Further on, the prices here seem a bit "off" to me, but I am new.
Consider that as a game and not a realism-simulator, prices might not make "real life" sense, but they do make game-balance sense. The rebalancing and repricing followed years of everyone using the same two or three weapons.
Also, welcome to the struggle, where Mixers struggle for everything they get, and Corpies struggle to keep what they have.
Have fun!
So say you went to surplus shit, and you looked at a knife. It' costs fucking 20 grand, which 90% of the people on that level don't even have. What next? You'd shank a fucker with some broken glass, or an ink pen, or basically whatever you could find that even remotely resembled a knife, then you'd take their 20k knife (because that may be more money than you've everfucking seen before. With their 20k, you'd buy 10 hookers, build 10 more shiv's to sell to your buddies, and then still have 5k left for rent and drugs.
Knives not your thing? Then you'd grab a stick, or a piece of rebar from the trash or a handfull of brick(Cause who is going to pay 20k for a hockey stick, or a cricket bat or brass knucks)
I don't know what the right answer is to this question, but a change in pricing is the first. At the very least, when you are selling a knife for 20k, somewhere that that equals like 3 monts pay, and you have 10 of them. You'd get your store raided.
My best suggestions are, 1) make entry level melee weapons, which are weak, for WAAAY cheaper. Think... well anything you could make from scrap on RED.
2) Move nice melee to gold and green, not that anyone who lives on those levels cares. Lower prices, and nerf melee weapons a bit, or maybe make firearms (since those are obviously the real good, and hard to get stuff) more powerful.
3) Don't do that much extra work, but go back to valuing weapons based on what they are, and who wants them, not how bad they can hurt someone.
IRL speaking Noone's going to pay 20k for butterfly knife, if stick sharpened on the sidewalk is longer, and almost as good. They will shank you with said stick for your kife that costs 6 months wages though.
We have a UE cap. You can only put so much UE into stats and skills before you hit that cap. That means, for someone who uses brawling, there needs to be available to them, the same tiers of weapons that are available to someone who uses long blade or pistol. Otherwise, we fundamentally break the skills that do not offer comparable weapons.
At the same time, the amount of work that goes into creating weapons is high and thus, we don't have 10 levels of weapons for every skill. It's just not needed. Also, it wasn't a long time ago that weapons were balanced in this way. It was quite recently and it's an on-going effort. As is everything in the game. Nothing really stays the same forever. We constantly balance. It's important to us to make sure that no matter what skills you pick, you have the ability to compete with others, with other skills.
We've toyed with the idea of 'scavenged' or 'make-shift' weapons, and I think some day, that will be a reality!
Thanks for the feedback!
That said.. if I have a combat skill other than brawling, or ma, it'd make me sad to find out that it'd going to take me six months to even try to have a weapon. (Insert rant here about how you shouldn't care about weaponry) So maybe, a switchblade, though better than a piece of glass off the ground, isn't great, then maybe a butterfly knife is better, then maybe only you can get a rambo knife topside, and it's awesome, and 50k. Also, maybe high end brawl and martial arts is more badass than it currently is. but low end isn't..
All i'm saying is that, if you have to plan your budget for months out of chargen to get a weapon... we're missing the whole CP theme here.
As always thank you, and no disrespect meant.......
Those knuckles are the shit in awesomeness.
On another note, it's been plastered on the Features page under "Kick As Combat" that if you can hold it, you can kill with it.
"With over 80 well balanced weapons to choose from, you don't have to wield a katana or semi-auto pistol to be a badass on the street. If you can hold it, you can kill with it."
Let's just say I know of an IC experience a couple years back involving something not badass helping someone (unintentionally) in a fight and my character being thanked for the fluke.
So no, a weapon doesn't have to cost very much. It just won't do the damage a katana or brass knuckles can possibly do.
My only thoughts on this is that if you have to have something be the BEST weapon, like it appears Brass Knuckles is. Why would you have it be Brass Knuckles?
We are in a future, the timeline speaks of laser guns (which I understand why they don't exist because of the same timeline, but I use it as a frame of reference) and our FLASH and WIZ weapon for brawlers is a set of Brass Knuckles?
To me personally that's what is hard to swallow and hard to keep immersed in the world because of. I understand inflation but when you can buy Armor that covers your whole torso for less than a lump of metal with four holes in it? Seeing what I'm getting at?
If you guys share the template needed to create weapons and how the pronouns work, we might be able to take some of the work off staff and make it make more sense in the grand scheme of things.
Just an idea, take it or leave it.
Stop using immersion as an excuse to whine about shit. Weapons are the way they are due to BALANCING. You don't know the numbers behind it, we do. You will never know the numbers behind it but a good clue will always be the price of something. Yes it is a CLUE by design. More expensive weapons and armor are better than less expensive shit. The same way that higher caliber weapons do more damage than lower caliber...
Weapons are balanced across the board. Brass knuckles are where they are to counterbalance other weapons for other skills in the same rank.
Stop whining about this or the next complaint I will turn them into useless shit and reprice them to pocket change so your immersion will be satisfied and your weapon will be shit.
Thanks for the feedback. While I can appreciate where you are coming from, that would undo 18 years of weapon creation, weapon balancing, customized weapon attacks, weapon messaging, and also require a complete over haul of the combat system.
Almost every skill in the game has a very cheap weapon. Brawling and MA have the cheapest: your bare hands.
This mechanic is a part of the game, has been for a long time, has been iterated upon and balanced and reviewed and discussed by players and admin alike for a long time. We like it the way it is. That doesn't make the idea less valid, it just isn't right for our game.
As Jinx said, the cost is a balancing issue where the cost is a reflection of the damage a weapon is capable of doing when used by a skilled combatant. We have, in the past, added new classes of weapons to the game (synth knux is a perfect example) when interest has grown in certain skills. We continue to do this to this very day!
-- S