Nobody stays in the role because of how much not fun it is. It seems to have been added as a literal joke. Hah hah. It's not really fun or funny anymore.
Topside is a literal ghost town with tumbleweeds blowing around, but automated systems are blasting away making topside places look like shit.
Can we not? Thank you.
I think this would be a more productive conversation if instead of saying 'delete the system' we focused on what isn't working, and ways to improve it.
One thing I can think of is not spawning messes, or at least reducing their frequency if there isn't an IC janitor at a corporation. The same way we don't send ambient trouble maker NPCs to corporations if they don't have corpsec online.
Open to suggestions.
The point of bringing this up is that I believe it to be a fundamentally unfun role and one that people will very rarely partake in outside of some kind of hazing ritual or prank. I feel there is quite a number of espionage weaknesses and liabilities baked into the corporation buildings and how they're structured, but perhaps it's not enough.
The core of the issue that I wanted to raise is that it takes quite literally several hours per week, per person to keep these places clean if we're following theme and not cleaning them with corporate characters. Between the contractors or janitors and the people tasked to babysit them, it winds up being an appreciable chunk of every week dedicated to one person typing a verb and waiting, as you walk throughout facilities that are absolutely ginormous. It doesn't help that the janitor boards do almost nothing to assist with locating the messes besides giving the room names, and sometimes a big chunk of the time is spent wandering around trying to find a coffee spill.
TL;DR is that it's a job that takes actual work to do, often requires multiple (as many as three) people to do, and is not really providing the opportunities for RP that it seems it was made for. It's a bit out of alignment with the overall game design philosophy that IC jobs generally aren't supposed to be actual chores. (I know that this is not true for a quite a number of jobs.)
Corporations have mad stacks to hire all sorts of people, including ambpop janitors. Messes that are ambiantly created (ambient only. Not player created. Dropping your drink in the VS lobby, or getting that bakas blood on the floor after you beat him in the elevator stays, for example).
Ambient messes are cleaned up ambiently after x amount of unanswered time.
Corporations have mad stacks to hire all sorts of people, including ambpop janitors. Messes that are ambiantly created (ambient only. Not player created. Dropping your drink in the VS lobby, or getting that bakas blood on the floor after you beat him in the elevator stays, for example).
Ambient messes are cleaned up ambiently after x amount of unanswered time.
Metro Pass
Super powerful perk. Amazing. Not only can you go shopping for the things you actually need up on Green, but you can also use it to go to the Mix where actual gameplay takes place. And being a service worker, you're not immediately KOS for attempting to participate with the majority of the players on the server..
Great Pay
15Kc a week is nothing to laugh at. While the Corpies start at around 11.5Kc, running around with weekly paychecks starting at 14 to 18Kc is a great way for new players to get a little nest egg going.
Bigger @stat Sheet
I don't know about you, but bigger is always better. So that's why having that medical insurance perk is so awesome. You get a @stat sheet that's a whole line longer. Nothing else, because it only affects NPC doctors (not NPC cyberdocs though) and PC's are already cheaper.
But in the Cyberpunk life, bigger is always better and at the end of the day nothing says Sindome like a Megacorp handing their employees a turd while making it sound like it's a diamond.
Zero Responsibility
You don't actually have to do your job. Those custodian boards are worthless. All a janitor has to do is memorize about four to five different spots get dirty that they actually have access to, with another like three being able to be cleaned if they can snag security. The rest of the locations are unable to be cleaned because no PC on the payroll has access to them, with some dirty rooms literally not existing because they were never fully coded in. Just a CFO's office floating in a null void with a crooked painting. So a Jannie can safely ignore a good 4/5th of the actual dirty rooms in any given tower. Just wander around the lobby, emote some mopping and wiping down a lamp or two and call it roleplaying.
Yes you can technically open a puppet request but who in their right mind is going to waste half their puppet requests to get someone to open a door four days later.
So I don't know about you, but Janitor is a great job.
It would depend on management and how you RP it but this could be a chance to make connections, look good and embezzle a lot of money. I totally get that this all depends on IC management (OOC GMs) allowing things and things may have changed and it's not guaranteed. But I personally love this kind of IC opportunity, even if I get my hand slapped doing it.
I recall people pointing to Snow Crash as a reason why fast food jobs were actually cool, when I decried how few cyberpunk-ish jobs were present in the game, but I do think players like to experience certain amount of archetype evocativeness about their IC jobs.
And janitorial jobs might have less glamor IC than they do IRL, since they're often seen as non-vital corporate hazing, or salaries of last resort. I think the mechanics themselves are kind of neat and at least, somewhat theoretically, give characters accesses without a lot of oversight. However they're still a "janitor", and is that really anyone's cyberpunk class fantasy?
Even something as simple as calling these positions 'Maintenance' and making them notionally techy sort of roles, might go some distance towards improving player engagement with them. I mean, it's sort of a corporate joke about retitling a position to be something more prestigious but not actually paying any different, but labels often matter to players.
