Suggestion Title: Criminal Gameplay Rework
Suggestion Description: Rework the criminal gameplay loop in such a way that directly forces or encourages players to interact with one another while taking more meaningful risks, instead of creating a community of players that mostly stay AFK in a property growing/drying while waiting to be raided.
Drugs should be more interactive, whether by adding more depth to the systems at play (perhaps a drug quality system like SantosRP), or by changing the way players make money from drugs (dynamic price changes, sell limits, dealers for each type of drug). More ideas can be taken from SantosRP that can enrich the quality of gameplay in general, like the in-depth cooking system: you can cook foods of varying qualities, and the higher the quality, the more beneficial it is to your character. This introduces a new avenue for money-making, as the PVP min-maxxers will want to stock up on the highest quality goods to ensure they have the edge. I understand that, if you were not a player at the time SantosRP was active, SantosRP is not a very good template for criminal roleplay, as a majority (if not all) of the roleplay in any gameplay videos produced for SantosRP on YouTube were likely manufactured by the same person. However, there are ideas in this gamemode that I really think would work in PERPHeads.
Drug quality could be implemented with little to no friction (with my naive understanding of developing for such a large codebase in mind). The drug dealer would sell seeds of varying qualities, with limited stock: Low, Medium, and High. Low quality seeds would share the current seed price for weed/coca, while Medium and High would be more expensive. Seeding planters should not always give identical quality seeds, they should have a chance to drop higher or identical quality seeds, but very rarely lower quality seeds. High quality drugs would share the current sale price for weed/cocaine, and Medium/Low would scale downward. In terms of methamphetamine, quality would be only determined for the finished product. The quality would be determined by checking how well the methamphetamine was cooked, either by tracking how fast a given player cooks it, how close the temperature is to the target, et cetera. This would be a meaningful buff to methamphetamine without making it too easy. It would also make drug production more interactive and varied. If anything, drug quality should only be added to methamphetamine; and I actually think this makes more sense than adding it to weed/mushrooms. Nothing has to be done to grow these two, you just plant them and wait until they're done. Quality would be an arbitrary attribute for these two, and wouldn't change much.
Expanding on the "dynamic price changes" mentioned earlier, I thought of this when reading about Counter-Strike: Source's patch history. They had an update where weapons would dynamically change price based on the demand of players. This update flopped hard and was reverted very quickly, but the idea remained interesting to me because it could work for the drug dealer. For example, if people haven't sold any cocaine to him in a while, he'll want more of it. When people sell cocaine to him, the price he pays for it lowers and lowers until it reaches some lowest price. This encourages people to diversify their drug creation, so they don't put all of their eggs in one basket and end up losing money in the long run. At some point, the drug dealer could also tell you to come back later when he wants more of a specific drug, if he's been sold way too much of it. This wouldn't completely discourage players from only making one type of drug, but it would end up in significantly less income if they compared it to a more varied production workflow.
Another idea for drug changes would be to take a note out of Chop Shop and make any money gained from the Drug Dealer "dirty". What this means is that the money must be laundered by completing some intermediate action, like dropping it off to someone at a certain time and place, or whatever. This would make it harder for people to sell their drugs by making it riskier and lengthier of a process, which would, in turn, make it more interesting for the PD, which might be able to intervene.
Criminal gameplay should not be entirely focused on either drugs or raiding, as this is a roleplay server. I understand the point of the server is not to be an ultra-realistic roleplay fest, rather a more realistic version of Cops vs. Robbers, but the current meta is still too stale and boring once players reach the endgame. Right now, the endgame only consists of gambling at the casino and raiding with G3A3/AS50 every raid. Even though it's fun to use the AS50, it is still incredibly boring to just stomp raids nonstop. It's reaching a point where a lot of people (including myself) are getting fatigued with the constant raidspam with AS50s and G3A3s by the top orgs on the server. Some of the best moments I've had with PvP on this server have involved roleplaying situations where KOS was not instantaneously gained and/or acted upon. Raiding cuts all of the roleplay out of the gamemode, unless you count being revived and arrested by the Police as roleplay. I'm not against adding the ability to rob NPC-owned stores, or steal packages/cargo from certain parts of the map (casino loading dock, PPS), but this on its own is a big change that needs to be discussed with players of the community and developers. I understand the developers' reluctance to add content that involves players not being put in the driver's seat, but it may be necessary to add more substance to PERPHeads' criminal gameplay loop.
Why should this be added?:
- This directly addresses the current boring gameplay loop of grow -> harvest -> dry -> sell -> gamble/spend -> repeat, that most, if not all players (including me) are tired of, by possibly introducing more interactivity and depth to the drug systems present in the gamemode
- Criminals will have more to do than to raid -> bring planters to a property -> wait 30 min -> repeat, and/or sit in a base AFK and tabbed out while waiting for their drugs to finish growing.
- Making money without PvP can be more interesting and not so boring, by adding things like robbing NPC-owned stores and businesses, instead of only drug production. Loosening the restrictions around robbing players (whether by scamming, mugging, or other means) could also help, but this is a substantial change that can likely hurt more than it would help.
