Economy Update
Entry posted by Mmartin in Community Updates ·
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Hey all,
The server's economy is very important to us. You know this because we've been talking about "trying to get it right" for a while now. This article should give you a brief overview of the system we will have in place, and some changes being made today.
Our goals with the server economy are:
- In-game prices should reflect real life prices
- People should not get rich quick
- Grinding shouldn't give players major advantage
- Money is a tool to facilitate roleplay
- Players should have access to assets without a stockpile of cash
Mission Rewards
Our initial formula to set paychecks was that if a player spends 7 hours working in-game, they should earn an equivalent of a week's pay for the same job IRL. For example if a lawn mower makes $673/wk IRL, player doing the job should earn $673/7hr, or $96/hr. This formula is flawed because it's linear and gives advantage to players who can spend more time doing the script job.
Our solution to that are tapered paychecks. Effective today, you'll earn more money per mission initially, but the more you work, the less you earn. After 2 hours, it will be borderline not worth it to continue working just for the money. The IRL weekly pay equivalent is still split between 7 hours, with each reward being exponentially lower. This limit is reset every 8 hours, after which you'll earn the full amount again. Here's a real-life example of how this formula works:
There are several advantages to tapered paychecks:
- They allow players with less time to spend in-game to earn money without grinding, and doesn't put more active people into an immediate advantage.
- They allow players to focus on roleplay and not sacrifice a significant portion of their ingame time to earning money just to get by.
- They will take strain off of the job script at launch.
People who enjoy doing the jobs could see this change in a negative light because of the diminishing returns. Alternative rewards, such as the CDL XP will still be applied as before. We will look for other alternative rewards for the other missions. That being said, the tapering paychecks will also serve a good purpose by forcing people off of script jobs to RP.
These changes of course apply to faction paychecks as well. Along with a hourly pay, each rank has an assigned "Reward Cycle Limit".
tl;dr: Rewards will go up, but taper off over time. Like XP in CS:GO.
Vehicle Prices
Many of you rightfully pointed out that the vehicle prices we set at pre-release were incorrect. The differences in prices are too significant one way or another to correct for this manually, so we've opted to refund all vehicles. Shortly after this message is posted, all of the following will be refunded: Vehicle purchase (/buy), vehicle down-payments, loan interest payments, loan principal payments, vehicle number plate changes (credits). All vehicles will be detached from their characters, and all loans will be marked as paid. These loans will later be deleted from the database, to not skew the statistics and your character's credit, once that's a thing.
We apologize for the inconvenience, however this is an expected part of the pre-release. You can see the detailed list of vehicle changes here. In addition, we also lowered the interest rate on all vehicles to 5%. This, in combination with faster earnings from the tapered paychecks should give you more purchasing power.
Other Updates
Besides that, we're working on a plan to support both active and passive roleplay based companies with favorable loans and grants. This is a careful process as we don't wish to inflate the economy by injecting it with unreasonable amount of cash, so bear with us as we finalize the proposal. A separate scheme is cooked up for factions.
We've adjusted the way trucking is paid based on the CDL Level you currently have. Lower levels earn less, higher levels earn more. Lower levels have a lower reward cycle limit, higher levels have the limit raised higher. We've also added more trucking routes, more loading bays, larger containers for the mules, and support for vans. We will be making CDLs bound to character ID instead of character name soon. People who've purchased their CDL twice will have their XP merged.
To continue monitor and adjust the course of the economy, we'll be establishing an Economy Team. This team will be led by people with background in economics and finance. They will have access to the tools necessary to monitor the flow of money on the server, and work with development to cover blind spots.
It's important to remember the economy will be tweaked further. This is not its final form, just first significant change.
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