Topside pay, rents and membership
How to make it past junior?

As is, once you are past junior in a megacorp, you pretty much lose ability to access NPC income. It's not total, there are ways around it but broadly that will be an experience you have.

It's passable if you have membership and at least your rent is covered, but if you do not, then going from junior to full employee can take your finances from making 20k+ a week from NPC sources (pay+npc income-cost of npc income) with rent paid up, to making 15k a week AND having to cover rent from that.

I think that's really broken, both the fact that getting promoted is a pay cut (though obviously you get much wider access to the embezzlement fund… I mean budgets, and opportunities for shady deals), and just how extremely unfair is that promotion on non-membership players, as even a not so nice flat topside, after corporate perks, will cost you half of your weekly pay.

I do not know what a balanced fix would be here, maybe for non-membership corporates the rent perk could be doubled to lesser the blow, and base pay slightly bumped across topside jobs, but to balance it out say put limits on how many paychecks you can accumulate without picking them up?

I agree with Froggy, it's weird feeling like you're being penalized for being promoted. Especially when on top of what they were saying, some roles are far more limited on what they can reasonably see about reimbursements for compared to others being *very* flexible.

I'd really like too see this changed too. Why cant I supply my own corp sec with drugs and shit. It should be allowed.

MacGuffins. Just saying.

If the problem was people were keeping them locked behind impenetrable doors, then giving the janitor the keys to those doors would be a perfectly good weak point in the whole operation.

To all those topside looking for side hustle I say this; shed your fear. Whatever it is your corp has given you access to, steal it or exploit it. Get a Mixer involved to take the heat. Come up with a good lie and expect that someday you will get caught. Will you get fired? Almost certainly not the first time except in the most extreme circumstances. You'll get chewed out, certainly, but even that has advantages. Some bosses, believe it or not, are just as crooked as you are and if they feel like they have leverage like this over you might use you for their own under the table dealings. This goes for both PCs and NPCs, I've seen it in action.

The worst thing you can do is stare are your paycheck and think 'this is all there is'. Remember you are a cog in the machine and everything you do is a rounding error on a balance sheet. The things you steal or embezzle may seem like outrageous to you, but to them it's literally nothing. Don't be dumb about it, obviously, but stop being paralyzed thinking the moment you stuff something in your pocket corpsec will come alive and baton you to immediate death. Even if they do, -they- are more likely in deep shit than you are for it.

Mench but thats already doable beforehand. If you are already doing that then you still take the massive hit. 10-15 kay a week is a lot of flash to be shut off from. Getting an immy to sell the candy only is going to net you less than you would get normally for a larger amount of product. Youd need to do MORE work to make the same amount of flash.