- Community sentiment across multiple forum posts over a significant timespan demonstrates that something must change with the criminal gameplay loop. This is a long standing issue that needs to be addressed, or else the server will begin to dwindle in playercount.
- Roleplay should be PRIORITIZED, not minimized. Criminal players nowadays don't meaningfully interact with each other unless it involves a raid.
- PD can more meaningfully contribute to roleplay. Currently, the PD gameplay loop consists of seeing a life alert -> respond to the life alert -> die to raiders -> respawn -> see a life alert -> respond to the life alert -> arrest raiders -> raiders shout 10 toes through the floor of the PD lobby -> pd raid -> die to raiders -> etc. The majority of PD players are not RTU, and even RTU have to respond to raids sometimes.
What negatives could this have?:
- Such a rework will take a long time to develop. Fresh ideas are hard to come by, especially those that can fit with the philosophy of the developers, which is why I haven't outlined many of my own ideas in this suggestion.
- If these changes are not widely agreed upon by the community, you run the risk of causing a server-wide exodus of the community's crim players.
- Added complexity to gamemode systems introduces a problem for newer players, who will need more onboarding guides and tools to integrate into the community
What problem would this suggestion solve?:
- YOU CAN MAKE MORE MONEY IN 24H BY SITTING AFK IN A BASE POWERGROWING THAN ANYONE ELSE ON THE SERVER. For a server that calls itself a ROLEPLAY server, this is FAR FROM OKAY. Staff members who are reading this can (and should) check my logs. All of my logs in the past week has been powergrowing. I've been raided only 4 times while playing when the server was full (one of which was approx. 36 min ago as of writing), and 0 times (if I recall correctly) when the server was at 60-90 players. I've lost one raid in total. If I were to dry the leaves I have in my inventory, I would make 1-2 million dollars, over less than 24 hours of gameplay/work (if I've done my homework correctly). There exists no government job that can match this flow of income, even if you win every single raid as a TFU and manage to confiscate 30 AS50s at full pop daily.
- 90% of PVP is raid spam, and almost none of that involves any roleplay. Hostage situations are deeply flawed, for reasons described best in the PLPD is a joke thread.
- Criminal endgame is extremely shallow, leaving a lot of high-skill high-playtime players without much to do on the server except constantly raid with expensive equipment and gamble. This ends up making the overall PvP experience worse for newer players, as they don't stand a chance against even average-playtime (3 months) players. If you didn't get in on the ground floor, and chances are you didn't, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle almost all of the time you engage in PvP.
Below is an abbreviated list of issues I personally have with PvP on PERPHeads, which directly inspired this post.
Suggestion Description: Rework the criminal gameplay loop in such a way that directly forces or encourages players to interact with one another while taking more meaningful risks, instead of creating a community of players that mostly stay AFK in a property growing/drying while waiting to be raided.
Drugs should be more interactive, whether by adding more depth to the systems at play (perhaps a drug quality system like SantosRP), or by changing the way players make money from drugs (dynamic price changes, sell limits, dealers for each type of drug). More ideas can be taken from SantosRP that can enrich the quality of gameplay in general, like the in-depth cooking system: you can cook foods of varying qualities, and the higher the quality, the more beneficial it is to your character. This introduces a new avenue for money-making, as the PVP min-maxxers will want to stock up on the highest quality goods to ensure they have the edge. I understand that, if you were not a player at the time SantosRP was active, SantosRP is not a very good template for criminal roleplay, as a majority (if not all) of the roleplay in any gameplay videos produced for SantosRP on YouTube were likely manufactured by the same person. However, there are ideas in this gamemode that I really think would work in PERPHeads.
Drug quality could be implemented with little to no friction (with my naive understanding of developing for such a large codebase in mind). The drug dealer would sell seeds of varying qualities, with limited stock: Low, Medium, and High. Low quality seeds would share the current seed price for weed/coca, while Medium and High would be more expensive. Seeding planters should not always give identical quality seeds, they should have a chance to drop higher or identical quality seeds, but very rarely lower quality seeds. High quality drugs would share the current sale price for weed/cocaine, and Medium/Low would scale downward. In terms of methamphetamine, quality would be only determined for the finished product. The quality would be determined by checking how well the methamphetamine was cooked, either by tracking how fast a given player cooks it, how close the temperature is to the target, et cetera. This would be a meaningful buff to methamphetamine without making it too easy. It would also make drug production more interactive and varied. If anything, drug quality should only be added to methamphetamine; and I actually think this makes more sense than adding it to weed/mushrooms. Nothing has to be done to grow these two, you just plant them and wait until they're done. Quality would be an arbitrary attribute for these two, and wouldn't change much.
Expanding on the "dynamic price changes" mentioned earlier, I thought of this when reading about Counter-Strike: Source's patch history. They had an update where weapons would dynamically change price based on the demand of players. This update flopped hard and was reverted very quickly, but the idea remained interesting to me because it could work for the drug dealer. For example, if people haven't sold any cocaine to him in a while, he'll want more of it. When people sell cocaine to him, the price he pays for it lowers and lowers until it reaches some lowest price. This encourages people to diversify their drug creation, so they don't put all of their eggs in one basket and end up losing money in the long run. At some point, the drug dealer could also tell you to come back later when he wants more of a specific drug, if he's been sold way too much of it. This wouldn't completely discourage players from only making one type of drug, but it would end up in significantly less income if they compared it to a more varied production workflow.
