Discussion Solving the Rebel Economy Issues

[M!NT]

Greetings. Over the last few months I've heard a lot of complaints about the current 'system' which rebel characters use to gather scripts. The so called 'rebel' economy, if it were. Many people, including myself, consider said system to be half baked, boring, and incredibly time consuming. I think we can all agree that something needs to change.

The purpose of this thread is to figure out what.



This is a very controversial topic so, to keep this discussion productive, I want to make sure that we stay focused. I will be deleting any replies which fall into these two general categories:

1. "Current rebel economy sucks" but, offers no possible solutions
2. Shitposting
3. "You should go RP instead" type responses.

Instead, please highlight which issues you think highlight the core of the issue, and possible solutions we can employ to fix them. These solutions may be minor balancing related things, or total reworks. Don't think something is too large to suggest. These solutions may require development changes which is totally fine. However, please try to keep it reasonable. I don't need people to ask that we just code rust, runescape, etc in garrysmod for rebels.

Now that the formalities are out of the way, I will present some ideas that I have:


1) What are we rewarding players for?
This is the crux of the issue, in my opinion. At the moment, the most rewarding thing to do on willard is grind trash, and shoot cops as if they were loot pinatas. There is really no incentive to do anything else. Well, there are, but they aren't nearly as potent and immediate of a reward as trash spawners.

I think that the existence of trash spawners in general is very silly, and inhibits us from being able to meaningfully impact rebel roleplay when it incentives players to avoid it and collect trash instead. Not only that, but it also leads to people cluttering up the map and the DB with junk items they just throw on the ground, which contributes to instability and lag. For that reason, I think that the trash spawning system needs to go, or at leased, be nerfed. We can only remove it if we replace it with something though. Some possible solutions:

1. Push for more rewards from quests, settlements, expos, etc. Systems which reward rebel players for participating in the server narrative; impacting citizen RP, etc.
2. Establish a proper rebel faction, which has supply lines and things to get scripts into the city, which provides for its members and promotes roleplay which aligns with the goals of the server narrative.
   1. This deserves its own thread, to be completely honest. I think its been done very poorly in the past. It can done right though and, if it is executed correctly, it can solve a lot of these issues.
   2. I have personally seen this work on plenty of servers in the past, years before HL2RP shifted towards 'player lead resistance groups' (which, I've personally never seen work well) like we're doing now.
3. Promote infiltration into factions such as the CWU, CP, etc where one can just walk out of the nexus or the warehouse with scripts, run fake workshifts, etc..

2) Things take too long
Yes, I'm aware that a lot of rebel economy related actions take forever. The reasons for this have always been to prevent people from being able to get end-game gear in under a couple of days. Which, in my opinion, is a bit silly. I think it is necessary for there to be speedbumps to prevent people from gearing up too quickly. At the same time, I understand that it doesn't respect people's IRL time, and puts a lot of people off from rebel RP.

I think to fix this, we could consider making certain timers for getting gear dependent on what class of item it is; not just a flat timer. It might take days to get an AK, but to get some AK ammo should be fast (<1hr) for example.


Anyways, those are a couple of my thoughts and suggestions. Feel free to discuss them, or come up with something different entirely

 

[Rebel RP Philosopher]

Seems that the question on how to balance Rebel RP is still the biggest unsolved philosophical question that has yet been resolved since the launch of HL2 RP.

 

[𝔄𝔪𝔟𝔢𝔯𝔮]

I'll try and give my (half-blind) suggestion here (I'd've made a thread in suggestions, but they are on hold )

A little addition to the smuggling system, that could *probably* do something for RebelRP (or so I hope), here goes:
Make it so, that clothing items (typically/mostly jackets) can be made smuggling-inventories: Through the crafting menu at level X, you can make your X clothing item include a 1x2 or 2x2 inventory space, meant to hold items that are small enough to fit into such a space realistically. Given that it is a smuggling inventory, they should be hidden from players searching you, *depending on your smuggling level*. If you have 0 smuggling and a smuggling inventory, it only functions as another regular inventory, 5 smuggling gives a searching player a 10% chance of not finding the inventory, 10 smuggling is 20% chance of missing, 25 is 50%, etc.. and max smuggling is always unfindable. Something like that.
Do what you want with the idea, nerf it or buff it if it is added, I just thought it'd be cool . Might enable some RP, give the smuggling skill some more use, and with that, the smuggling part might gain more traction and make people utilize the system more (if they aren't).

