, the height depends on the status of the company.

The status is a function of:

• How active the employees are
  
• How many missions have been completed in an interval
  
• What size the business is
  

If the status goes below a level the earnings will drop to 0 and after a longer period the business will be foreclosed and open for sale.


I have thought about ways to organize the hierarchy inside a company, the easiest way is to have no owner and players are free to join and exit a company whenever they wish. This gets rid of the opportunity to upscale the operation and all benefits for the player are gained from doing missions, this is how most RP servers work.

The best I can come up with is that the owner of a business can set their operation to be either open or closed.
If they decide to have an open business, everyone can join and help to with the growth of the business. The owner has no power to control over who joins and who does what, employees could be fired if they haven't done any work in x days, the owner could exclude some players from this rule.
If a owner chooses to open a closed business, they have to invite players and manage those themselves. This kind of business is aimed at existing groups and gangs. For this type it is useful to have co-owners that can manage the gangs while the leader is away.
Maybe some fields of operation should only be allowed to closed businesses, because I predict those will be more active and willing to fight each other in missions. Also their level of skill could be unfair for unorganized players.

[Epiccc]

Hardcoree Roleplay.. i <3 Roleplay :p

[Russell]

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:

• 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.

[Joeri]

The main difference between our approaches is that I see businesses as a may to make money to something else with, your plan would transform LVP into a pure RP server by asking players to become businessmen and spend their time figuring out how to make money. Meanwhile LVP 2.9.4 tries to be a mix of a freeroam/stunt/DM server.

Your ideas can, if done right, become the most sophisticated sa-mp server to date, but that would push the server also into a niche with players with knowledge and willingness to climb the steep learning curve.

I think we should first look into what the gross of the sa-mp players actually want and transform those wants into a gamemode.
To be successful with a server you need to attract the masses and climb up the Internet List.

We should analyze what the strengths are of the most popular server today and what their weaknesses are.

[Russell]

The challenge is to do this in a straightforward way, not in a sophisticated way. The complexities are determined by the UI exposed to the user by our implementation, there is no need for that to be complicated. In short, having more advanced features like these will keep the more experienced players interested in the server.

I'm not opposed to your idea, but do think of them more in terms of "missions" or "jobs" instead of "businesses". I'd like to ask you if you could create a new topic giving concrete proposals to what you'd like to see in the gamemode: what kind of "jobs", how can a player get one and how do they work. There are some interesting challenges there, as missions such as exporting vehicles and delivering trucks get dull over time. More of such systems would be better, however.