Normalize currency and credits/costs/values

[cedarbridge]

I know I know. The econ system was kinda just slapped in there and people are kinda loathe to mess with it, but I think part of that problem is the numerical mess of working out what things should cost relative to how much people have to get those things. As stands, department budgets (especially science) bloat extremely quickly while things like coins (minted in mining or wherever else you find them/put a coin press) are almost universally undervalued relative to their source materials.

I think it would be constructive if we started taking a look across the board of how much things should cost and how much a department should be required to part with in order to get those things. At the same time, I'd like to see cargo's budget trimmed down (with some of the more wildly overvalued bounties trimmed as well) to bring them more in line with a focus on providing products to crew and keeping the station's vending machines (whose credits feed the service budget) stocked. Crew are currently empowered with paychecks that they can spend at cargo to order crates of things they want or need, but more often cargo is just the loot box bonanza of free loot to the QM and his techs more or less paid for by everyone else contributing to the budget (or the captain just refunded them ship for Daniel and now cargo gets a budget bump).

Things I'd like to see discussed here with some proposed solutions:
1) What should a standard credit look like value wise? What should it be theoretically based around so that crew/traders/traitors/vending machines/coders know how to set prices on goods and services with credits in mind?
2) What needs to be done to bring coin currency in line with this new credit value? Keep in mind that a coin should probably be at least worth is value weight in its raw material.
3) What should be done to bring cargo more in line with its service-oriented purpose? I gave a couple of my thoughts above but I'd like to hear from others as well. Make cargo more of a commissary than a loot box party.

Keep in mind that your suggestions to all of the above will likely have knock on effects in how cargo crates/shuttles/vending machine products/department-sold products/medbay healthcare/etc are priced.

[Mickyan]

On a personal level payout difference between jobs need to be flatter because a 2000% paycheck increase between the lowest and highest paying job (ignoring heads since having free access to budget means their personal account is irrelevant) is impossible to balance and you end up with nonsense like a security webbing costing 800 credits and virtually unlimited money for everything else

Also the NEET quirk completely invalidates one of the current strongest advantages of the economy as it currently stands which is dynamically limiting the amount of tools assistants can get their hands on and I hate it, I hate it so much and it's not surprising it's a favorite of assistant mains

[cedarbridge]

On a personal level payout difference between jobs need to be flatter because a 2000% paycheck increase between the lowest and highest paying job (ignoring heads since having free access to budget means their personal account is irrelevant) is impossible to balance and you end up with nonsense like a security webbing costing 800 credits and virtually unlimited money for everything else

Also the NEET quirk completely invalidates one of the current strongest advantages of the economy as it currently stands which is dynamically limiting the amount of tools assistants can get their hands on and I hate it, I hate it so much and it's not surprising it's a favorite of assistant mains

Make those NEETs get a job.

[Farquaar]

3) What should be done to bring cargo more in line with its service-oriented purpose? I gave a couple of my thoughts above but I'd like to hear from others as well. Make cargo more of a commissary than a loot box party.

The cargo crate system is incredibly inefficient. Imagine that you're a regular crewmember who wants to do a gimmick, and all you need is a clown mask. Your only option would be to fork over $1000 for a Standard Costume Crate, which includes:

• A full clown costume (including the backpack)
  A bike horn
  A full mime costume (including the backpack)
  A bottle of nothing

Breaking that down, you're forced to buy twelve extra items that nobody wants at a price of ~77 credits per item. That cost becomes even more exorbitantly prohibitive for each clown mask you want. You want three clown masks to start a clown cult? Hope you've got 3000 credits to spend!

Here is my proposed solution to this problem that will make both cargo and credits more relevant.

• 1. Standard Pricing: Each item has a "standard price", included with the item's defines. For instance, a top hat might have a standard price of 25 credits, while an RCD might have a price of 500 credits. These prices may be chosen arbitrarily for each individual item, or might be priced by category (i.e. costume, food item, advanced tool, firearm etc.). Items with no assigned standard price in the code would either be free, or have a default standard price.
  
