20-Jan-2024, 23:04
Quote:Secondly, while the rules say like "no killing without a valid reason," the definition of "valid reason" is meant to be incredibly vague. What it would boil down to is: if it's abundantly clear that the rule-breaker is breaking rules to break rules, they're gonna get the boot. I was going to let people get away with something as silly as "they looked at me funny."Going by vibes is definitely the right approach, but I feel like the wording can mislead people into believing they can call staff for individual RDM incidents (which they really shouldn't). The lawless guide uses the term "MassDM", which probably fits better. Alternatively, since any judgment is up to staff discretion anyways, a catch-all "behave yourself" rule might work too. The fewer bullet points on the MOTD, the more likely people are to actually pay attention.
Quote:My original idea for prop abuse prevention was to just make every prop have health so that they could be destroyed at any time.I'm in favor of the idea, though I personally prefer making props resistant or immune to bullet damage, forcing players to get closer to use melee / explosives.
Quote:For 3, there's a hidden mechanic on the server that I honestly don't mind if it's not hidden that you only drop money on disconnect/job switch if you gained money within the last five minutes.Having "insecure" money that gets lost when combat logged is a fine idea, I agree that it just needs to be communicated more clearly. Assuming the amount dropped is the amount earned, perhaps the HUD can show two wallet values, with the "insecure" value in red. When insecure money is dropped due to job change, a notification might be good to have as well.
Quote:I originally intended to have miners supply metals to gun dealers, but I'm not a fan of crafting weapons to sell them. Of course there's ways to simplify this, but then you run into the problem of gun dealers not being able to do their job fully without another player supplying metal to them. Is it necessary for a gun dealer to always be able to sell high-end guns? Maybe, maybe not.Needing another person is indeed a downside to dependency, but it does have the nice benefit of making the high-end guns truly rare as a result. Alternatively it could be made so that metals can be produced/bought without a miner around, just rate limited and/or more expensive.
Quote:Out of everything so far, the combat is probably the most experimental thing and honestly the thing I'm willing to change the least.My opinion on combat lethality isn't too informed - I haven't really used or played with weapons more lethal than the M9K guns (which are plenty too deadly for me already) - so what I have is mostly conjecture, and I'm interested to see how it plays out.
Quote:I tried balancing [the money printers] so that they're not too profitable, but I think all I managed was forcing players to have to tend to them almost 24/7, which ironically is exactly what I was trying to avoid.Yeah, the printer requires a lot of babysitting when I tried it and isn't really fun to manage. The low profit margin only makes it worse as losing it to overheat is a big blow, and you can't tell if it's overheating unless the printer is in view. If it's to be kept, I'm of the opinion that printers should be restricted to certain jobs only (gang/criminal if available) and be illegal regardless of mayor, so that the police are also incentivized to seek out and raid printers.
Last night after the post, I gave another look at the server a bit more with Fesiug, and overall it feels like the economy aspects need the most attention. My main concern is twofold.
First, while everyone has a baseline cost to doing their job (paying for food and attrition loss from deaths), many jobs don't have a baseline income/salary to offset it. If a merchant job isn't getting business, they would bleed money over time and be incentivized to either disconnect or switch to a job that either has a salary or can generate money on demand (like miner). Having a base salary incentivizes players to stick around the server even if they aren't actively doing a profitable activity, so I'm strongly in favor of keeping salaries on most jobs.
Second, due to how lethal the guns are, the price points on them feel really inconsistent. Cheap guns are way too cheap and high-end guns are quite overpriced.
Easy to acquire guns being deadly is a huge contributor to RDM, as both the barrier of entry and financial loss is minimal. Just for comparison, in vanilla settings it takes around 10.7 minutes of salary to afford the cheapest gun (the glock that does 10 damage). With the server's current starting money and gun prices I fear people could get very trigger happy. On the other hand, the expensive guns seem cost ineffective. For example, the M4A1 civilian version is 44% the cost of the automatic version, but with the same fire rate and damage, it can just as easily kill someone if the shooter starts the fight despite its lower magazine capacity. With all the damage numbers so high, the advantages of a better gun is diminished. Even the cheapest gun can score a one-hit headshot kill, so the playing field is quite level (for better or for worse).
A couple of other side notes.
- Dumping magazine on a reload is awkward since even on a full magazine, guns can be reloaded to top off the chamber. Either by instinct or on accident (trying to switch firemodes for example), a lot of ammo can be accidentally lost. I implemented a similar feature for the TacRP weapon base but made the physically dropped magazine contain the lost ammo, giving the shooter an option to pick it back up if there's time for it.
- The ATM seems needlessly time consuming to operate. I guess the point is to make the user vulnerable, but in most cases it just feels like a waste of time. I personally run a modified BraxATM in my servers, it's comparatively a lot quicker to use (1 or 2 inputs needed, number input is through Derma and not a in-world keypad).
- Gun shipments cost 10x the price for 10 guns, so there is zero reason to buy shipments - they should probably get a 20-30% discount to encourage bulk buying and thus setting up shop to hold the stock. I actually prefer the vanilla DarkRP approach of disallowing buying individual long guns entirely.
- It's really weird that the bank manager can just siphon all the money out of the vault. I'm not really sure what that's supposed to accomplish, nominally the mayor is supposed to stop this but in low population servers having a mayor isn't really guaranteed.
- Having a separate police job specifically to raid homes seems unnecessary. Why not just let the regular civil protection participate in raids?
- 30 second respawn feels too long. Even without NLR or some equivalent, it takes a long time to gear up and return to an ongoing situation anyways; and in cases where the player can't/doesn't intend to return, it's just frustrating.
- Jobs should probably spawn near their job-specific places. Notably I spent like 5 minutes trying to find the mines as a miner when I first joined.
- With 2 players in the server, one can instantly demote the other since nobody else is around to vote. IDK if this is a big deal or not.
- I don't know if there's any system in place to prevent people from AFKing for salary as bank manager/clerk/police. Might be worth considering.
- I had some confusing trying to use the long use entities due to a lack of a prompt (and inconsistency. e.g. vodka is instant use but fruits are long use). They should probably have a tooltip saying what the interaction is and to hold the key when hovered over.
- Police dropping their guns on death seems ripe for abuse and will result in a lot of guns floating around the server even if nobody is selling any.