A
AdamCF
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- Thread Author
- #1
While I know some people are definitely going to disagree with this thread as a whole, we can all agree on the fact that stores are painfully inactive. There's a few which are up and running fine, but the majority close in the first week.
From what I've seen, stores often go inactive after a very specific cycle repeats itself. People might not want to buy anything at that store for a day either due to competing businesses or due to, I don't know, a 2-hour increase in the ration timer increasing the scarcity of credits. This then results in the store manager, and any employees, aren't on that day. This then results in your store gaining the reputation of being inactive to some who saw it closed all day. This cycle repeats until your store truly is inactive. You could say 'Why don't you just hire employees?', but I'll get onto that.
I believe that rent prices are far, far too low. Not exactly a crucial detail, but when I commented on this in discord and said that I could get on for an hour a week while still being able to pay rent, I was threatened with having my store revoked. Anyway, this also means that managing your employees isn't important. You could easily have no employees but remain able to happily pay rent for your store. So, I'll give an example of these rent prices.
My character's store, the Indigent stall, hasn't been open for a while for the reasons I explained above. Yet, I'm still fully capable of paying rent. Why is that? Because my store's rent is laughably low. Five credits a week to run my stall. Sure, a responsible roleplayer would give up their stall if they aren't willing to be active in it, but you cannot rely on that. The whole point of rent in HL2RP is so you actually have to make money, you need to do something to ensure you can pay it off by the end of the week.
An argument from a CWU lead in discord was "If you have a pickup terminal, most stores can go above 100 rent". That's not a great excuse for many reasons. Why would you want a pickup terminal if you aren't running your store? Do you really think 100 rent is enough? It's not enough.
So, now onto the actual sugestion: Make rent prices not completely shit
Increasing rent prices doesn't mean the manager needs to do storeRP for 6 hours a day. It just means they need to focus on hiring employees to be semi-active to make up this rent, which increases store activity. Don't want to lose your storefront but people aren't coming? Change up your permits to both lower your rent, and to make your business stand out more.
I came up with a system when Pineapple was in charge, suggested it, and it was denied. iirc, they said they had a better system being worked on. Clearly that's not the case. The rent pricing system thing that I made looks at a lot of different factors. The number of official employees, number of permits, quality of permits, location and quality of store... All of this put together gives some slightly different rent results to what we have now, and ones that I believe are better.
Let's take a look at the two largest stores first
The Sanctum of Breen currently costs a nice even 100 credits to run. For a week's profits, ten total employees, and the best location on the map, it's simply too low to make employee activity a requirement to keep it running. With my system (which disregards non-permit employees), they'd be paying 230 a week. This can then be modified if it needs to.
The flying dutchman is another very large store (based on their employee and permit numbers), as well as having an appealing property. But their activity doesn't seem too great, from what I've seen. For that amount of employees, the high-quality permits, and the property, I don't believe that 65 credits a week is high enough. That can be extremely easily obtained and doesn't encourage the manager to ensure their employees remain active and bring in profits. With my system, they'd instead be paying 280.
But what about the stalls? They aren't going to bring in that much profit, so how would they pay these ridiculous prices?!
Alright. Let's look at the shittiest stall on the map: Indigent's stall. As I've already said, the rent is laughably low. Five credits. It may be a shit store, but it still takes up a store location and requires no effort to keep running. Assuming it were a snack stand, under my system it'd cost 90 credits to run. That's a reasonable price for running a low-end store if you want it to be active and might actually require the manager to sell something.
From what I've seen, stores often go inactive after a very specific cycle repeats itself. People might not want to buy anything at that store for a day either due to competing businesses or due to, I don't know, a 2-hour increase in the ration timer increasing the scarcity of credits. This then results in the store manager, and any employees, aren't on that day. This then results in your store gaining the reputation of being inactive to some who saw it closed all day. This cycle repeats until your store truly is inactive. You could say 'Why don't you just hire employees?', but I'll get onto that.
I believe that rent prices are far, far too low. Not exactly a crucial detail, but when I commented on this in discord and said that I could get on for an hour a week while still being able to pay rent, I was threatened with having my store revoked. Anyway, this also means that managing your employees isn't important. You could easily have no employees but remain able to happily pay rent for your store. So, I'll give an example of these rent prices.
My character's store, the Indigent stall, hasn't been open for a while for the reasons I explained above. Yet, I'm still fully capable of paying rent. Why is that? Because my store's rent is laughably low. Five credits a week to run my stall. Sure, a responsible roleplayer would give up their stall if they aren't willing to be active in it, but you cannot rely on that. The whole point of rent in HL2RP is so you actually have to make money, you need to do something to ensure you can pay it off by the end of the week.
An argument from a CWU lead in discord was "If you have a pickup terminal, most stores can go above 100 rent". That's not a great excuse for many reasons. Why would you want a pickup terminal if you aren't running your store? Do you really think 100 rent is enough? It's not enough.
So, now onto the actual sugestion: Make rent prices not completely shit
Increasing rent prices doesn't mean the manager needs to do storeRP for 6 hours a day. It just means they need to focus on hiring employees to be semi-active to make up this rent, which increases store activity. Don't want to lose your storefront but people aren't coming? Change up your permits to both lower your rent, and to make your business stand out more.
I came up with a system when Pineapple was in charge, suggested it, and it was denied. iirc, they said they had a better system being worked on. Clearly that's not the case. The rent pricing system thing that I made looks at a lot of different factors. The number of official employees, number of permits, quality of permits, location and quality of store... All of this put together gives some slightly different rent results to what we have now, and ones that I believe are better.
Let's take a look at the two largest stores first
The Sanctum of Breen currently costs a nice even 100 credits to run. For a week's profits, ten total employees, and the best location on the map, it's simply too low to make employee activity a requirement to keep it running. With my system (which disregards non-permit employees), they'd be paying 230 a week. This can then be modified if it needs to.
The flying dutchman is another very large store (based on their employee and permit numbers), as well as having an appealing property. But their activity doesn't seem too great, from what I've seen. For that amount of employees, the high-quality permits, and the property, I don't believe that 65 credits a week is high enough. That can be extremely easily obtained and doesn't encourage the manager to ensure their employees remain active and bring in profits. With my system, they'd instead be paying 280.
But what about the stalls? They aren't going to bring in that much profit, so how would they pay these ridiculous prices?!
Alright. Let's look at the shittiest stall on the map: Indigent's stall. As I've already said, the rent is laughably low. Five credits. It may be a shit store, but it still takes up a store location and requires no effort to keep running. Assuming it were a snack stand, under my system it'd cost 90 credits to run. That's a reasonable price for running a low-end store if you want it to be active and might actually require the manager to sell something.
