Discuss improvements here.
"Now you might be saying, we have drugs, why do we need drug grenades?"
Whoever is saying that needs to do more drugs! Hahaha. I'm sayin, "we have drugs, we need drug grenades".
I think that anything encourages a more diverse experience and rewards careful planning is a good thing.
On a somewhat related subject, is there a way to force someone to take drugs yet? If not, that would be great. Maybe base it on grapple, and limit it to certain types of drugs? (syringes for example)
While this difference may have existed for a long time, it was -so- obfuscated that even the prices were the same in stores and the marketplace.
It was -so- obfuscated that I am actually convinced that the builders in charge of generating new vehicles on order often didn't know the difference between the two objects and just used the first item on the list.
It was so obfuscated that when I polled the various motorcycles around red and gold I found only two instances of 600cc engines on gold, and two on red. If these had existed in the same numbers as their host bikes, one would have expected more of a mix and match amongst the various models, but instead the 600cc models only existed on what one would expect them to exist on...but not always, whereas if one expected to find a 250cc, they would find it.
While I understand the effort that addressing this would have taken, I think it's pretty clear that almost no one knew this information, even on the back end. When I first reported the issue, the current builder and coder team even treated it as a bug and applied a temporary fix to it.
It took a month or more perhaps for the names to be changed and for my ticket to be closed out and this announcement made.
Furthermore, with the smaller and larger engines being completely interchangeable, this creates some fairly significant balance issues. A 600cc engine on a cricket will allow the least expensive bike in the game to go as fast as much more expensive models at a dramatically lower price. As it is, outside of the bike's desc, there's no reason for anything but the cricket and roadmaster to exist.
Thank you for making this transparent, but I think just 'moving forward from here' is a bit disingenuous. This is tantamount to announcing that 'Oh yeah, every bladed weapon in the game has had a blunt and a sharp version with completely different stats and they always existed but you could never tell'. This is a MAJOR alteration to the knowledge and understanding of vehicle mechanics, and at the very least addressing some of the now very visible balance issues would be appropriate in my opinion.
Maybe engine swaps need to be made more difficult or some other accommodation so mechanics can charge more for such a labor intensive task and would-be economical decision?
I think you bring up a good point about higher-end vehicles being a status symbol.
My gut tells me that 99% of vehicle owners did not know and did not care what kind of engine they had in their motorcycle.
This change is already generating work for characters who have the skills. It seems to me that generating work for characters is much better than having staff make wholesale changes to dozens or more of objects.
While I do not want to encourage people to divulge in character information, I would be curious to know how many motorcycle owners in the game ever felt like their motorcycle was measurably slower than another character's motorcycle.
My suspicion here is that situations where players would even become aware that their vehicle was moving through rooms in the game less quickly than other vehicles is infinitesimally small.
That's exactly one of my points. allowing more variety of engine size should be the difference between the Katana 250 and the Katana 600. Otherwise...they're the same bike, just one is a HELL OF a lot cheaper.
