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Yes, 100% of the money is now in Banded Bank Notes. Before there was a split to gold bars. Again, just another change I thought we would try for a bit...
Gotta pick up the rubber. No way to "deposit" that anywhere...
OK, I'm going to relent (temporarily) and test something out. Both of the main changes in this patch are temporary. We're going to see how it effects things and then react. With that being said:
Money from the cartel fridge(s) will now automatically deposit into the gang account of the gang who owns the cartel. This happens on an incremental basis (every 5 minutes), so you will still see money in the fridge (and can take it if it is there). The trade off here is that we are no longer generating money to go into the fridge. People have to sell drugs, turtles, scotch, etc to fill up Drug and Wong's. People have to buy things at Rebel to fill up Arms.
All proceeds from robbing the bank will now be Banded Bank Notes. No more gold bars from the bank. Banded Bank Notes introduce a time wait to deposit money from the bank, so the APD can still chase you down...
Exiting a vehicle should maintain your weapon fire rate (as it used to). This was a bug from the performance patch.
Additional performance enhancements. Minor things, but hey were still working on that too.
Hotfix 1:
Y inventory should now drop to the ground where expected when someone dies in a vehicle.
Hotfix 2:
Increased the prison break combat radius
Increased the radius that prisoners can move around in the prison (get shanking boys)
Made a small map change at the prison to (hopefully) prevent an exploit
Hotfix 3:
Tweaked the prison radius again. Should solve both issues: not being able to create shanks and the inability to escape after a prison break.
I'm coding something up to let you guys have this for a week or two as a test. I'm doing it in a lazy way, but it will be low effort on my part to make it so (and then undo it if necessary).
OK, so let's take a look at this from my side of the fence. As a preface, since many of you probably don't know, I was part of the gang scene back in the day (no, I wasn't always a cop on the servers) - so I do have an appreciation for your arguments (whether you think I do or not). I'll go through point by point on your comments and then add my own...
@Steve's points:
Advantages of the fridge:
It absolutely makes more money for your gang in the current methodology - provided you actually clear out the fridge.
This is a double edged sword of sorts. Back in Innovative we had a member who at night would "watch the cartels". What he was really doing was cleaning out the gang bank (he was rank 2), albeit he was doing it slowly. So even though the money was going directly into the gang bank, he still had access to this money. Therefore, I call this one a wash in my opinion.
Agreed. Who doesn't love robbing the solo guy who thinks he's safe at rebel right?
Disadvantages of the fridge:
Having your "name on the map" is not a bad thing. Also, that fridge is constantly generating money. If someone taps the cap (fridge or not), you stop generating income into your bank account.
I think having rats at rebel increases the sense that rebel isn't safe, but that's just me.
This happens regardless of system we use. If the gang controlling a cartel isn't online, then they are not really controlling the cartel are they?
See point 2 from above. Members of sufficient rank are doing this now anyway, we are just not telling you about it...
You see a disadvantage, I see the need to try to protect those people because I know they are actively on a run - and I make more money if they make money.
Advantages of auto paying cartels:
Gangs shouldn't have to pickup the money every 20-30 minutes now. I've let the money roll over between play sessions (which is a pretty big buff to the cartel fridge honestly), so even at server reset you no longer have to be rushing to get this done before the server restarts.
Holding the cartel is important either way. You have to hold it to make money. With the auto paying cartel though, if you know no one is running drugs then there is no incentive for you to fight for that cap. With the fridge money pours in either way.
I'll explain why I feel like your logic for this is flawed down below.
Disadvantages of the auto paying cartels:
True. You will always have less money making potential without us creating money for you. You're basically getting a bonus for having your name on the map right now. Also, the higher the player count, the higher that bonus is (did you know that?).
True.
True.
OK, there's my thoughts on all of @Steve's thoughts. Now with that being said, let's talk about why lots of these types of changes were made back in the day (well before I was a developer here, but while I was an admin/CM/etc).
Back in April or so of 2015 (I think it was 2015) there was a meta on the server of 2 major gangs splitting the cartels and each holding 2. There was a gentleman's agreement not to go after each other's cartels, and to help defend the other gang's cartels if they came under attack. This lasted for a month or two on each server, and then the two dominate gangs on S1 decided to just merge and became Innovative. Now a single gang on S1 held all 4 cartels virtually 24 hours a day. Inevitably, there was some small period of the night where all the members would be offline (we had 40-50 overall members IIRC) so the window was small - but that was the only time someone would take the cartel from us. I work at home, so each morning I'd drink coffee, check email, and afk cap all the cartels back for us (and I almost never got shot at). This meta spread to the other servers. S1 had Innovative, S2 had Bad Blood, etc. etc.