Oh yeah, no mixers in your James Bond pockets plis.

 

[M!NT]

Glad this thread is picking up steam. Love to see some healthy communication about this. Honestly, its very refreshing.

1. I agree this should be fixed. NPC spawners would fix a main issue I'd brought up about allowing people to roam the outlands/canals. If there isn't a GM hounding the place, it is empty and there is no threat out there (When there should be given how we want to use it). If we do have NPC spawners or an advanced NPC spawner that would be helpful. A suggestion I'd have for it, beyond it being zone based, is for GMs to have the ability to not only dictate the max number of NPCs but to choose a variety that can spawn.
An issue I can see with us using automated spawners, however, is that there may be cases of enemies "warping" into existence.

Yeah. A bit more detail is required for this to be the thing we want. I made a quick wireframe to explain how this menu would work:

Basically, you select a zone from the drop down and pick the zone you want, the table updates and you can then add/remove npc types to the list. Which you can then set a maximum, minimum, a spawn speed multiplier, HP override, and if the NPC agros combine and/or civilians. I think that should be all we need for this.

As for how this would work in reality: its complicated. Basically, the way I see it working in my head, is that it'll spawn these NPCs in random places at X per minute(s) (configurable) within the zone. Then, I'll have to write some code that makes the NPCs not leave the zone they're supposed to be in. That way people can't funnel all the NPCs from a spawning zone into a neighboring spawn zone which could cause infinite spawns; spawn farming.

As for the 'popping' in issue, I actually have a fix for that. We can randomly pick a spawn place in the zone, then we can check if anyone currently in the zone is currently able to see that spot. We can keep retrying until we find somewhere that is in no one's vis cone. This'll actually have a cool effect, because NPCs have the chance of spawning right behind you

 

[RonBag]

I'll take a slightly different approach than the ones offered. Right now, from my experience, the system encourages P2W and powergaming to the max. How so?

1. The smuggler money pool is shared between players.

The first is a tricky one to solve. There are two smugglers currently, one high tier and one normal tier. The normal tier smuggler almost never runs out of cash due to it not buying medical/other items. The high tier will have a queue of people waiting for it to spawn. So it basically rewards people who time it or AFK right next to spawn so they drain all 2000 (it varies based on player count) chips nearly instantly. This is quite a big problem because if I'm roleplaying and I want to get some chips? I have to basically drop what I'm doing and pray that I manage to beat someone who has the smuggler spawn down to the second.

The simple solution would be to make it so the smuggler chip pool is for each player, but this would result in significantly more chips entering the economy per day. Additionally, you could make it so both smugglers are high-tier, but this would again only benefit those who are gaming the system to the max.

I would suggest making the chip pool per player and reducing it to 1k (theoretical max, scaling with player count) per hour per player. This doesn't seem like a lot, but it adds up quite a bit. I'm not sure how else to tackle the issue since currently you have some people who will get 5-6k chips a day and some who will get 0-100.

• 2. The crate pool is shared between players.

This one is an issue as the crates are on a somewhat fixed (and absolutely predictable) timer. So again, you'll have people literally sitting on the beach for crates to spawn so they can hoover them all up at the exact time. This is absolutely horrible for roleplayers. You are basically forcing them to sit and hope that someone with a timer on their phone doesn't beat them to the crates.

The solution to this one is somewhat simpler- Instance the loot to be per player, but lower overall. This allows every player to collect the crates on their own time without flooding the economy with items.


These two problems being fixed would do quite a lot to help reduce the grind and the P2W mentality by reducing the competitive aspect among rebels.

 

[zeroday:)]

I think the CPs are good at not just blindly following tips like they used to. Word of mouth doesn't go very far, and the CP leads respect this. They want people to do this sort of RP, and they're trying to support it.

I've seen a and experienced quite a few things that would make me doubt this as tips do go a far way from what i've seen but I trust you in what you say that the Civil Protection isn't just blindly following tips anymore.

They don't just randomly go PKing people after getting a word of mouth tip from some random blueshirt, if thats what you're implying.

To clear up some stuff nah thats not what im implying but i'm thinking more in terms of getting arrested and shit (which sorta ties into civil protection tip thing I mentioned, but you've clarified that civil protection shouldn't be blindly following tips so i'll concede but usually getting arrested and being a big ol' johnny rebel means to most that they should be willing to kiss that character goodbye)

As I've said in the past, the existence of smugglers, and trash, and other zero-risk automated things prevent quests from really being viable. Quests are risky, and they require some thinking and some roleplay. Why do that, when you can just grind a couple random systems and make X chips per day? Even if its less than the quest reward?

