Note on economy

[oranges]

Okay so economy sucks, and never really managed to stick.

So we're going to remove it.

NO more changes will be accepted other than removal of paying for things.


Sorry it didn't work out.

[wesoda25]

uh

[Qustinnus]

nooo i thought i didnt care but my roulette machine uses goofconomy

[as334]

Thank god, I always felt like economy just existed because people thought it should be there, without thinking of whether it actually made things better.

Would cargo be going back to the original cargo points sytem?

[oranges]

Cargo would return to the original points yes.

[Armhulen]

nooo i thought i didnt care but my roulette machine uses goofconomy

gamble with cargo points is probably fine

[Qustinnus]

nooo i thought i didnt care but my roulette machine uses goofconomy

gamble with cargo points is probably fine

only cargo can play roulette then which is dull. but oh well not much i can do back to making flesh cult

[Fikou]

nooo i thought i didnt care but my roulette machine uses goofconomy

cant you just make it gamble with coins

[Flatulent]

does that mean budget cards will make a return

[oranges]

Cargo would return to the original points yes.

Money doesn't have to be removed, things just won't cost money anymore, you can still keep holocredits and people can still get money, it just doesn't do anything.

[Anonmare]

nooo i thought i didnt care but my roulette machine uses goofconomy

cant you just make it gamble with coins

Coins are a pain in the ass to carry and make since only people who go public mining will have them, it's why nobody used the slot machines ever

[oranges]

does that mean budget cards will make a return

No, the budget card makes no sense when there is no economy.

[wesoda25]

Money doesn't have to be removed, things just won't cost money anymore, you can still keep holocredits and people can still get money, it just doesn't do anything.

Theres literally no point for the system to remain if you plan on not allowing anyone to develop it, all it will do is stagnate and get worse. This doesn't make any sense.

[oranges]

I dont' care, use it as a points banner, brag about how much cash you have. What happens to it at this point is no longer my concern, if someone wants to remove money itself, that is their choice.

[JusticeGoat]

does that mean budget cards will make a return

No, the budget card makes no sense when there is no economy.

Its so a section of "points" can be earmarked for a departments rather than just all be spent on soviet surplus crates.

[oranges]

I don't think it's relevant, but establishing a standard for quartermasters on how to use the cargo budget productively is an IC or admin policy problem, not a code one, I will not be drawn into it.

[wesoda25]

Hmm. Whats your reason for economy removal? All you've said is that it didn't manage to stick and that it sucks.

This just seems very sudden, economy definitely has its issues, I'm not even that attached to it, I just don't get why you want it gone now.

[oranges]

I have decided to live up to the tyrant moniker other people have assigned me, so I am now enforcing the way I think things should be.

I have no confidence economy will ever be good, I do not see anyone in the community with a workable plan, or a detailed document that engenders hope.

Therefore i have decide to remove it.

[Arcanemusic]

Respectfully, this is a bad idea.

I'm not underestimating that we can't remove economy, or that economy is perfect, but the only major changes with economy I've experienced has been changing how much each item costs individually, and as per your wishes limiting almost all income to either mining, cargo, or passive generation. The problem with economy has been that it almost never serves as a major driving force within the round, which was the original hope. This was the idea I gated the BEPIS around originally, that science would have a reason to interact with cargo in order to make more money, so that they could finish out their techweb with BEPIS techs. The idea was designed around October/November of 2019, when having several thousand dollars of credits was a pretty prevalent issue, and the original tech cost of 10000 credits was being floated.

I'll spare the details here because I imagine that most everyone reading an economy removal thread knows what's happened in economy over the past few months but in short I'm fairly certain I'm the only coder who's been putting in work on actually making the economy system interact with the round over the past few months outside of changing individual jobs income levels. Working on making the economy more interactive was my project during the antag freeze, and I feel like it's a much better place than when we started. The only thing I really got held up on recently was making more content actually exportable for cargo, so as to keep the impetus on cargo generating the station's income if you were really strapped for cash. It is my firm belief that economy is in a better place than the annoying bitching you hear in #coding-general would leave you to believe, with the only real roadblock being that the only valuable export on the station, by design, is mining and selling plasma sheets. If we had a more concise set of station exports, you would more than likely see economy play a greater role within the round as a result.

Anyway. The people that complain about economy being a waste are the people who ignore economy in-round, and so are only inconvenienced by it. I hope you'll reconsider you decision.

[oranges]

I have no intention of reconsidering.

[pubby]

The economy obviously failed but there is one idea worth keeping.

