"I think another good topic would be the gang economy. What worked before, what doesn't work now, and if there should be tweaks. I think the gang economy really made Red a maelstrom of RP owing to a constant influx of trading and gang fights. But with the rebalance/bug fix that made ganger runs a lot less frequent, a lot of that fell off and disappeared."
We've recently made a change to how pledging works. It was setup in a weird way that you had to like, pledge and raise your faction score in order to... pledge officially. Then you you had to be a pledge a while in order to join the gang.
We've removed the pledge to pledge part, allowing people to start pledging earlier, and with lower faction scores. And have updated our documentation on tasks/plots for pledges.
We've got a bunch more pledges in the past few weeks after this change. I think this will correct some of the issues mentioned above.
As for economy, previously it felt like selling stuff to gangers was a chyen faucet and people doing it were making a lot of money off of it. We had to tone that down. It's still possible to make money on this, but it isn't as easy, and requires more work. I don't think this is a problem personally, but I haven't RPed this role in a long time so I could be wrong. Interested to hear others thoughts.
The following thoughts assume a low cap, disregard if my assumption is just wrong :)
If there are really just a couple of players in a gang at any given time, this means that the stars really have to align to have ANYONE else to play with in that gang - chances are they're in a different timezone, not that active, move on/stop playing and it takes time to replace them and so on.
This makes them less attractive than most groups you can play in - nobody likes to play by themselves or with no other players in the group. It also hurts continuity - the gang is going to be empty a lot, and you have to "start from scratch" as the only player in that gang with no one else around to teach new pledges how things are done or pass on experience.
As for the economy, I think the changes regarding ganger trades have certainly slowed business down, and by extension general activity, and again by extension conflict and fun. Parroting them in brief, there were some posts in the referenced thread discussing how how we have lost an old understanding of the Mix being 'fast and loose' - in the sense that you could make twice the chy a corpie did in a week, but be twice as likely to lose it all. I think that is a shame in terms of theme and promotes a topside braindrain one could argue is fairly relevant right now. In addition, we are seeing certain businesses slow. Being a baby fixer is a lot more difficult when you can't just trade or scheme for items that you know everyone wants. Candy trades and by extension chemistry has taken a major nosedive in terms of participation as well from my understanding, and that is likely due to the fact hand-to-hand NPC trades are far less common and thus the avenue is far less trodden.
I can totally understand the concern regarding the money faucet, but I will be blunt and state that most of the items people want in this game are already way too expensive anyway. A ton of awesome recent additions such as vehicle combat and rigging come with major price tags and see less participation than they should because of them. While there probably were issues in terms of 'gamey' aspects of the old ganger trade system, I don't think anyone would describe that era as the one in which people had way too much money to spend. On the other hand, many would describe it as a more active era in terms of Mix conflict and business. Very much believe some steps back towards what it looked like before would be healthy.
For the economy, though, I think the result of tuning the ganger sales back is people losing their interest in Red. People often go corporate whenever they can (and maybe are allowed to more than they should) because Red living is both dangerous and not profitable.
I remember there being a lot of complaining about mixers making more money than corpies at the time of the change. I think it was a good thing. Corpies should make steady money in safety, and mixers should be able to get rich quick and subsequently lose it all. Now, we see a disproportionate amount of high UE players are all topside with hoards of gear and no danger to show for any of it. People go where the money is, and it left Red.
The chyen faucet of ganging was also a good thing because it involved so many people. Fixers hired lots of people to run goods, primarily immies, making lots of contacts and driving day to day plots for the lowest common demoninator of Red. Gangers sold weapons to fixers, fixers sold weapons and drugs to gangers through a fleet of immigrants and lowbies. It was a good cycle that kept Red alive, I think, and you just don't see it happening anymore.
I rarely recall so many characters being involved in this particular chyen loop. Mostly just the one who took an item and the immy who sells it. From what I have seen, most players/characters try to reduce how many are involved as it means more money for them if they do.
Also, once a new player learns how the whole OOC NPC earning cap works, they realize that being the one selling these things for others tends to be a very inefficient use of that cap. Some are willing to accept that for the interaction and other non-monetary benefits. Some not so much.
