I personally still believe that the pay for legal jobs should be increased, merely for the time it'll really take to afford those goals you mention. For a job with a standard $110 pay, $192.5 as premium, and let's say it's the default 40% tax, you're making about $115.5 a minute, or $6930 an hour. If your goal is to buy a car like, for example, the Morgan Aero SS that costs $1,200,000.00, you'll have to spend roughly 173 hours on this job, not to include any downtime if you die/get knocked out, or money spent on food. Let's say you're only able to play for 4 hours a day (School/Work?), it'll take you over 43 days just to afford this car, if you don't spend a single dollar on anything else.
I do get that the idea is to keep players around while they go for these goals, but if a new player knew how long it'd actually take to afford their dream car by working as roadcrew, don't you think they'll be discouraged at least a little bit?
Even before drugs were changed to their current state, I could make about 700k a day, so affording that new player's dream car could be achieved for me within 48 hours. Of course, that's if I spend most of my day on the server, growing, but this is just an example. And with today's state of drugs, you can rather easily ramp that up to over 1 million per day, if you play your cards right. But if a new player, who has premium, spends 10 hours in a day playing as roadcrew, and getting an additional $500 every 10 minutes for repairs/impound, they'd be looking at a total of $99.3k for all their work. 10 hours for a fraction of what someone growing drugs could make in both the current and the old system.
And as far as goals go, I believe players are quick to find new ones. I mean, it seems quite apparent some people join merely for the PvP aspect of raiding, shootouts with police, etc., and there's lots of that going on all the time. (Perhaps except for when it's 15 people against 2 or 3, at which point it gets kind of sad). In my case, I constantly have the goal of getting new cars. I don't go for my favorite (because it's not on perp cough cough), but for cars I just generally like, or are underused. Right now, I already have my Audi R8, Jaguar F-Type, Ford Mustang GT, Dodge Challenger 1970 and of course my Ford Raptor, but I am still working on saving up for the next car, and the next after that. I even did this back in 2015, buying random cars almost every day, and tuning them up, although back then I did it to get a lot of ricer-looking cars and chose at random.
Anyway, back to what I was saying; I still believe the pay for legal jobs should be increased. If we go with what
@LEWIS 088 suggests and the default RC pay is $400, $700 for premium, that's suddenly $42k an hour for roadcrew workers, which is slightly more than what the old weed and cocaine could net you, but isn't quite as much as drugs can get you right now. This will change the time required for new players to get their shiny new $1,200,000.00 car from 173 hours, to slightly more than 28.5 hours. Doesn't sound so bad for a new player with premium, but perhaps it can be seen as a bit excessive. If the standard pay would be something like $280 instead, $490 for premium players, that would be 29.4k an hour, and they'd get their car within 41 hours of work, which I believe is fair enough for the time invested. Of course, once again assuming that they get an additional $500 every 10 minutes for repairs/impound, that's an extra 3k an hour, and would cut down the time to roughly 37 hours to get their car.
Also, I picked roadcrew an example through this because it's probably the easiest to determine a rough money/hour for, since Medic, Firefighter, Taxi and Courier are all pretty situational regarding what they can make, cops have all their ranks and stuff to deal with, and I didn't really want to talk about mayor/ss.
EDIT: I am aware I forgot to include 40% tax in my calculations for everything besides the current standard pay, please don't sue me I noticed just 5 seconds after I posted and my brain is dead.