Giving players a small budget to buy items at the start of the game is good. It allows vending machines to have actually interesting items without ruining the balance of the game. Before the economy PR, people would eat vending food rather than going to the kitchen, people would abuse soda as ghetto stims, people would drain the tool vend even if they didn't need tools, and there would be a mad rush at the start of the round to grab coins for insuls. Giving players budgets allows designers to have better control in shaping the game and keep power-gaming in check.

My proposal would be to gut everything but vending machines. Start each player with $100 regardless of their job (maybe the captain gets $200). Don't have pay checks or allow money to be deposited, withdrawn, or bartered. Don't have money in the vault. Don't have player dollars relate in any way to cargo. Instead just give players a small budget to buy stuff at the start of the round.

[oranges]

That would be restarting on economy though, because the tendency would be to add other stuff to it.

I think if anything was left in, it should be individual cargo crates.

[Jack7D1]

I like the idea of socialist station where you get x things and no more.

[PKPenguin321]

This one I don't like because economy was just starting to get good. Sad

[XivilaiAnaxes]

Hooray! Cool clothing is no longer locked behind "did you pick a job that has salary set to a high enough value?

Edit: Please disregard this opinion. It is not based (but free clothing is the future).

[NecromancerAnne]

Wow this is quite unfortunate. It is actually something I've considered to have been improving to the point of actual functionality over the course of time and had finally reached an impactful state. Taking it out now seems far harder than staying the course given how much content got woven into it, like the BEPIS being the most notable example, and gating premium items in the vendors being actually how some roles are balanced right now.

[Mickyan]

Looking forward to the upcoming powercreep dump thanks to all the new things that have been added to vending machine now being completely free

[Shadowflame909]

eh. Bepis stuff can go into tech webs.

It's really just Economy Gacha and not at all a job.

Basically an arcade machine without the bideo game.

[Kryson]

It is important to point out that oranges has never tested Arcane*s new economy improvements. I know this since he has only 20 min alive in the last 30 days.

This comes of as incredibly heavy handed and is not without it's own set of problems.

This is a great shame as i enjoy the economy system and thinks it will work well with some adjustments.

[Farquaar]

I'll miss economy. It was fun selling ice cream cones as a clown to make ends meet.

[cacogen]

Like people before me have said this seems like a rash decision. Without any reasoning backing it up it's impossible to know why you're doing it. Someone pointed out how little you've played recently and it's hard to think this is an informed decision.

Economy just needs to be balanced properly. I've thought a lot about it but have never done anything to it because I suck at coding. Says a lot about Goofball though that there's no way to even see how much money is on the station, let alone where it's going.

ugly quote mining commence

my roulette machine uses goofconomy

I like that machine. It never feels like a real loss to lose all your money on it with economy as it is though, compared to other games

Hooray! Cool clothing is no longer locked behind "did you pick a job that has salary set to a high enough value?"

Assistants are underpaid while everyone else is overpaid. Not enough of the goods and services you receive cost a significant amount of money (or anything).

I think if anything was left in, it should be individual cargo crates.

But you can buy guns and shit

Before the economy PR, people would eat vending food rather than going to the kitchen, people would abuse soda as ghetto stims, people would drain the tool vend even if they didn't need tools, and there would be a mad rush at the start of the round to grab coins for insuls.

you'd get sick of junk food and have to eat real food though
stims litter maint now
insulated gloves are always sold out in the vendor in engineering so i'm assuming it's the same in tool storage, but that assistants can't get them roundstart anymore
excess tools would just sit on top of the machine

[oranges]

I have already made a decision sorry.

[cacogen]

Why not lock the thread then?

[actioninja]

Can you elaborate as exactly to what's wrong with it?

Throwing away everyone's work that went into economy related things and the efforts to make it less irrelevant just because you've decided it's bad and will always be bad with no further elaboration feels like a great way to get people to never want to work on new content or overhauls ever again.

And at worst it's irrelevant. It barely affects things. Assistant mains complain they can't buy clothes but that's about it.

[Mickyan]

Throwing away everyone's work that went into economy related things and the efforts to make it less irrelevant just because you've decided it's bad and will always be bad with no further elaboration feels like a great way to get people to never want to work on new content or overhauls ever again.

I was just going to drop it because what's even the point but I think me and Arcane have been the ones to do the most changes on the economy post-merge and oranges sure managed to single-handedly put me off ever contributing anything of note months ago already, I can only imagine Arcane isn't too thrilled about this turn of events

Who gives a fuck though, someone on digg called oranges a tyrant so that gives him the right to treat us like shit, throw all that work in the garbage and how dare you ask for an explanation why

[oranges]

Can you elaborate as exactly to what's wrong with it?

Throwing away everyone's work that went into economy related things and the efforts to make it less irrelevant just because you've decided it's bad and will always be bad with no further elaboration feels like a great way to get people to never want to work on new content or overhauls ever again.