Truthful, but I still believe in the automated systems being buffed its probably gonna be hard to find a nice balance between letting the rebels grind and letting the rebels still have incentive to roleplay and do quests (which is gonna be a hard balance to find)

I don't necessarily think that shotcops are totally a bad thing. I just think that, when there are too many in such a short time, a lot of folks consider it to be disruptive for City RP. This is why I've been wanting rebels to move out more towards shell beach and the canals more. Issue is that there is nothing to do out there. If we add more automated systems blindly, it removes any real challenge or risk, which makes quests, settlements, expos, a faction, etc. not worth it.

Truthful yet again, me personally, never done a shotcop. however the rebels moving towards shell beach and canals is a good idea and you are right there is nothing to do out there simply put I mean you can uhh visit the lighthouse and possibly die on the bridge getting there I guess or look at the cool infestation.. but like i've said before I dont think you should make automated systems the MASTER CHEF CEO way to get items but I think it should be buffed within moderation as I do think that grinding still gives out less rewards than it should. me personally i'd like to see more fun and lighthearted events instead of EPIC S2K OTA VS REBEL VS VORT SHOWDOWN 900000

I think, with everything I've heard here, I can come to some proper conclusions on what our focus should be.

1. Fix NPC spawners to make them actually sort of work the way we want them to.
   1. This'll probably just be its own plugin tbh
   2. I think I can find a way to do this so that there are max/min n zombies per zone in the zone based system. Maybe a GUI that lets GMs set the difficulty for a specific zone, and which NPCs to spawn?
2. Add automatic loot spawns out there in those zones which have spawning enabled, in accordance to their difficulty.
   1. Example: The canals may have some high tier lootable areas, but difficult NPC spawns (and OTA, conscript patrols, etc).
3. Consider balancing the timers for smugglers
4. Consider balancing the values for the trash spawners (chance of getting nothing, chance for getting more than one item, the breakdown recipes for said junk items, etc)
5. Continue pushing with quests, settlements, expos, main server events, etc. which dish out more loot than can be gained via the automated systems.

All in all pretty good ideas, I agree with all of them i'd like to see them implemented in the future definetely (and that new combat system thing you guys are trying out it looks kewl for once in my life I might actually do combat instead of trying to avoid it) make the NPC BMD sell rotisserie chicken as well and I believe willard will be at its peak.

tl;dr: egg

 

[swagile]

another thing is the bmd system

the bmd system has historically been bad in open aura / clockwork era because they were treated like glorified NPC's; non-characters that went around trading tokens for gear then disappearing into the night or getting snitched on and pk'd by a CP patrol

this seems to be the way that Willard has gone but even worse; BMD's don't actually have a flag from my understanding to spawn things from a business menu, they have the next worst thing; DMing a admin a list of items they want to buy then waiting

player BMD's is actually a good idea if done right with a flag that has inbuilt delays on how much and of what you can buy, and ensuring that REBEL LEADERS are given BMD flags

why? because REBEL LEADERS have an incentive to play; because they own resistance groups and hence want to push the objectives of said group forward, and they do so via the supplies they have access to, making them an actual player that used the BMD flag as a vehicle for roleplay instead of being a BMD that sells to groups (which makes them a non-player who's only role is to accrue wealth, which is VERY bad for the long term health of the resistance as most of such players either get bored and never play BMD again which kills the economy anyway since the BMD's hold all the wealth, or they become power hungry and abuse people with their huge wealth, which is what happened on Nebulous with Novus aka all the BMD flag holders basically controlling the resistance and no one could do anything cause the only legitimate and viable ways of getting gear is sucking up to them since they had the BMD flags)


tl;dr BMD system should actually be a real flag like in OpenAura / Clockwork era but set inbuilt limits (only x amount of items every y week) with low to mid tier gear having very little to no limits, but heavy gear having huge limits (like 1 per week level limits) which requires you to conserve heavy hitter gear for big operations or work with other groups / do missions to get said gear (which, again, forces Resistance to actually interact with the server and roleplay, which is the whole point)

 

[ultima]

make the krah aur nur a bmd group we'll fix all the issues trust (this isnt a shitpost)

 

[Rebel RP Philosopher]

tl;dr BMD system should actually be a real flag like in OpenAura / Clockwork era but set inbuilt limits (only x amount of items every y week) with low to mid tier gear having very little to no limits, but heavy gear having huge limits (like 1 per week level limits) which requires you to conserve heavy hitter gear for big operations or work with other groups / do missions to get said gear (which, again, forces Resistance to actually interact with the server and roleplay, which is the whole point)

TL;DR God gave us a TL;DR commandment

Feedback, after reading the TL;DR - the TL;DR in less than a paragraph got me the intrigue to read the actual post.

