Cartel life exists, but only barely. I think that it could be improved with a proper rework.
The main problems afflicting cartel life I see are i) lack of incentive and ii) lack of consistently good cartel spots to fight
Incentives:
Drug cartel is incentivized enough. However, as it stands, there's virtually no incentive to cap arms for most gangs. I think that another issue, overly cheap ifrits, could be fixed in an effective manner at the same time as providing better reason to cap arms; something like a 33-50% tax on everything at rebel, including vehicles such as orcas and ifrits as well as loadouts, with the tax going to the owner of the arms cartel. This could decrease the ubiquity of ifrits at cartels, while at the same time further incentivizing capping arms--not only for the greater income, but also for access to cheaper loadouts/vehicles. The current $2-3k rake per loadout is virtually nothing given the inflated economy, and I could see a likewise 33-50% tax being enough to incentivize capping arms for the income/cheaper loadouts but not enough to discourage those without access to cartels from buying loadouts.
It's fair to say that rebel is too cheap given the current economy, and a solution like this would fix rebel being too cheap, while being more enjoyable from a gameplay perspective than a flat increase. Suicide vests are a good example of this; they were identified as being too cheap, so they had a flat increase to $240k from $65k, and people were made upset, not only because it was a dramatic increase, but because there was no good way to dampen the blow. But if instead, it was made $160k, with a 50% arms cartel tax added onto that, it would be more reasonable to buy if you were willing and able to cap arms, while still providing the intended effect of significantly reducing sui vest spam. So if this change was implemented, ifrits would be more expensive, but it would still be reasonable to purchase if you could cap arms--the base price could be changed to something like $80k, and the post-arms tax would be $120k.
Cartel locations:
The current cartel fighting locations on Asylum aren't bad, but the randomness aspect should be tuned down. There is really no reason that OG shouldn't be a static cartel location for arms--it is by far the favorite location for gangs to fight on, and when half the time it's church instead, people don't want to fight as much. I think a workable solution to keep alternatives to OG, while making arms static at OG, would be to move wongs to arms island and make it alternate between church and east arms. The wongs location north of therisa could also be included in the rotation, but there's no reason the north wongs cap should be in the game. It's always an AFK cap because nobody cares enough to go all the way across the map to fight a mediocre cap.
These are just a couple of ideas I have. I don't really care what ideas get implemented, I am just hoping for something to change that could bring more often fights back to server 1.
