There is a weekly limit to how much you can earn ingame, as well as other factors.
I don't know what weekly automated income cap has to do with it though.
The cost is also not a gate to entry because some easily lost gear and chrome can cost nearly as much as one unit for production which you can bolt into a locked room and never lose.
Pretty sure this idea has been posted about before and it still gets my +1 vote. If I remember correctly a past staffer who was coding had said adding the necessity for ingredients was intended, but they left and it was never implemented.
It also used to be extremely tedious to produce candy with players having to go as far as setting timers on IRL devices to make sure they didn't forget to tend their candy. This was also improved on so players don't have to spend as much time obsessing over candy tending.
I am not complaining about candy production being made easier through QoL updates, but I am acknowledging that the barrier for entry is now much lower than it used to be. The cost is still there but when you have the lab you're probably profiting off it a lot with not much worry of losing it.
Drug wars also used to be more common on the game, with rival factions constantly attempting to find ways to steal or disrupt the labs of their competition. This is less of a factor now as well.
I'm not sure if updating labs so that they have to be refilled after every few cycles is the answer as I believe the primary issue is the lack of conflict around them, but it might help make it less of an infinite chy farm.
People have lost their drug labs from people sneaking into their labs and stealing them, it has happened, and it will happen again, even if they're bolted.
Yes, obviously this is a thing that can and has happened. The problem is that it happens so infrequently chemists can, as others have said, continue to endlessly print chyen with zero risk involved.
This would be a massive advantage to scale producers in the form of a deeper moat on production costs, because scale production much prefers a higher price, and so this would essentially be a tax on end users (either injecting or flipping to gangers) that would take their percentage and take it out of the economy.
So this would definitely reduce inflation of the chyen in circulation overall, but the players losing money would be at the street level, not at the production level.
As it stands it feels like everyone is a drug dealer as a hobby and any chance for a faceman or fixer to stick their hand in the game is much more gated behind lab-to-table chemists with access to shelves in a store or vending machines.
I also disagree with the examples of labs going missing as being a reason to maintain the current system. We all know that a select few people will ever make that happen and the circumstances have to be perfect, it is not commonplace. To be honest, it probably shouldn't be commonplace.
As it stands it feels like everyone is a drug dealer as a hobby and any chance for a faceman or fixer to stick their hand in the game is much more gated behind lab-to-table chemists with access to shelves in a store or vending machines.
I also disagree with the examples of labs going missing as being a reason to maintain the current system. We all know that a select few people will ever make that happen and the circumstances have to be perfect, it is not commonplace. To be honest, it probably shouldn't be commonplace.
I do however think it would be very very hard to tweak these factors in a way that wouldn't put new entrants into the market at a disadvantage though, whether economic factors will cause increases or decreases is competition is something the game has never really had a great handle on, it's a really complex system and always hard to know how changes work out even with a lot of retrospect.
I can understand players on the outside feeling there's not enough competition going on over resources, but I believe it would be a mistake to think things couldn't be less competitive because they absolutely could be compared to how they are now. Given how expensive and involved it is to set up major drug operations I'm actually kind of shocked it ended up as non-monopolistic as it has now.