  2. Vending Machines and Price: Every vending machine has a list of items it can sell in the code. By default, every item would cost the standard price (unless gets it free with the job). Individual vendors may consider an item to be "discounted" or "expensive". These tags apply a multiplier (x0.5 or x2) onto the price for that item for that specific vending machine.
  Spoiler:

  Vendor Price Example: An advanced welding tool has a standard price of $50. The engineering tool vendor sells them for the standard price. The public tool vendor applies the expensive tag to the item however, making it cost $100 credits to purchase from the public tool storage, making it a more premium item for non-engineers.
  3. The New Crate Ordering System: The old cargo order system would be replaced by a "custom order" system. Each item one might be able to order is sorted by category. One tab might offer food items, Another tab might offer weapons et cetera. When making an order, one would add items to their cart individually, and each item will arrive in a crate specifically for the category of item ordered.
  Spoiler:

  Custom Cargo Order Example: Cargo has received two custom order requests from the console. One if from a doctor, who wants 2 burn kits and 2 brute kits. The other is from the clown, who wants an extra chicken suit and five banana cream pies. The orders are approved, and the shuttle is called from Centcomm. Inside the shuttle will be three crates. One is a medical crate, which contains the doctor's brute and burn kits. One is a clothing crate, which contains the clown's chicken costume. The third is a food crate, which contains the clown's banana cream pies.
  4. Cargo Pricing: It will almost always be more expensive to order an item from Centcomm compared to finding it on-station. To order an item from cargo, an "import" multiplier would applied to the item's standard price (possibly x3 or x2.5). For each crate included in the shipment, a flat shipping fee might also be applied.

Were this system to be implemented, I imagine it would be a lot easier for the crew to interact with cargo, and a lot simpler for coders to balance the prices of individual items. The prospects of this getting implemented by any of the coders is slim, but I'd be happy to collaborate with anyone who's interested.

[cedarbridge]

Strict multipliers might be hard to work with on a modular level since they're 1) arbitrary 2) make the price differential between distinct items randomly similar.

Making cargo less bound to ordering entire mixed item batch crates is interesting though. Even if it were just adding the ability for cargo to order "custom" crates that contained only certain items from a buyer-made shopping cart styled list. That way you'd still get a single crate batch of things that cargo can wrap and stuff into the mail chute in one go. Applying some sort of "this shift X, Y, Z items are on sale" discounts to random things might be interesting too in order to give cargo a reason to encourage people to come and buy junk from cargo to fill their budget.

[Tlaltecuhtli]

crates have a sell value of 500 + 200 for manifest so the 1000 clown crate is actually worth 300, you have to rely on cargo actually buying it with their money and maybe just drag a crate from maint to cargo/help with bounties/give plasma sheets so the overall value gives a profit to cargo

[MisterPerson]

I was gonna go on a long rant about inflation/deflation, but there's the summary. Too much money is bad. Ideally the amount coming in would be slightly more than the amount leaving. Any major imbalance should be corrected ASAP.

[Kryson]

Assistant, bartender and to some extent botanist, sec officer and medical doctor have things they want to buy from vendors they cannot instantly afford.

I think many roles are too well off and need their pay cut to be a bit closer to service levels. Even adding just a few desirable items to the appropriate vendors can make credits more meaningful.

Either one big ticket item or several small , preferably both.

My experience playing bartender after champagne was made a 200 credit premium item, receiving tips feel more meaningful and you are happy to sell your spare armor vest to a greytide in order to be able to serve some less seen drinks.

[cedarbridge]

My experience playing bartender after champagne was made a 200 credit premium item, receiving tips feel more meaningful and you are happy to sell your spare armor vest to a greytide in order to be able to serve some less seen drinks.

This is the goal. When you make certain things not easily obtainable for free but give a means to access them by doing your job and interacting with others you're rewarded with more and more interesting things you can do. Being a jobless loser should limit your options while doing things that make you and your department rich should feel rewarding.

[Kenteko]

This is much easier to do than it seems, all of it stemming from simple number play and some quick design decisions. When dealing with monetary values, you need to build off a base number and then tweak and adjust the levers as necessary until you get something that people/the designer are happy with. This may seem challenging, but is in fact quite simple. I'll provide an example with numbers below.

