Well, to be fair 'This is a game...mechanics will exist' is a self-evident and nonsensical statement. I get what you're trying to articulate, though. Mechanics need to indeed work to make the game function in what we might call a reasonable manner, right? Sure. But all it looks like to me (as the prototypical someone who has returned after a long time and is confused) is trading one apparent kind of 'unreasonableness' for another and I just don't see why it was necessary. It balances weapons in some way blah blah blah, okay, but what it equates to ICly for what have to be treated in IC, RP ways (because that's the core of everything the admins seem to want, right? Which is a good thing) is -- well, let's think, I don't really know what an equivalent contemporary example would be, like, what does a senior TV producer at NBC make in a week? If I'm in an approximation of RED sector, the seedy part of town where barred-window pawn shops sell mostly guns / knives / etc., and I see some brass knuckles for that kind of money, at the very least it demands an answer to the question 'How the bloody fuck is this place in business?'
Balancing this weirdness because it makes something else less weird is just dealing in a weird false economy. Balancing A at the expense of B now not making any IC, RP-driven way sense is just plugging one hole while making another one, the boat still isn't doing what it ideally should be.
If the IC answer is along the lines of well, Mixers these days tend to be able to make on average 26k a week more or less, or at least the ones who are doing things that make owning an entry-level melee weapon is desirable, so it's a solid fucking pair of brass knuckles and a week of saving sounds about right, then all I'm getting at is, well, if that kind of inflation is at work these days and/or we're just going to write that weirdness off as a necessary hole because blah blah weapon variety, then that's fine if it's adjusted that corpies make some kind if equivalent-isn increase in income, because if at the end of the day the book isn't balancing. A senior level corpie gig should not pay the same as even a fairly well-connected mixer doing nice business, or regardless of chyen figures they should have the ability to effect more 'power' in weaponry for the equivalent passage of time -- i.e., for the same comparison of time/work, a mixer should be walking into a fight with say those sweet brass knuckles, where a corpie has the means to walk into the fight with armor and an assault rifle, or more corpie-esque, to hire a seriously lethal goon-on-retainer-to-get-the-dirty-work-done.
If the IC answer to that disparity is that the way things want to be handled is hey, maybe we want fairly connected, business-savvy Mixers to be able to have equivalent financial leverage as that senior corpie gig. If that's the case then why is RED still such a shithole? What's the point of being a chy-hungry corpie slave? What RP do corpies have when because of some OOC game mechanic jabber they don't bring much more to the table than some entry-level street thug in RED? Where's the disparity between the haves vs. the have-nots that is seemingly pretty central do conflict and tension in Withmore? Oh no, copies smell bad and sometimes lose SIC to a brownout? That's the RP-driving turmoil between the incredible (alleged) class disparity?
This is what bothers me, is all. My immediate thought at seeing the recycled brass knuckle example is 'Well, through the way RED works, surely because of theft and murder and blah blah it's almost certainly brass knuckles go for significantly less at player-run stores or on the black market of players trading with players'. But then either the owner of Surplus and Shit or whatever store, it must be ICly accounted for, either is making money elsewhere and keeps his store stocked with expensive shit no one will by for some unknown reason, or he's going to go out of business because he's charging like 5x what say the Dark Shop does (I have no idea what the price is elsewhere, it's sort of immaterial).
And I'm terribly sorry if I'm troubling the admin with this discussion, but I had concerns / questions that hadn't been covered necessary or fully and I wanted to voice my opinion, I figured that was a fairly okay thing to do? If my answer is 'We thought through stuff, we like the change, STFU', then, well okay, sweetness, I'm glad I'm back.
I get the drive for variety, it's an age old problem in game design, how do you have variety among a class of items when, realistically (and stylistically, one could argue) some weapons are simply going to do more damage / be more badass? Sure we're all sick of nothing but street thugs who all seem to have katanas / train long_blade, but that's far more ideal to me than, like, hey, we want variety so now sledgehammers and katanas do roughly similar damage and cost about the same because the choice should be whether you want to be a sledge'ing badass or a samurai badass. That's probably hyperbolic example, I have no idea how they actually compare in those ways, but I'm taking your statement to its logical conclusion and it just sounds silly to me. Does a sledgehammer person with solid melee skill have as much chance in a fight as someone with an SMG and SMG skill with equivalent stats, etc.? If so, and it's for the sake of 'style choices / sake of variety over path of most success by the numbers' kind of thing, it's just getting sillier by the moment.