Oh well, at least it's clear now, sorry for not being clear earlier

[Kryson]

Welcome back to a world where everyone no mater the job has a full toolbelt and the chef's food goes uneaten because people would rather eat raisins.

[oranges]

don't believe economy achieved any real meaningful impact, the two things that had any real change on the round was individual cargo crates and the bepis, neither of which were really where economy should have gone.

One was just another content dump treading on top of techwebs, and the other didn't really achieve much of anything other than letting people buy random shit from cargo which is like ehh.

The only positive is that chef food was slightly better than vended

there's no meaningful reason to keep cash other than to reward yourself and there's no real reasons to go out and earn more cash as any job but assistants who just broke in and stole everything not nailed down instead.

so the only actual impact economy had on any round was that slightly more people check out the chef than before and I just don't feel the direction it was going in was positive, because it was all just about earning rewards for yourself and not anything intrinsically meaningful and then we couldn't even tie it to doing jobs because the rates just went all over the place and turned into a mess.

I wanted economy to encourage people to interact with others and ideally to do their job better than the average, but I don't think it turned out that way, or it's just not possible in the first place because the job simulation isn't good enough.

I don't want to keep adding systems that boil down into get points, turn points into items I can use to powergame, it sucks, we already have two with mining points and techwebs, three if you count cargo points themselves.

Economy end game shouldn't be just doing things that other stuff already did (cargo, techwebs), that's just redundant.

[JusticeGoat]

One thing i liked about the cash system was it did drive some rp, and people often handed credits over to tip service workers.

[cacogen]

Welcome back to a world where everyone no mater the job has a full toolbelt and the chef's food goes uneaten because people would rather eat raisins.

People are forgetting you can't eat junk food to satiate hunger because you get sick of it. Everyone already has a full toolbelt if they want it, thanks to departmental protolathes and autolathes.

[oranges]

Even the satiation thing didn't work that well either, so maybe it wasn't properly balanced either.

[Kryson]

One thing i liked about the cash system was it did drive some rp, and people often handed credits over to tip service workers.

Yes, and i was able to buy monkeys cubes from botany, sell bounty items to cargo, or sell stolen goods.

Economy does if work if you actually try to use it, and it is working better for every update.

But oranges has not even tried the latest economy stuff.

[cacogen]

>Economy does if work if you actually try to use it
this doesn't sound any different from roleplaying with space cash which used to happen very rarely back when it was just monopoly money. i don't see money used for trading very often at all. which is because you don't need it, or you already have enough of it, that you can afford to just give the stuff your department produces away. i never see a cook charge for food, or a chemist charge for medicine, or science charge for bags of holding. to me at least that'd seem dickish and unnecessary (at least in the last two examples). i don't need the money. it doesn't mean anything to you either, unless you're an assistant. the only times i've ever wanted for money is as an assistant wanting clothes from the clothing vendor in the locker room or as an engineer wanting an RCD at the start of the round (which soon becomes available through techwebs). if you think of all the goods and services on the station you use, the amount you actually have to pay a meaningful amount for is miniscule.

the fact we're on a private research station where we don't have to pay for our operating costs, i.e. any finite resources we consume (power, atmosphere, materials, supplies, etc.) doesn't help either. it's a station designed to be self-sufficient. so there's no need to sell the commodities each department produces because there are no operating costs to cover. what would stimulate the economy is if the station had a finite budget used to pay employees (maybe for cargo and research as well) and those employees then NEED that money to provide for themselves (e.g. food, to avoid starvation).

[Kryson]

it doesn't mean anything to you either, unless you're an assistant.

Not true at all if you have some imagination. There is something for everyone in the cargo catalogue, and certain jobs like medical and botany have things they want in their vendor.

The solution is to move and add new stuff to the premium section of the departmental vendors, not scrap the entire system.

[cacogen]

I don't think "luxury" items as Cobby has termed them in the past are enough to fuel the economy. Or at least, they haven't so far.

[Shadowflame909]

im happy again because I don't have to play GTA botanist anymore.

Kill The MONEY. MUHAHAHAHA

[oranges]

I have to say I find this reaction mostly highly confusing.

I have had negative feedback on economy for basically it's entire existence and didn't get any good feedback.

I felt I had held out far longer than was fair in terms of actually trying to let people work on it.

I'm going to run a simple poll, choose between three options

economy has had a net improvement of my experience
economy has had no impact on my experience
economy has had a net negative on my experience

I will run this for two weeks to see what the actual opinon is.

[cacogen]

People don't want economy removed, so option 1 will win, followed by 2 and then 3.

[CDranzer]

Curious - any plans for how this will affect the insuls and multitools from the tool vendor?

[oranges]

you'll have to wait now