Before we can get started, we are going to split the entire process into two categories: Making money for the individual and making money for the budget. These two will build off one base assumption that you will see going forward, but it serves to start everything on the system with the same assumption. So let's start with individual pay rates.

First set of questions:
1) What is the base pay? (50)
2) What is the cost of a singular good? (10)
3) How many goods can one buy per pay cycle? (5)
4) What is the highest or lowest multiplier allotted? (x10: /10 for an Assistant Pay, x10 for a Captain)
5) How often is a pay cycle? (every 10 minutes)

This now gives us a starting point. Every ten minutes, you can buy five goods with zero price modification. We establish a "good" as an item to buy, ostensibly this can range from tools to cigarettes to anything on a vending machine. Goods intrinsically have different values, as do certain jobs, so here's where we introduce the concept of modifiers working off the base price to adjust goods (and pay) up or down as necessary. Modifiers work off the base value (10) to adjust prices in a way that is consistent and just requires simple labeling to achieve a goal.
Example Modifiers:
Hazard Pay: Any job that faces danger on a regular basis can buy one additional item. At minimum, this means security, engineering, and the clown. (+10)
Specialist: Any job that requires "certification." This is basically for hyper specialized jobs, Virologist, Chemist, Roboticist, Atmos. (+10)
Capitalist: Any job that requires actual constant use of a Vending Machine (+20)
Plentiful: Any good which is, by design, meant to be mass produced or mass available (/10)
Luxury/Collectible: Any good which is, by design, meant to be scarce (*10)
Component: Any good which is part of a component of something bigger, so computer parts or switches (/2)

This settles both accruing money as an individual and the price of goods. These can all be easily applied and created and as long as they remain consistent with what the base designer wants (Cedarbridge in this case), they can be mass adjusted with tweaks here and there. The next part comes with generating money for the station on a macro level, in addition to utilizing the Coin Press and solidifying how most of the economy will work out.

Going into this, the base assumptions are simple: Cargo needs shit to do and we want to incorporate the station as much as possible. Both of these are solved with freight/coins (Cargo) and Bounties (everyone else). Once again, we need to define a few questions to create a baseline using the things we've explored above, while also seeing about how to adjust things on an individual basis if needed.
1) How much is a piece of freight worth, good wise? (1 Freight = 3 goods, so 30)
2) How much is a coin/bit of material worth? (Varies by individual, but we'll assume metal as the baseline, so 10)
3) How much is saved on packages/large orders versus individual/private purchases? (Let's say lump orders reduce individual good costs by half)
4) On the flip side, are there costs to private orders? (We can just add a good service charge of +10)
5) Do budgets grow passively (i.e. based off full staffing budget is wired the funds) or actively (strictly bounties)?

This now gives us a baseline to work with. Every piece of freight we deliver gets us three goods. Likewise, every coin we press (or more accurately, every X metal we use) nets us one good. Finally, on large orders versus individual packages, we get a "savings" of half off, but have to mass order things we may neither want nor need. Suddenly, everything now has a standard to work with and the value of coins goes up as they are worth, at minimum, a good each (unless the coin press makes multiple per amount, at which point the value is divided among the amount of coins printed i.e. if X metal gets 10 coins, each coin costs 1). This handles the cargo budget, but what about the remaining budgets? Simply put, just remove passive gain (aside from worker pay addition) and instead tie them to bounties. Each bounty is already specialized towards a department or job, so when a bounty is completed from a department, just add it straight to the budget. There's many different options here, between splitting it 50/50 with Cargo to allotting bonuses to the individual (this is more for service, i.e. bartender, chef, botany). This promotes jolly cooperation all around, as some people may get a direct reward for getting a bounty done. As for determining the worth of the bounty, just decide how many items you'll get and split it evenly (or not) between cargo and the base department. Small tip: If you want to make it split, but don't want to get to ugh numbers, you can decide how many goods it'll get (10) and then just double it so that when it gets split with cargo, both departments get 100.