Another idea for drug changes would be to take a note out of Chop Shop and make any money gained from the Drug Dealer "dirty". What this means is that the money must be laundered by completing some intermediate action, like dropping it off to someone at a certain time and place, or whatever. This would make it harder for people to sell their drugs by making it riskier and lengthier of a process, which would, in turn, make it more interesting for the PD, which might be able to intervene.
Criminal gameplay should not be entirely focused on either drugs or raiding, as this is a roleplay server. I understand the point of the server is not to be an ultra-realistic roleplay fest, rather a more realistic version of Cops vs. Robbers, but the current meta is still too stale and boring once players reach the endgame. Right now, the endgame only consists of gambling at the casino and raiding with G3A3/AS50 every raid. Even though it's fun to use the AS50, it is still incredibly boring to just stomp raids nonstop. It's reaching a point where a lot of people (including myself) are getting fatigued with the constant raidspam with AS50s and G3A3s by the top orgs on the server. Some of the best moments I've had with PvP on this server have involved roleplaying situations where KOS was not instantaneously gained and/or acted upon. Raiding cuts all of the roleplay out of the gamemode, unless you count being revived and arrested by the Police as roleplay. I'm not against adding the ability to rob NPC-owned stores, or steal packages/cargo from certain parts of the map (casino loading dock, PPS), but this on its own is a big change that needs to be discussed with players of the community and developers. I understand the developers' reluctance to add content that involves players not being put in the driver's seat, but it may be necessary to add more substance to PERPHeads' criminal gameplay loop.
Why should this be added?:
- This directly addresses the current boring gameplay loop of grow -> harvest -> dry -> sell -> gamble/spend -> repeat, that most, if not all players (including me) are tired of, by possibly introducing more interactivity and depth to the drug systems present in the gamemode
- Criminals will have more to do than to raid -> bring planters to a property -> wait 30 min -> repeat, and/or sit in a base AFK and tabbed out while waiting for their drugs to finish growing.
- Making money without PvP can be more interesting and not so boring, by adding things like robbing NPC-owned stores and businesses, instead of only drug production. Loosening the restrictions around robbing players (whether by scamming, mugging, or other means) could also help, but this is a substantial change that can likely hurt more than it would help.
- Community sentiment across multiple forum posts over a significant timespan demonstrates that something must change with the criminal gameplay loop. This is a long standing issue that needs to be addressed, or else the server will begin to dwindle in playercount.
- Roleplay should be PRIORITIZED, not minimized. Criminal players nowadays don't meaningfully interact with each other unless it involves a raid.
- PD can more meaningfully contribute to roleplay. Currently, the PD gameplay loop consists of seeing a life alert -> respond to the life alert -> die to raiders -> respawn -> see a life alert -> respond to the life alert -> arrest raiders -> raiders shout 10 toes through the floor of the PD lobby -> pd raid -> die to raiders -> etc. The majority of PD players are not RTU, and even RTU have to respond to raids sometimes.
What negatives could this have?:
- Such a rework will take a long time to develop. Fresh ideas are hard to come by, especially those that can fit with the philosophy of the developers, which is why I haven't outlined many of my own ideas in this suggestion.
- If these changes are not widely agreed upon by the community, you run the risk of causing a server-wide exodus of the community's crim players.
- Added complexity to gamemode systems introduces a problem for newer players, who will need more onboarding guides and tools to integrate into the community
What problem would this suggestion solve?:
- YOU CAN MAKE MORE MONEY IN 24H BY SITTING AFK IN A BASE POWERGROWING THAN ANYONE ELSE ON THE SERVER. For a server that calls itself a ROLEPLAY server, this is FAR FROM OKAY. Staff members who are reading this can (and should) check my logs. All of my logs in the past week has been powergrowing. I've been raided only 4 times while playing when the server was full (one of which was approx. 36 min ago as of writing), and 0 times (if I recall correctly) when the server was at 60-90 players. I've lost one raid in total. If I were to dry the leaves I have in my inventory, I would make 1-2 million dollars, over less than 24 hours of gameplay/work (if I've done my homework correctly). There exists no government job that can match this flow of income, even if you win every single raid as a TFU and manage to confiscate 30 AS50s at full pop daily.
- 90% of PVP is raid spam, and almost none of that involves any roleplay. Hostage situations are deeply flawed, for reasons described best in the PLPD is a joke thread.
- Criminal endgame is extremely shallow, leaving a lot of high-skill high-playtime players without much to do on the server except constantly raid with expensive equipment and gamble. This ends up making the overall PvP experience worse for newer players, as they don't stand a chance against even average-playtime (3 months) players. If you didn't get in on the ground floor, and chances are you didn't, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle almost all of the time you engage in PvP.
Below is an abbreviated list of issues I personally have with PvP on PERPHeads, which directly inspired this post.
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