Red Kitchenettes
Are mixers being too posh with their food choices?

I do agree though, I want to see more fast food stuff, greasy, bad for the health food.

Rather than a corbonara with permasan cheese. The question is since you can make custom foods, how would it impact that? What prevents a player from just mixing up a diamond rated food dish in the mix?

These are just questions, not opposed, just curious.

Another consideration is that the nutritional value of food affects your character's performance and that matters if you do things like combat or really anything shady. The reason I would go for something like steak over anything else most of the time is because there's a mechanic in the game that makes that choice more beneficial. It's almost like using a higher quality drug.

If there'd be 'high quality' Red District themed food that's not really a problem though. Maybe the super mega ultra deluxe nutripaste tastes so awful it makes you want to bite your tongue off but it does wonders for your health.

We're also aware that there will be a monetary loss for those of us that have put flash into stocking our kitchenettes. The best response I can give for that is…

If we decide to follow through on this, we will come up with a themely reason for it so players can try to generate RP in the aftermath.

rats like the good stuff more

mixers BANNED from store on gold

time to pay a corpie to go grocery shopping for you or steal their groceries on their way home

If it's a retcon there should be a retcon of cash chyen value into the rooms they're in.

Also would like to give an obligatory mention that some 'mixer' jobs should have access to corporate grocers, however it ends up being restricted.

These are pretty extreme examples, but to a lesser degree mirror my sentiments.

That said, more thematic mixer foods that don't distinctly carry a mechanical disadvantage that directly translates to an OOC penalty would be nice instead of just saying "You decided to live on Red, so you're just going to have to wait longer to do the things you want to do in the game."

I'm pro the thought of a 'black market' for more expensive/exotic ingredients. There are after all, rich mixers and ex-corpies for whom access to that sort of fare would be something that they'd want to cling to as long as they could afford it, and characters who have made providing 'catering' services for red part of their characters thing.

So yeh, if it's going to happen, I'd like to see the people who invested compensated for it because the chef's island alone to be able to make 'custom' items is forty kay plus let alone the cost of the food to stock it.

What about people who bought those items to use, not as a fixer, when they were higher priced right before price change drops? Did those people get chyen back because they bought a day too early?

WHat about people who bought cars or aeros retail before some price adjustments a couple years ago?

What about people who accidentally override their kitchenettes previously because they don't understand how the grocery system works? They don't get compensation, it's a learning experience. A horrible one, but one all the same.

The food stuff has been going on for years now. I think this change would help reinforce theme.

2. This is not decided.

That'd potentially take a lot of staff time though, so regardless I'm all for the reset.

I make the comparison to high end gear because the chyen value can be comparable. I spent something close to a million chyen on a previous character on food supplies, and just because I'm not impacted now doesn't make me think it would be equitable for some players to be told too bad so sad just because they didn't invest in something that was common enough to have permissible popular support.

If it doesn't impact many people, and isn't really a big deal, it should be no issue to compensate the small but non-zero number of people very negatively impacted by it.

But I'm asking about every day changes for items that still exist. Like the pricing changes I pointed out.

People lose stuff all the item. I like batko's point about how there's no real way to lose this stuff and it's only a one time purchase in most cases (unless you're moving frequently). And when you run out of supplies in the kitchen, you can go reup for a tiny, tiny price that lasts for a long, long time.

It;s important to remember how much has been moved from corporate only to available to everyone over the last handful of years and how that takes away some societal uniqueness from corporate citizens. I think we should find a way to reinforce the theme of Red and to help reinforce the economic class differences as well.

It's okay not to agree, but I think comparing this those past times while also floating the idea that this could happen to xo5, high end weapons, etc isn't comparable or healthy.

I’m pro- Red kitchenette and anything that enlarges the Class Divide.

No idea how feasible that is, but that seems to be like rp avenue I would take as mixer wanting to eat lobster from my kitchen. Could blackmail a corpie for their pad, or bribe business manager to rent to a mixer, whatever, i see a lot of fun options.

I am for this as a player. I see it as a good thing and I'll weigh in with my stance now.

Mixers lose all the time. Maybe it's a toll or a beating. Maybe a wallet taken or yeah, a group getting the drop on that badass razorgirl and she loses a 100k+ load out in Xo and chrome. It has and does happen. Losses bigger than that have happened. Does it suck to lose all that at once? It can. I've experienced similar situations as a player. But mixers are resilient. Stubborn. Feisty af. They persevere and overcome adversity.

I want that disparity for the mix. It's what I love about it and it can drive so much RP. But that disparity has diminished of late. Things that once separated corporate and mixer have been shared across the board and my personal opinion is that there isn't enough disparity between the haves and have nots.

Aside from wanting to address some legacy issues that weren't meant to remain in the kitchenette system, or be there in the first place (like restaurant menu items), I see the potential here to put some of that disparity back into the game and reinforce the class struggle that is supposed to be so vitally central to theme.