Fun addition, you can also accrue money through the recycling program by just slapping the maximum multiplier (/10) for selling the good. You can also include simple things like stamped delivery sheets (+10) or wrapping the freight (+10) to encourage people doing that.

One final note, which gets a little into the realm of complexity, you can wrap this all up with the concept of bonuses. Instead of/in addition to a base pay scale as described above, you can have budgets grant "bonuses" whenever they are over X cash. This grants all employees an extra lump sum decided at the start (remember, how many goods it grants) which encourages more cooperation. If we assume passive growth, you shift when the payment/budget increase comes (5 minutes before the pay, every 10 minutes) and then have it check if there's excess cash in the budget. If yes, simply divide it equally amount all employees. If no, nothing happens.

Hopefully this helps, but it's more to show that this is absolutely not complex. By setting a few standards, the system can be incredibly robust and potent, but requires just some number tweaking. Good game design requires creating those "levers" and adjusting the numbers in a sane way off the base. Every number provided works off the base value of a good, 10, and is easily adjustable. If you want to make this more based off a different number, change the base number and fill in where appropriate.

[Mickyan]

You can't start a post saying your idea is simple and then spend several paragraphs describing something that is definitely not simple

Unless by simple you mean code wise and not the enormous amount of design work to come up with the correct values for everything cause if you just slap some numbers together and hope it works out you get.. exactly what we have now

[Yakumo_Chen]

If you're in need of money, consider just going to your current head of staff and asking for some. 99% of the time heads aren't doing anything with their budget aside from throwing it at cargo and if the player isn't shit, they'll probably willingly give you some cash to work with.

I have a tendency to hand out a stack to anyone that does me a favor when head. Often it makes a good incentive to cargo to deliver me crates if they know extra money is in it for them. (((This issue may have a roleplay solution play at your own risk)))

[Kenteko]

You can't start a post saying your idea is simple and then spend several paragraphs describing something that is definitely not simple

Unless by simple you mean code wise and not the enormous amount of design work to come up with the correct values for everything cause if you just slap some numbers together and hope it works out you get.. exactly what we have now

I wrote a bunch of paragraphs because I wanted to explain where I was coming from and how things are easy to make. I could just give a bunch of numbers and be done with it, but I wanted to show the process.

[cedarbridge]

If you're in need of money, consider just going to your current head of staff and asking for some. 99% of the time heads aren't doing anything with their budget aside from throwing it at cargo and if the player isn't shit, they'll probably willingly give you some cash to work with.

I have a tendency to hand out a stack to anyone that does me a favor when head. Often it makes a good incentive to cargo to deliver me crates if they know extra money is in it for them. (((This issue may have a roleplay solution play at your own risk)))

I see you didn't read the thread. We're discussing how to make currency something with predictable and useful value instead of "go see the RD and his bottomless money card." Among other things.

[zxaber]

3. The New Crate Ordering System: The old cargo order system would be replaced by a "custom order" system. Each item one might be able to order is sorted by category. One tab might offer food items, Another tab might offer weapons et cetera. When making an order, one would add items to their cart individually, and each item will arrive in a crate specifically for the category of item ordered.

Spoiler:

Custom Cargo Order Example: Cargo has received two custom order requests from the console. One if from a doctor, who wants 2 burn kits and 2 brute kits. The other is from the clown, who wants an extra chicken suit and five banana cream pies. The orders are approved, and the shuttle is called from Centcomm. Inside the shuttle will be three crates. One is a medical crate, which contains the doctor's brute and burn kits. One is a clothing crate, which contains the clown's chicken costume. The third is a food crate, which contains the clown's banana cream pies.

By the by, I put in a small items system not too long ago. Small item orders are defined and generally one or two items at max, and come in "combo" boxes grouped by purchaser. In your example, assuming the doctor and clown put in a private order, you would have two boxes; one for the doctor and one for the clown. If it was all requests, then it is on Cargo's dime and it just comes in one box. It's sorta how if you order a bunch of small things from Amazon, you often get just one big box at your door.

