To keep people from buying up all of something, pissing everyone else off.. like, maybe Cigarettes. There could be a code or something allowing you to buy only so much of whatever item over whatever amount of time. or maybe a sign or something?
Some of the staff doesn't agree with me when I ask you to keep in mind the fact that we are in beta and that I expect you to think of your fellow player a little bit in situations like this.
I wish you didn't have to put up with shoddy code, I wish we were all great coders who didn't cut our programming teeth on here.
Thats not the case, I'm sorry.
I'm not really talking specifically about this thread, just pointing out as a general rule of thumb.
But anyhow, what were we talking about? Oh, monopoly… yeah, can I be the boot?
Meanwhile, back in the small portion of Rastus' brain that hasn't been driven to insanity by the constant stench of doberman farts...
The game -needs- unrealistic limitations on the availability of some objects. While it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume there would be hundreds of WAI shotguns in Withmore, there needs to be a very low availability on them to maintain the economy. If -everyone- had WAI shotguns, their real value would be insignificant and all of the less powerful firearms would be of no value whatsoever... That said, cigs -should- be openly available. What is needed (and has been discussed) is an overhaul of the economy system that stocks the stores via Bruce deliveries...
Up until we can get that done, and even after that -is- done, hoarding will be frowned upon. Purchasing/acquiring multiples of a given object for no reason other than to store it in your little stash location is fundamentally bad for the MOO. While we won't do anything OOCly about you hoarding, you should note that -if- someone is seen to be hoarding items and making -no- effort to redistribute them, there will be an increased risk of some IC consequences happening. The grapevine talks and people in the know quickly get information on which movers and shakers are sitting on valuable stashes, picking them out as prime targets for a little involuntary wealth redistribution...
The IC world is not exclusively player based and some of the domes most powerful and unpleasant people are NPC's, don't be surprised if they happen to come a knocking.
Say Nic is looking for a nice neXus skirt…and YOU HATE NIC!!! So you buy up all of the neXus skirts you can find and then go to Nic and charge him an arm and a leg.
Monopolizing and hoarding are two different things. Hoarding is selfishly stashing crap so that YOU can use it later etc...monopolizing is controlling a market in order to put a pinch on someone else, or to boost the price you get for them.
There's a thin line there, but it all comes down to motivation and what you do with the gear.
Yes it sucks that you can't find anything real easy...but that's the world you RP in...nothing's easy...i personally enjoy that you can't find cigarettes so easily. It adds a character to the game, it builds RP. And while yes, hoarding cigarettes is different than hoarding Xo3, that is my take on the situation.
-stones
We can go on to look at why cigars, specialty liquors and all those fancy things Nixxi has been working on aren't readily available in stores for everyone at cheap prices. Why aren't they? Because it's 2087 and things you find readily available in 2002 aren't necessarily going to be 85 years from now.
This is my argument as to why smokes should be kept in the game in the same capacity as any other item.. being stocked in Jimmy's or ordered in bulk by the fixers/resellers. Of course if the players like how things are and there's a decent story as to why cigarettes would be as easy to get as a McChikken sandwich, then fine… As Stonemonk said, he enjoys not having everything easily accessible.. same goes for myself as a player. Where do the rest of you stand?
It totally makes sense that X-brand cigarette company would mass produce these babies because they're addictive and people will buy buy buy. And because of that, they'd be imported, yes…but they'd be in a warehouse in crate after crate. So the supply wouldn't be the problem.
My view is that on Red...where over 70% of the populations lives. Imagine a place like Jimmy's in an area that is home to 50million people. Ask yourself how many cigarettes Jimmy could stock (in the gas station I worked at, there were approximately 200 packs of various kinds at any given time. stocked or otherwise), now if even 1/4 of that 50 million (12.5million) walked past Jimmy's every day? How many do you think (in a world where simply going outside your front door can be dangerous) would be smokers because it 'calms the nerves'?? Let's say just to be conservative that 1/3 of those persons (4.125million) smoked. So 4.125 million smokers walk past Jimmy's Drug every day. Now if Jimmy got a shipment everyday of 200 cigaretes (1400), how long do you think they'd last?
Ok...so besides just the vast numbers...I wonder how much the corporate marketing managers really care about the Red Level Demographic. YES there's a huge market there...and yes the economy is pretty much based off of what the people down there buy. But for the most part, the average Red dweller has very little money, which means they buy very little, which means not only does that corpie have personal begrudgement against the 'lowlife' of red, those people also affect his sales very little. So the ammount/quality/frequency of products being delivered to Red are very small.
The answer to this then is STOCK SOMEPLACE ON GREEN OR GOLD WITH CIGARETTES. To which I would have to say that that would ruin my whole argument against massive ammounts of cigarettes, but then those cigarettes would be the expensive kind that you couldn't afford!!! MUAHAHAHA!
But like FS said...show us otherwise. *shrugs* I may not have thought it all out...prove me WRONG!
Consider it a form of reverse psychology, because smokes are hard to find players are motivated to purchase them when they see them. This leads to players smoking them, selling them, handing them to their buddies in bars and generally using them. Conversely, we make cigarettes freely available and suddenly you have no special reason to buy them just because you can. Buying smokes gives you nothing that everyone else can't already get and they don't actually -do- anything, so why buy them? After an initial honeymoon period in which everyone will buy smokes because they're suddenly so plentiful I am 100% sure we will see a -massive- decline in the purchase and smoking of cigs. It'll no longer be RP significant to have a cig because they're so damned common and cliched anyhow. What -everyone- wants is something special, not something every Joe has.
As I said, it's hardly IC, but it's a strong factor in the abstract enviroment that is 'the game'. Sometimes realism will damage reality.
Should I have made a seperate topic for this idea?
Also, since smoking or rather the chemicals in cigarettes can cause cancer I don't think you'd see many places on Gold that would sell cigarettes. I mean what corp, even the tabacco producing ones, wants to fork out huge medical insurance premiums to employees with cancer that they got from smoking the cigarettes from the machine in the cafetieria.
But I would like to see designer cigarettes. Special flavours and stuff. I mean, we already have coconut, tropical fruit, apple, and mint flavoured cigarettes now - they should be far more high tech and better tasting in the future.
2. I think you could RP the taste. Perhaps we could describe the package of the cigarette box to say something like, "With their ever changing flavor..." and then you make one up. (kinda like those jelly beans from that movie with the wizard kid)
3. Good point Tash...about the demographic thingymajig. They need to be less available than Pacwest Freqmans, and more available then Battox Batteries (uh oh...i hope i didn't start a new rant by mentioning Battox Batteries).
4. I WISH I COULD PLAY MORE!!! GAH!
