My plans for Era
 

In the past weeks, Era's playercount has declined significantly. We are now usually behind at least one other server in the race for players, and we're not gaining any ground. School will be out soon for many, and with this I expect many players who have left will return, giving us a perfect opportunity to gain more players.

My ultimate goal as manager of Era is to see a reset; this is a very ambitious one, and I do not expect it to be completed in the near future. Instead, we will focus on fixing the current Era. In the recent past, the economy has been weak, but gangs have flourished. Now, even they are beginning to die. I recognize the importance of fixing both the rich gang experience on Era, as well as restoring economical balance.

My first project: I plan to disable the item trade window and centralize all trades in the mall. The mall will offer an option for selling your items for money through a database-type system allowing you to search all items for sale, sort them by price, and even sell offer-only items. There will be a second component for trading items for items in another part of the mall which will facilitate public trading.

The second project will be gangs. I will complete Sales' unfinished work on the gang system and release that as soon as possible. With this, gangs will be given a purpose, with points given individually to players and as a whole to gangs. Points will be able to be traded for certain perks, possibly including items, increased HP, and the like. We'll talk more on this later.

After this, I will focus on businesses and events. Era has a surprisingly small number of hostable events, and eventually all of them will be rescripted and automated. As for businesses, you can read more of my plan here.

These projects will help sustain Era while work is carried forward on the development server toward the new overworld, improved core scripting, and new features (such as additional jobs).

I would appreciate any and all criticisms and suggestions. I will also open up a more detailed discussion of each job as it is undertaken.

Thank you for your continued support of Era

Im happy about this but I don't like the "taking out trade window" idea.

When business owners choose what they produced, how will an image for the item be created? Will you just set aside a GFX artist to create the images? Or will there only be a certain number you can choose from?

They'll be choosing from a set of items, not creating gun stats from scratch :p

Please tell me you've figured out what you're going to do about controlling the prices so the business system doesn't blow up like it did with "small biz's".

The pawn shop, including selling most items in shops. I meant to include this as part of this thread but apparently neglected to.

Your business plan doesn't include Era News' situation :p

100% agree
 

I agree with everything, I really like the new store idea, the idea to take out item trade...ehhh it could work if the mall system is correctly implemented. ;)

The new gang idea is fantastic, just make it like parties without the word "Party", increase the party size,and give us all the new perks. ^^

Pawn shop owns, make more of those, selling back FTW

Here's another suggestion

dude u accidently just agreed with chris in public!!

about businesses though. You need to make sure that the items businesses have, have to be rotated every so often so other businesses (that aren't in prime locations) will have the chance to get money by being one of the few only places selling hg ammo for example. The old business system never worked as if you didn't own the shops near the hospital or unstick me you made no money. I doubt the ammo shop down in SR ever made money because they had the same items as EVERY other business.

My first project: I plan to disable the item trade window and centralize all trades in the mall. The mall will offer an option for selling your items for money through a database-type system allowing you to search all items for sale, sort them by price, and even sell offer-only items. There will be a second component for trading items for items in another part of the mall which will facilitate public trading.

omg thats all i had to read to be excited

nooooo
 

crap >_<

Just adding in my 2 cents,

Gangs should have more objectives then just killing for points, even that will get old fast.

Bring back EFBI and Era Police, then create racketeering between the new player businesses..

EFBI and Era Police's job is to stop the racketeering and they get paid for successing preventions and Gangs get paid for successful rackets.

Typically I'd say you'd use businesses such as Gun Point, Ammo Mart, Dippin Donuts, Dairy Hut as fronts for the rackets, along with the newer soon to be player businesses.


Era doesn't require a reset, it needs to have the levels that aren't complete fixed, if you want a new .gmap just make it test it then upload it, you don't need a reset to change a gmap. The economy balanced out when they made the Vday shop and took a lot of cash out of the system, and if they didn't feel it did a great enough job open up another one. The gangs you can fix by giving them more to do instead of just PK, and it'll give meaning to being in a gang if you can make profit by being in one. Such as successful rackets will divide the money amongst the ones that were online, and it'll split it by how long they were on tag during the racket. That way the one on for 2hours helping gets paid a lot and the guy that logged on for 10 minutes doesn't get a big cut.

im so excited omg!!!! *giggles*

Kenshin is right, resets usually end up ticking people off immensely. If at all possible avoid this option. You could even set a limit on banked cash per individual if you wish to avoid the multibillionaire problem.

Do it
 

this

^^

if gangs are going to wield such a tremendous benefit to players they should be able to join gangs without having to be recruited.

It always seemed like a terrible system to begin with but this will only make it worse

A reset would be best, people are popping out of nowhere with 5mil+ it's ridiculous.

A reset is unavoidable since we can't change Era's dated systems without breaking tons of things — the current systems are incredibly limited and make many of our ideas impossible. For example, things like gangs choosing the stats of their gang gun are all but impossible and have to be done with several hackish workarounds.

It might be possible to write some kind of converter script for the systems but it would require the rescripting of almost every script involving anything but effects, and coupled with all the other drastic changes we have planned (rebalancing of guns, for example), a reset seems the most appropriate option.

I think a reset is the way to go and from what I see resets usually increase playercount since everyone wants to be #1 and people from other servers have a chance to actually get good on the server.

sums it up perfectly
straight from the mouth of god

I disagree with you Bell, I also wouldn't like a reset.. Neither will all the good rich players, But if they got rich already it won't be hard for them to get rich again. They know how to.