The goal was to allow for more individual items without having to have a whole crate for each one. At some point, I think the cargo console UI really needs an overhaul to support a huge number of individual items. Perhaps a search function, that would also find bundles (IE, searching for clown mask shows the "clown mask" on its own and also the costume bundle)?

[cedarbridge]

3. The New Crate Ordering System: The old cargo order system would be replaced by a "custom order" system. Each item one might be able to order is sorted by category. One tab might offer food items, Another tab might offer weapons et cetera. When making an order, one would add items to their cart individually, and each item will arrive in a crate specifically for the category of item ordered.

Spoiler:

Custom Cargo Order Example: Cargo has received two custom order requests from the console. One if from a doctor, who wants 2 burn kits and 2 brute kits. The other is from the clown, who wants an extra chicken suit and five banana cream pies. The orders are approved, and the shuttle is called from Centcomm. Inside the shuttle will be three crates. One is a medical crate, which contains the doctor's brute and burn kits. One is a clothing crate, which contains the clown's chicken costume. The third is a food crate, which contains the clown's banana cream pies.

By the by, I put in a small items system not too long ago. Small item orders are defined and generally one or two items at max, and come in "combo" boxes grouped by purchaser. In your example, assuming the doctor and clown put in a private order, you would have two boxes; one for the doctor and one for the clown. If it was all requests, then it is on Cargo's dime and it just comes in one box. It's sorta how if you order a bunch of small things from Amazon, you often get just one big box at your door.

The goal was to allow for more individual items without having to have a whole crate for each one. At some point, I think the cargo console UI really needs an overhaul to support a huge number of individual items. Perhaps a search function, that would also find bundles (IE, searching for clown mask shows the "clown mask" on its own and also the costume bundle)?

Being able to do this from the console or your PDA (or those department wall request consoles that only the chef/CMO seems to use) might be neat too. Punch your order into your PDA, insert your ID and get your order fee deducted from your account, pick it up at cargo or have it shipped from cargo. Sounds super fun.

[cedarbridge]

Conceptually we could:

Nuke department budgets - They're already huge piles of basically free money that either get gifted to the QM or rides around in the head's wallet (RDs end up with huge piles of creds that they don't really use after the first meaningful test bomb goes off.) This means that cargo goes bananas with free loot crates for themselves and only themselves with minimal reason to interact with the outside world and if science did use/distribute the huge credit bloat they get from test bombs the creds would be more or less worthless due to instant wealth inflation. Best I can tell department budgets were added to assuage complaints from certain departments about access to roundstart essentials (which they don't purchase because most of our maps start packed to the gills with required roundstart materials.)

Tie paydays to the station budget linked to the vault console - Sure, NT is a megacorp, but it would make sense that they set up their payroll budget with a limit in mind. Its a bad investment if I'm contantly dumping resources and funds into a black hole. Better that we tie the paydays to the vault and station budget so that 1) vault theft is meaningful because they're stealing your money and fuck that guy. 2) It encourages station departments to contribute things to enhance that budget through creation and sale and encourages heads to keep their departments productive for the same reason.

Give the HoP access to adjust pay rates - Science fucking around? Dock their pay. Engineering just declared a mutiny? Take away their paychecks Medbay working extra hard and keeping things going smoothly? - Pay raises all around Clown got all access? - Clown and mime and rich and everyone's pissed at them

From there we can take the more limited currency pool and implement (or adjust) a couple of credit faucets (bounties come to mind, though there's been a lot of banter about excess power sale which could be looked at) and a few sinks (traders, expensive station goal parts, etc) as well as the already implemented Space Pirates. Give normal traitors goals to steal X amount of credits and escape (TC-granted cash doesn't count because its counterfeit or something)

This could likely result in cargo becoming more akin to a commissary (they place orders for common things and sell them to make a profit to the crew to buy more things to sell to the crew etc) but also the shipping dock for other departments to sell off their department's produce and contribute to the station's budget. This final amount could be added to the end-round score card or we could take a cue from other servers with econ systems and just have a line for "richest spaceman" to show off whoever had the most credits in their account at round end. This wouldn't be as easy as now because we got rid of the free credit stacks in step 1.

