People shouldn't be farming NPCs to begin with.
"First, the ratio at which you target NPCs vs PCs. In general, you should not be targeting NPCs for
dipping/mugging/stealing/killing/whatever significantly more often than PCs. If we look at the source of your
character's wealth and it mostly comes from your character taking things from NPCs, it's a problem.
Second, the rate needs to be reasonable for the activity in question - even if you are targeting NPCs and PCs at an
acceptable ratio. Dipping half a dozen NPCs in a day is not a huge deal - assuming you are also targeting an equal or
greater number of PCs. But killing half a dozen a day is a big deal. If the amount of flash pulled in from NPC sources
or the number of NPCs targeted is excessive given the circumstances, it's a problem.
Third, we ask that people limit themselves to taking about one big-ticket item from NPCs per week."
And I've seen all those points enforced on people who were breaking them on repeatable basis, and if you see someone doing so then it's best to let the staff know so they can sort it out.
And while we do have farming guidelines, I honestly dislike that they need to exist at all. Ideally players would just meta less and we could all move on but it's not really that simple. It's not easy to realize you're being meta, there are different opinions as to when something crosses that line and the pressure to keep up can be fierce. So if we can find ways to make the farming guidelines unnecessary, I am very eager to consider them.
Obviously there is not enough staff manpower to keep all those gangers run like players. And trying to write some sripts to do that is also likely not possible. So maybe instead of nerfing the memento gangsters, we could figure out a way to pass that feeling onto players about just how big and dangerous the gangs are? It is so rare to see people going to pay the tolls not because of the gang-player asking, but because of the fear for the whole big ass gang behind that single person shaking you down.
I do think that fixers play a major role in the weapons trade. Most weapons are sold to a fixer, in my experience, and when someone hires a runner to sell a weapon often that runner is someone who wants to become a fixer one day. Right now there is a fixer shortage which I think increases the amount of weapons being run, but that's okay and the IC economy will slowly solve that.
In general I think there's a tension -- the weapons trade provides a backbone income to gangers and other violent characters, and probably is the source of a lot of the cash that enters the mix. I think you want people having that cash to hire runners for dumb stuff or put up bounties on people who dodge tolls or any of the things gangers do as high-profile spenders, but it is also a really weird business to be in. I wonder if there would be a way to shift income away from the weapons trade somehow, maybe by dramatically increasing the payouts on protection rackets. That's maybe the subject of its own @idea though.
Only if there are more than zero named gangers buying weapons.
In my own opinion this problem is already solving itself, through mechanisms already described above. Working as intended - very organically.
That said, I think it'd be fun to see mementos carrying more varied weapons, as long as they aren't all huge downgrades across the board.