I think that this source of chyen has been replaced by other new sources of chyen. I can think of two that have made some PCs VERY financially successful. I don't think there's a massive lack of chyen in the mix compared to times past. I think it's coming from different sources.
Also, I think that if it is desired for gangers to have more chyen, they can be given more chyen. There are or were systems in place to provide gangers with regular flash and guidelines on making sure they had a reasonable amount given their situation. These can be adjusted for sure.
I actually think the current chyen flow, as I have seen it, encourages gangers to go out and do more gangish things. Like trying to mug, steal and extort. Insert themselves into the chyen flow.
Further, I think that the lack of chyen in the mix has as much to do with outside sources, places you might say are above or outside the gangs, possibly failing to funnel chyen to other PCs. Hiring the mixers as it were. I think it's about more than this one chyen source changing.
Honorable mention, I think you can still engage in this means of earning flash. It just takes more effort. More steps are involved. I won't deny that the flow rate is reduced by the changes though.
Lastly, I think that gangers don't NEED all that much flash. Rent, clones, possible DCD and some basic weapons. There are a lot of protections in place so even Clones/DCD might not be a huge expense for most gangers.
I will say that I have reservations as to how the whole mix is organized and am not a huge fan of how gangs operate from an OOC systems perspective but they are what they are and this feedback is with that in mind.
There used to be entire encryptions dedicated to finding runners for sales. If a runner finds they have a bad deal, they go to another fixer. They try and source their own goods, which is more player involvement.
All new automated income sources are posted in the change logs / new game features forum. So can you just say what you think they are? I will say that MacGuffins and Cargo (both widely spoken about on xooc and the new game features forum) are cool money makers but are not nearly as expansive in terms of players involvement, and they don't really effect Red much.
I'm not convinced that if there is a money issue that it hasn't been from characters so habitually washing out of gangs or dying while they're still in the training wheels ranks. If no one topside ever made senior it would seem underpaid too. The gang leaders I've seen since the recession all seemed to be well-enough off in proportion.
One other player in your gang results is enough in an ideal situation, but most of the time, things aren't ideal. There's no fallback if someone dies, disappears, or stops playing. If playtimes don't align, you're stuck with them, but get zero interaction. If this lone PC quits because playing by yourself isn't fun, there's a gap in succession and no one to teach the next guy, and being a lone pledge is unappealing for the next guy. Especially when there are other places to play that have five or six active players on the payroll.
I think this is a contributing factor to the lack of gang play and even lack of overall activity in the mix.
It's ideal to have lots of overlap between long-standing characters in a faction so there is lots of institutional memory and mentorship, but where that becomes a problem for gangs is that it is a part of the game meant to be low barrier to entry and high activity, two things that tend not to go hand-in-hand with lots of very long lasting characters. It's ideal to have good leaders, but there might be five good PC leaders in the whole community so you can only be so choosey before you're limiting recruitment and players say it's too hard to get in.
I don't have access to all the information and can only go by what I've learned IG. I'm also still fairly new and while I've looked through some threads on these boards, I don't really know what's new or how things have been historically, or know what changes have been introduced and when. I don't even know if it has always been this way, and I can't seem to find that information in old threads, either.
If the big gang is full of players and won't take new members, and people want to join big gang, they'll take their ball elsewhere and join the other gang. That's my experience from the gang-o-sphere, it's pretty common that being turned away just meant they'll head to the next best place.
I'm not convinced from the responses here, which are fairly mixed, that we have an issue with ganger payouts. The gangers are paying less than an item is worth for something people probably got for free from robbing those self same gangers.
Also, plenty of NPCs want gear. The majority of NPCs that are out and about want -something- be it drugs, weapons, armor, or just a slice of pizza.
And the gangers use the consumables, so there is always a desire from them to have more over time.
If someone wants to make the case that gangers aren't willing to buy drugs for enough and that is impacting the drug trade, I'd be interested in hearing that.
I wouldn't be surprised if 25% or more of all the chyen in the game's economy at the time was coming from just weapon flips. The Mix economy at the time was really active, and the Syndicates had a huge amount of interest in controlling the flow of chyen and especially of people they could use because of how it all worked.
There was definitely some extreme wealth inequality beginning to happen, and looking back it's hard to imagine it could be sustainable, but it was a very fun time.