After reading this post, i agree it to the full extent as facts and that booile is the face for this suggestion and eligible to have my full vote.

 

[HOKI]

I'd fix it in a few hour , payment required however

 

[CyckaLoop16]

revive

 

[swagile]

reviving this thread

solutions:

1. make BMD rebel leader only, make it a flag, make it so that said flag / permission / whatever gives them access to a menu or extended BMD permissions when interacting with BMD NPC's that lets them buy everything so they get it from the drop off points instead of admins, give them a base wage that gives them X chips every Y minute(s) so your incentivized to play and use said chips to do rebel ops and actually roleplay instead of grind, make it so there is a stock limit of what you can buy for mid to high level gear (especially high level gear) and it replenishes in a OOC week

2. make more crates over trashbags, make them give finished products and no trash at all / funny """empty bourbon bottle""", spawn more containers, make those containers never give nothing and always finished PRODUCTS (not more advanced crafting materials like fabric but more on the lines of that one container that gives you literal armor) and make it all low to mid level stuff; most it drops is pistols since trash guns are available for ppl who want automatics / rifles such as helsing, tikhar

3. make npc bmd personalized (gives 1k chips at most and 100 stock at most BUT NO ONE ELSE CAN TAKE IT), solves the hoarding problem

ok problem solved, people spend very little on grind (max 2 hours) which lets them spend the rest rping with ppl and/or planning rebel operations

your welcome

 

[HOKI]

reviving this thread

solutions:

1. make BMD rebel leader only, make it a flag, make it so that said flag / permission / whatever gives them access to a menu or extended BMD permissions when interacting with BMD NPC's that lets them buy everything so they get it from the drop off points instead of admins, give them a base wage that gives them X chips every Y minute(s) so your incentivized to play and use said chips to do rebel ops and actually roleplay instead of grind

2. make more crates over trashbags, make them give finished products and no trash at all / funny """empty bourbon bottle""", spawn more containers, make those containers never give nothing and always finished PRODUCTS (not more advanced crafting materials like fabric but more on the lines of that one container that gives you literal armor) and make it all low to mid level stuff; most it drops is pistols since trash guns are available for ppl who want automatics / rifles such as helsing, tikhar

3. make npc bmd personalized (gives 1k chips at most and 100 stock at most BUT NO ONE ELSE CAN TAKE IT), solves the hoarding problem

ok problem solved, people spend very little on grind (max 2 hours) which lets them spend the rest rping with ppl and/or planning rebel operations

your welcome

thanks, took you long enough...

 

[John Rico]

The idea of a rebel faction controlling the flow of weapons and supplies into the economy (instead of a BMD faction of dubious loyalties and roleplay value) is so straightforward that I'm surprised it was never tried seriously.

You still have your independent player-made rebel cells that have to stick to the staff-supervised united rebel front plans (that are actually useful to the narrative or gameplay loop of the server) to get their hand outs. Anyone trying to go fully on their own can still go for it, but they won't be catered to by staff and will probably have to go through the old-school grind loop or any other creative ways of getting their supplies.

 

[swagile]

The idea of a rebel faction controlling the flow of weapons and supplies into the economy (instead of a BMD faction of dubious loyalties and roleplay value) is so straightforward that I'm surprised it was never tried seriously.

You still have your independent player-made rebel cells that have to stick to the staff-supervised united rebel front plans (that are actually useful to the narrative or gameplay loop of the server) to get their hand outs. Anyone trying to go fully on their own can still go for it, but they won't be catered to by staff and will probably have to go through the old-school grind loop or any other creative ways of getting their supplies.

idk who ur replying to but my point was to have rebel LEADERS have a flag / menu / etc. and chip wages

by that i mean say u start a group; the minimum group number is 1 leader and 4 other members, that is considered a rebel group

the LEADER gets acccess to a BMD flag that gives him chip wages that go straight to his stache of choice every X minute(s) and ability to buy all sorts of goods

this is done because:

A) rebel leaders have an incentive to actually play the server as they are leading a group, whereas traditional BMD's only reason to play is to accrue more money (which isn't conductive to RP as they never need to spend it, so the money just keeps disappearing into a select few power roles which is VERY BAD long term if they decide to create a cartel or worse, just stop playing)

B) rebel leaders, since they control groups, have an incentive to make the groups actually do stuff like create barricades, sabotage combine structures, fix rebel structures, etc. so they have a roleplay incentive to use their wages for something instead of just accumulating wealth in general

an overall rebel faction controlled by admins will have the SAME issue that BMD's overall have; the lack of incentive to do anything because of a lack of self interest. or worse, their self interest is to control the resistance for the sake of OOC power and not a genuine interest to keep the Resistance going

thats why i believe that every admin rebel group has failed; because lets be real we are human beings and have our own interests at heart 90% of the time, which means ur probably not gunna run constant quests / organize rebels as an admin unless you get something out of it (such as helping ur friends)


this is why bmd flags / permissions need to go to rebel leaders since they have a clear self interest to advance their own groups ideas and goals, which pushes forward roleplay since those groups typically come together for roleplay reasons (such as researching combine tech, taking the combine out through subterfuge or overt actions, etc)

 

[ItsLiam]

To expand on some of the points booile said, I made this thread

https://willard.network/forums/threads/rebel-rp.10840/#post-84226

I hope the people in charge can look at this thread and that one

 

[John Rico]

reviving this thread

solutions:

1. make BMD rebel leader only, make it a flag, make it so that said flag / permission / whatever gives them access to a menu or extended BMD permissions when interacting with BMD NPC's that lets them buy everything so they get it from the drop off points instead of admins, give them a base wage that gives them X chips every Y minute(s) so your incentivized to play and use said chips to do rebel ops and actually roleplay instead of grind, make it so there is a stock limit of what you can buy for mid to high level gear (especially high level gear) and it replenishes in a OOC week

2. make more crates over trashbags, make them give finished products and no trash at all / funny """empty bourbon bottle""", spawn more containers, make those containers never give nothing and always finished PRODUCTS (not more advanced crafting materials like fabric but more on the lines of that one container that gives you literal armor) and make it all low to mid level stuff; most it drops is pistols since trash guns are available for ppl who want automatics / rifles such as helsing, tikhar

3. make npc bmd personalized (gives 1k chips at most and 100 stock at most BUT NO ONE ELSE CAN TAKE IT), solves the hoarding problem

ok problem solved, people spend very little on grind (max 2 hours) which lets them spend the rest rping with ppl and/or planning rebel operations

your welcome

Yeah I like that too, though I my rambling is more about the attempt to do a united rebel faction with the LFC fiasco, I'm not updated on the details, but I doubt the guys involved in that ever had any power to make themselves relevant to the other rebels in the first place.
Anything that gives leaders (or any rebel that's willing to create meaningful roleplay for that matter) actual power or tools to keep the players in a fun gameplay loop should be attempted. I doubt there would be too much damage if worse comes to worst.

 

[Rebel RP Philosopher]

3. make npc bmd personalized (gives 1k chips at most and 100 stock at most BUT NO ONE ELSE CAN TAKE IT), solves the hoarding problem

In Rebel Hustling School, i learned that i can hire random civilians to empty their reserved "share" of BMD stock in exchange for remuneration. If not, i will mug them to buy from stock their with my money.

Cite of reference: Impulse HL2RP (Closed late 2021) Personal Gunpowder 7x limit / per 15 minutes, bypassed by paying another noob 60 T instead of 58 T per gunpowder, giving 2T arbitrage to the guy who would buy their allot for me.

 

[Zebra]

Add more guns and stuff to bmd’s selling. This server has such little to offer in variety for rebels.

 

[swagile]

Add more guns and stuff to bmd’s selling. This server has such little to offer in variety for rebels.

prime example of what i mean by a grinder, i don't even need to find examples, they just jump out and present themselves to the world free of charge

 

[Cavity]

Please click the provided image above.

Here is my opinion on the loot and BMD issue. This is a creative solution I put together and can easily be modified by the development team. I considered it essential to have multiple spawn locations and different varieties of dealers to sell loot to (including loot spawn locations), increase rotation times, and decrease the number of chips carried per dealer.

Another interesting idea here would be to bring back "gas areas." Meaning that certain locations can ONLY be accessed by using proper PPE. An example of this would be a player having to wear a hazmat suit or gas mask to gain access to a particular sewer area or building with rare loot spawns.