100% this is going to punish mixers as an IC thing. But what's new? We get punished every day in the mix.

But it is in no way an attempt to punish anyone as a player.Sometmes we just lose, right? And there'slittle we can or could have done to control the situation. That's not punishment, that's life. The life of a mixer.

Would it be recommended to xhelp if we see ppl talking about un themely topics or would that just get on staff’s nerves?

As someone said, food has a mechanical impact on character performance and not just combat, though it does hit combat types hard. I am happy for mix food to be skinned as poor people food. But I think it's important that mixers have access to food that has the same level of mechanical impact as topside foods, even if it's roast pidgeon, rat strips or whatever. If the result of this is that the mix has little to no access to mechanically sound food and the corpies easy access, I'd be worried. I don't think you shouldn have to sacrifice mechanical value to play to theme.

As far as w wipe goes, I'd prefer it if staff specified specific items that are considered high class and remove only those instead of just blanket resetting. Better yet, replace those with a new mix alternative of equal mechanical benefit. I know it's harder but it may be worth the effort. Replace New York steaks with Pidgin pie for example. I theory, one should be able to make a script to do this on a game wide scale. Maybe the way the kitchenettes work make it too hard to be worth it though. I don't know.

Themely named food is fine but nutrition nerfs for mixers would kind of suck depending on availability of such things elsewhere. Like 90% of PvP in the game is pretty much mixer vs mixer, the physically intensive jobs are done by mixers, etc. Does it make more sense for corporate citizens to have the good food? Yes of course, but is that good for the game if they need it the least? Not really, imo. If red sector will still have access to better quality food then it's a moot point, but I wanted to voice it just in case.

I have not read this entire thread because I just opened it after a long day and see 64 responses, so please forgive me if I repeat what someone else has already said. I think this kind of behavior should be policed. Just through reading the lore, you find things such as food riots as a part of the history. A food riot today would likely not occur or be scoffed at. One solution I would agree with is to make nutritional food stuffs to be just super hard to obtain. Perhaps on Green where you can't even enter the store without a corporate ID. Perhaps the next corporate hustle could be supplying some poor mixer with beef at a 500% markup? Leave all the crap food where it is.

It would have to come with policing people about bringing in their OOC food tastes/preferences on SIC to keep it more themely but I can see the whole Cyberpunk 2077 kind of aesthetic.

Bright, commercialized, pre-packaged, instantly consumable goods advertised everywhere and pushed endlessly on a population with no better options is very cyberpunk but doesn't really fit with kitchenettes as they currently work.

Make a kitchenette more like a food-only container. You buy your cup-o-joys, your soyanuts, other glitzy, corporate designed morsels to satiate the masses ready in sixty seconds or less and store them in the "kitchenette"/cupboard and pull them out when you're ready to eat them.

Rather than mass stock a kitchenette with X amount of uses before restock and restock for a fraction, turn it in to that prepackaged hellscape of outside of restaurants for a great deal more chy that's all the options you have.

It would give people more reasons to go out and hang out in restaurants, spend the extra chy for a "real" meal and help reinforce that theme of life is cheap and drip fed to you by the corporations.

But it would be a massive overhaul of the system as it stands and would still be something that I at least would want to see compensation for the people losing out on that niche of 'home caterer' type.

But it is good to hear from everyone, so keep it coming! I just ask that people don't rehash the same thing they keep saying. Saying it once is enough and makes this easier to read through! :)

I also think that it's a good point to bring up that, at least to my perception, the majority of the item creation lately has been geared towards the rich. Jewelry and perfume, Deathball collectables, and fancy gadgets. If the majority of what's being created is intended for the minority of players, I would absolutely expect people to gravitate towards the new hotness, theme be damned.

It seems to me that gritty, grungy, impactful and themely things could be created for mixers. More variety in cheap mixer fashion that isn't based on decades old gang stereotypes. More cheap weapon variety, even if they are just cheap functional remakes of existing ones. I think building is a great tool to drive things to be more themely, but if the theme is going to give poverty, give more interesting poverty options.

Thanks for clarifying Butako!

To me it does seem really thematic and I'm actually pro the thought of it being a thing, but would like those who have invested to be compensated for the drastic shift between 'we can make our own stuff' to 'we feed chy to shiny machine it gives us the food'.

And I'm just haunted by the loading screen that's all "Yeah when the lights went out there I was cooking dinner… Well, if we're getting specific, I was nukin' a half-eaten burrito I found wedged in my couch cushions[…]" that seems like it'd be very the desired Red Sector aesthetic being aimed for with the proposed change.

The first is that it is definitely not going to change a thing. People who wanna yap about luxury food and talk about history like highly educated university professors are gonna do that, whether they live in the Mix or not. Whether it annoys me or not.

The second is that this worries me we're going back to an old Sindome era where every little thing you say that might seem like it's a meme (even when it isn't) gets you xhelped at because you didn't RP the way you were 'supposed to'.

