In my opinion, also as a non staff but as a rebel player during the Bottlestreet/Sunrise era...I can definitley say the "magic" is gone. While occasionly I do still see some great RP, it is mostly influenced or pushed by me as a BMD. Back in the bottlestreet era the rebels seemed like a mystery. If you wanted to join them, it was really-really hard to pinpoint who rebels were or where they were hiding. It's safe to say it took a lot of effort to track down a rebel group and then join one.
Now, they all hang out in the shelter/park in full gear talking ab their latest trash run and comparing the size of their dicks...*coughs* I mean guns. They seem to get the two confused though. And that is because the systems in place have bread that behavior. Anyway, here is how I think we could bring back some of that magic:
1) Remove the DoB. They fucking suck. Go back to the CWU system. They "suck" due to poor ooc/ic management, gatekeeping of which type of stores you can have, never being active and making the lack of stores worse by claiming some to be unusable. It honestly feels like that whatever store owner gets the DoB Director role just uses their poisition to create an monopoly and keep their store "the best" and making the most money. You can see this from O'Hairs & The Pint. (Gotfried Hansen & O'Hair both from The O'Hairs Store have been Directors. In that time O'Hair's was the best store statistically. Now with Zoey Grodno, The Pint is center stage.) Back in the CWU era of store management, pretty much anyone was able to get a store and was able to set up in Indigent, build stalls, and have their business sell whatever they want without Zoey Grdono saying "Well we already have the pint so no threats to me...i mean, no bars. Wait what?". Additionly, the Department of Business store in Victory 3 is the least active store and just a waste of space for potentislly another great store. It's an empty shell of what it once was when it held places like The Sanctum of Breen. Which, if you know the story there...was actually a source for a lot of rebel rp
Rant aside, stores compliment rebel rp as fronts, as well as sources for certain materials like raw alcohol. I have even seen them as ways to launder chips into credits. All of which being great RP. But with the DoB in place, we will never see those avenues of RP again. (It's worth noting I think the DoB is an issue within itself and killing city rp as well)
2) Increase the "material cost" of everything so that items are more expensive. I'd go as far as to say just double everything and make a chip 1/4 of the value of a credit instead of 1/2.
3) Make trashbags more scarce. Back in the bottlestreet era there was like what...8 locations in and around the slums? Now there is like 40 or even more. I'd drastically decrease it so that people cannot build an entire rebel alliance out of literally somone else's trash. (Especially now with the introduction of player bmds, we can start to move the focus away from npc traders)
In the B/S era, trashbags were not sustainable nor a source to build an empire on. We mainly relied on shotcops, to then sell their gear to a BMD or keep their weapons for ourselves (USP matches & MP7's were much more common place back then). We'd also rely on expeditions or admin bmd events in the event box to aquire materials or perhaps even better weapons. All of which with a decent pk risk attatched. Trashbags were just...trash. They were a bonus that if we saw one we'd pick it up, but we wouldn't go looking for them. The most we ever needed trashbags for was to mass produce water bottles, flashlights and lighters. Water bottles for drinking and flashlights and lighters so that our smuggling rebels in our group can make some chips for us by selling them. (That was another thing, with the old systems many rebels used to have a focus. Whether it be a smuggler in the group, a crafter, a doctor, etc)