[zxaber]

I wouldn't say we should completely remove department budgets, but we could drastically reduce the round-start amount.

I'd really like to see a bit of a restructuring on how departments get money. Heads of staff have their stamp, and we could add the ability to stamp a package to mark it as an Engineering/Science/whatever export. Drop it off at cargo for delivery to centcomm, and place the revenue into the appropriate department's budget (Oranges recommended 20% going to Cargo when I last mentioned this offhand). It would need some way to track packages to see which ones have been sold (so that you know Cargo isn't just opening the packages and then selling off the things themselves). From here, we could implement things that a department could work on for cash (the fabled engineering selling power idea, perhaps tech-node items randomly chosen for science to research and produce, medbay could sell alien organs and viruses and perhaps genetics power syringes).

Personal income should come from a void, or at least a budget that's not linked to any existing department (is this the station budget?). It's not totally realistic, but at the same time heads of staff don't have an easy method of cutting down their job openings without getting the HoP to do it, so everyone is more of a freelancer working for NT as a whole anyway.

[terranaut]

This is only gonna be a problem in a small amount of rounds but enough for me to bring it up;
if budget cards were nuked there'd need to be a way to make large amounts of money quickly at least at roundstart, because War Ops is a thing.
Alternatively restructure the tech web to make ballistic weapons more accessible, I guess.

Other minor things might need adjustment, like giving Engineering most of the parts for alternative designs and only requiring a small, cheap addition from cargo to assemble the whole thing (as it is, the parts for another engine eat up about the entire roundstart budget of Engineering). I wouldn't like to see the option of setting these up straight away go.
There's probably a lot of other options that the budget cards being around at roundstart open that don't immediately spring to mind that'll require some sort of changes.

Having said that, arbitrarily making up numbers that sorta feel right -- and being open to adjusting them for a while -- is probably the most viable way for a project like this.

[zxaber]

I think engine parts costs are fine. You can make a good deal more power than is necessary with some SM tweaking (and a certain plasmeme admeme has shown me that once a proper quantity of Trit is obtained, you can make power levels through the roof on a mostly-unmodified cooling loop). Anyway, buying parts is a "spend money to make money" situation, which isn't so bad of a system.

[Tlaltecuhtli]

budget money gains are literally placeholders, they should start at 5000 and give u money for being ABOVE the standard instead of “hey the apcs are almost all charged, who would have guessed”

[cedarbridge]

This is only gonna be a problem in a small amount of rounds but enough for me to bring it up;
if budget cards were nuked there'd need to be a way to make large amounts of money quickly at least at roundstart, because War Ops is a thing.
Alternatively restructure the tech web to make ballistic weapons more accessible, I guess.

I'm not sure about this. Crews have handled warrops pre-budget cards just fine (pre-econ even). The crew's intended advantage is not that they have an inexaustible number of guns of every flavor but that they wildly outnumber the ops and have advanced warning that they're coming. Fail rate on warrops is already pretty high with or without budgets so I don't see that as a major loss for the crew.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Also the way you quickly get a load of cash for war ops w/o the budget card memes is that you send out a call to bring all crates to cargo, to send them back for moolah

[cedarbridge]

Also the way you quickly get a load of cash for war ops w/o the budget card memes is that you send out a call to bring all crates to cargo, to send them back for moolah

It also incentivizes departments to just cooperate with bounty requests instead of ignoring them.

[adamkad1]

On a personal level payout difference between jobs need to be flatter because a 2000% paycheck increase between the lowest and highest paying job (ignoring heads since having free access to budget means their personal account is irrelevant) is impossible to balance and you end up with nonsense like a security webbing costing 800 credits and virtually unlimited money for everything else

Also the NEET quirk completely invalidates one of the current strongest advantages of the economy as it currently stands which is dynamically limiting the amount of tools assistants can get their hands on and I hate it, I hate it so much and it's not surprising it's a favorite of assistant mains

i rarely play assistant and pick neet so i dont have to shower, so if it was nerfed in money way i wouldnt care