During this time, hardly anyone fought for control of the cartels. Each member of Innovative got between 2 and 4 million per week in gang payouts because the money literally just flowed in with no end in sight. Gangs got bigger and bigger, had "unlimited" money, and wreaked havoc on the server(s). I'm not going to say it wasn't fun for us (because it was), but at some point we missed people actually wanting to fight for the cartels. Anyone who was worth having would join our gang, so there was no real competition. There were no fights to be had - except against the other large gang on every server - the APD.
Gangs during this period absolutely ravaged the APD. Better equipment, no fear of losing gear because defibs had been introduced (and you always outnumbered the APD so you always got a revive), and always seeming to have numbers on the cops. We robbed and pillaged everyone who didn't buy a "meth pass" (another huge source of income for the gang allowing us to make money on people playing twice). We even robbed people doing legal stuff and would let them live (and keep their truck) if they promised to start running drugs so we could make more money that way.
It was the gang golden era. No doubts about it. But eventually we just got... bored... No fights except the APD, and we always beat them. People would only troll cap part of the cartel to be jackasses, but we'd have to fly over and run up to the cartel only to have to sit there while it went back to 100% from 90.
The devs noticed that no one was fighting for the cartels. The whole point of the cartels was to bring fights to the server, and it wasn't doing that since everyone was holding hands and not actually fighting over them. So an idea was born. An idea of giving something to actually fight for at the cartel itself. Enter the era of the fridge. A decision was made to actually just "create" money to make it more attractive to fight for the fridge. By this time we had dropped the group and gang hex limits, but that had not dissuaded the more organized large gangs from staying huge.
The fridge system, however, did finally get smaller gangs to want to go and challenge for the cartels. Part of this was that the larger gangs got frustrated that money wasn't just flowing straight into their gang banks. The big gangs said "there's not enough money there to even be worth fighting for", yet dirty money became the #1 (or #2) money maker on the servers when you look at the logs ($32M in the last week). But the smaller gangs could see there was money in controlling the cartels, so they actually went for them now. People were actually using the fridge system, and they still do.
That brings us to where we are today. We've made a few concessions along the way to try to bring back the feel that some of you want. We have slowly increased the group cap, we have tweaked the amounts of "created" money going into the cartels, and finally we have made the fridge not reset with the server (making fighting for the cartel at server startup something that is "worth doing"). The community goals system also has an increase to what the fridge can hold, giving veterans who may not have donated in years a reason to kick in for server costs occasionally.
Now, with all of that being said... I'm not opposed to ideas that try to keep the spirit of what we want intact. We want you guys to fight. Going back to the direct deposit method I really fear will just bring back "super gangs" and will not actually get you fights at the cartels. It will at first, but that will end when people realize they can make more money by just grouping up and having no real rival on each server.
Does it make sense what the devs are hoping to do here? We want you to have a reason to fight, and not have a reason to hold hands and have free money super gangs. We want you guys to have an incentive to go out and rob people (or is it protect them) who are running drugs. We want you to have a reason to go and do the higher end content (fed, bank, prison break), but we don't want them to devolve into cop sport shoots.
I'm open to ideas, but going back to the old days is not necessarily the panacea that some of you think it would be...
Bamf
P.S. Why are you guys still thinking that the market system prevents doing "community" runs of anything? The high end drugs don't start taking a hit on price until 1500 are on the market. How many HEMTTs is that again of a drug before you take even a single dollar hit???
There appears to be an issue with the Steam OpenID service that we utilize to log you into the My Asylum webpage. Hopefully they will get it fixed soon.
I thank you for being concerned about Altis Police Department.
I can assure you, at this point in time, there is no lack of "power" and no one person is solely responsible for the paradigm shift you believe there is.
While we can all sit here and name a handful of good officers that deserve the role, we cannot leave this choice to a popular vote. That has led to plenty of issues in the past.
I think I can speak for all of the Captains and assure you we will observe and review our options of those eligible for the rank.
For the record APD officers will still actually have to go up two ladders before getting to the stairs. So anyone saying its to hard to hold the staircase needs to not hold the staircase and watch the two other ladders officers have to go up beforehand.
Now you can't just lay on the roof endlessly, you will actually have to peak.