Sorry if any of that was harsh. I don't have much of anything special in my kitchenette. I'd think I'm rather themely in this way, but I like what I have and don't see any reason to lose it, or why this should be policed when people with enough money will buy what they want anyway.

With part of the problem being cited as mixers "bragging about steaks and other fancy food" and the concern that the idea of "mix rich" is skewing the general theme.

I've already stated I'm not a fan of the idea of wiping the kitchenettes or making certain food stuffs impossible to get (expensive? sure, impossible? pls no), but it comes down to: What -is- the thematic dietary choices that are looking to be enforced?

If it's supposed to be 'mix standard' that people aren't making their own food, they're buying cup-o-joy, nutripaste, quick-nuke, soylent green whatever vaguely nutritious shiny super processed stuff then, really, wiping kitchenette's isn't terribly going to fix the issue. If, and I do mean if that is the aesthetic that staff want to see, there is codedly and self-reinforcing way of achieving that which, from my haven't-attempted-to-code-for-here viewpoint there's already the bones for that would likely be less time and effort for staff to implement than trying to fix the existing kitchenette's.

But it comes down to a few questions:

1) What is the thematic 'standard' desired from this change?

2) Where is the thematic deviation currently being observed? (Mixers talking about eating steaks being a pretty good example).

3) How can #2 be brought in line with #1 in a way that causes the minimum headache and stress about implementation, and be self-reinforcing? The suggestion I was making about vending machines/food specific containers was just an idea of a possibly less messy/stressful way of achieving the goals of #1 & #2 without requiring going through kitchenettes for mixers with a fine toothed comb. But it does still circle back to #1: What -is- the thematic standard desired from this?

It's largely not about what the game says is valuable, that's some secondary thing everything can manage to deal with as needed in their IC roles, it's about player's creative expression. Not about picking a number to get a pre-written object of token extravagance but to make whatever junk food they grew up with as a kid or a Filipino recipe they got on the grid to try to impress their date, because no one wants to one of a hundred in a box. Tailoring shows that players will happily rep with expensive creative tools and common creative tools as appropriate as long as they are given the option to be creative both ways.

I'll be honest here, I don't know a dang thing about Chef's Islands. I imagine that, at the very least, we can come up with a new set of ingredients that will let mix chefs continue cooking even while accessing those quality ingredients is more difficult for them.

I'll talk to Butako and see if there are any other ideas to address that.

I'll touch on other people's posts as I can. You're firing responses quick so give us some time, but keep them coming.

Were I the opposition here, I might say something like, "These purchases were made at a time when the system didn't consider those kinds of consequences and it's unfair to take it away like this. My character wouldn't have paid all of that money if I'd known it was going to change."

That's an argument I can understand and it seems to be the root of the some arguments against the kitchenette wipe idea. Were something like food spoilage always a thing, I'm sure most of us would not have loads of high-value kitchenette stock nor would we have felt it worth blowing so much flash on.

The only response I can offer at this time is that I personally view it as a necessary growing pain in a larger mission to push theme back to where I think it should be in order to balance and improve overall game experience.

Why food and kitchenettes now and not something else? Because it's what's on our mind right now. It's really that simple. There are only so many of us on staff and even fewer among us with both the interest and ability to perform some tasks, like building. We also have lives and some of us are players too. There are a lot of building projects and we always want for more builders. If anyone is concerned that changes aren't happening fast enough or that too much is underway at once, you're free to apply for a position on the staffing team and work toward being a builder. Information for that process is here:

https://www.sindome.org/bgbb/open-discussion/anything-really/new-support-gm-position–823/

Moving on, I know questions have arisen about reimbursing players were the wipe to occur. I'll admit I'm a very "life sucks as much as possible if you're a mixer" type of person. That's where I lean for theme and I think I made that fairly clear in my earlier posts. It turns out that the suck is one of the broadest, easiest and most readily available plot devices to latch onto. So my gut response is to be like nah, bad shit happened to your mixer? That's life. Be a mixer, get over it or get even, stop being friends with everyone and go take it out on someone. Lie, cheat and steal to get your money back and truck on.

However, I'm one voice among many staff members. I will make sure the concern about financial loss is addressed with staff before we come to a decision on whether or not to follow through with this idea.

I'm not suggesting you should, but more than one player here took away the implication that everyone losing all their food and getting a new bodega at the same time is the combination offer being made, and I'm reading between the lines that actually there could be potentially several weeks or months of soyanuts and water only, which would be a huge loss of player creativity and enjoyment for a really minimum level of thematic gain in my opinion.

Expiration dates would probably spur people to spam food usage as much as possible to get their money worth. With limited uses, at least you know your money is getting you 100 steaks, not just steaks until next week.

Also, to compensate for the limitations, food prices should be lowered to reflect their limited uses, and kitchenettes should be able to be continuously stocked with food without clearing existing foodstuff in it.