Hmm I'm not familiar with Era and perhaps my post is dumb, but what about raise a big tax from very rich people?

yeah but they will just evade the tax with offshore bank accounts (i.e. southridge).

mehhhhhhhhhh
it seems like it's rude to punish the players who really play, and give Era a playercount, and then in turn give the newer players an advantage.

and where would the line to "very rich" be? if all the very rich were taxed, then the current "rich" would be the richest.

I didn't know that such accounts exist, but the tax could also be raised on bank accounts and it doesn't matters who's the owner or where on Era the account is.


The tax could be related to the wealth and/or to values (e.g. weapons) and applies for every player.

Nice idea and all. but if you really want to make sure the economy doesn't do what it has now, and become terrible.

Make all guns purchasable at a store. Yeah, sure, maybe everyone would eventually get a TG or a shipka, but era is a very difficult server to make money, and make the cost of said guns be rediculously high, but at least obtainable by everyone, and not through some stupid spar event.

That seems to be the biggest issue, lack of decent weapons circulating the market. Bring back gang guns, make them BETTER than the rest of the guns, gang tag only, special ammo ect.

Add more ways to make money, fishing is usually a great way to do so, as long as it is a decent amount per fish, like GG had. You could also bring back the 20 or so different flower boquets that actually made money, i forget the pink one but it made like 35$ per and was pretty easy to make. Remove batteries from drills, i don't see the point in this, there is no auto mining program that couldn't get around it if that was the original plan for their use.

A lot can be done, a lot should be done, focus on attention grabbers first because things that are new and exciting will drag players from UN/zodiac back. People quit due to lack of things to do, and i gotta admit, pking is boring when you chase down the same 3 people all day.

just my 5 cents, because my ideas are worth more than 2.

removing money from the economy doesn't mean it will be balanced. it's a lot more complicated than that. the economy needs to be completely redesigned because the same methods that managers have been using over the past 5+ years are clearly not working.

resets piss players off because managers in the past seem to take the wrong approach. they all want to prevent players from getting too many items/money, so they try to make it harder and harder to obtain them. then the server resets and players are stuck with tedious money making for days at a time just to buy weapons and ammo.

I'm still sticking behind my idea that the economy shouldn't control the server. let people make all the easy money they want. in the end all that should matter is players enjoying the playable content on the server.

Love this idea, increase activity in the mall just like the good old days ^^

Should hire some Event Developers, easy way to give the players some new events.
P.S
Please bring back outbreak ;D

listen obama we aint gona tax the rich mo ****as

Please forgive my lack of time, running through exams right now :cry:

Great ideas, can't wait too see updates. :cool:

lol like 1 reset again stefan said era isnt allowed to reset anymore but w/e

also corruption always has it's place in graal and i find era to be the best server for it. things like the old PI were awesome because chrisz basically let them run around with OP weapons for fun.

http://i39.tinypic.com/2vwcl52.jpg


<3

I don't see why people bring up how much money people have. No one has more than a million, therefore, it's no where as bad as it was before.

A reset will enable the server to accomplish more though.

Rofl, I hate you so much but I cant stop laughing at your rare and very funny gif posts.

Alongside with the reset, I feel that everyone should be unbanned aswell. Unless banned for major hacking. Half of the oldbie players are now banned because we gave Chris Vimes a hard time, and he resorts to banning us.

lol, wtf?

I don't think Chris has banned anyone since he was manager, and he honestly didn't ban too many people when I was manager.

Also, just because there's a reset doesn't free peoples sins on the servers. Most people aren't perm banned unless they did something horribly wrong to the server.

When I was manager I was planning to unban everyone with the reset, but I don't know what Chris plans to do.

I really don't think the business idea is a good one.

Limiting players to a set list of pre-generated items will dilute any real creativity or actual purpose for the business in the first place. Then, on top of that, the pawn shop will sell most (if not all) items in the shop. This just isn't an ideal way to give "everyone" a chance at running a business while combating economic woes.

The biggest problem with the current businesses is lack of diversity and purpose. You have a couple stores selling very basic guns and ammo (all of which can be bought at an NPC shop), and you've got three food stores. The only difference in the food stores is the graphics, levels, and which owner you're better friends with. The -only- thing that gives any of the businesses some sort of control is setting the price, its physical location, and/or holding special sales and discounts. When literally every item in each store yields the exact same results to the player, the only thing that matters is price and location.

If you put DD stands up right next to the hospital and unstick me, that's likely the only food shop that would receive any business. The only real way that each of the businesses would be justified in staying is to have each of them have at least one item or item effect unique to their store.

I think that rather than making another mass-produced automated business system (even looking past the economic havoc wreaked by it, the first incarnation was the most uninspired form of businesses on era ever), you should instead rework the way the business administrator handles new ideas and suggestions. Open up a forum where people submit applications with ideas and a solid plan for new businesses.

If you're concerned with not having the staff to create a new business from scratch, have the applicants form teams to create most of the content. Those with the most creative ideas can be selected for a trial run, where they are given a specific amount of time to create the levels, graphics, sounds, etc. Everything would be filtered through the business administrator (hell, we're even giving the BA an actual demanding job and purpose through this system), it would be his/her job to oversee and ensure that all of the content made is quality, and that everything the business is selling is balanced. If the player who suggested the idea cannot come up with enough content in the allotted time (and no staff are available to help with the project), then he will be removed from the trial business status and another application would be selected from the forum. Even a business that reaches completed status would require monthly or bimonthly evaluations.

If the business is consistently not doing well over a period of time, it would be removed and the building it once existed in would be open again to accommodate the next good idea. Perhaps it would be best to have 3-4 pre-made business stores (like I'm sure it would be for the automated system). Therefore, the players with the business ideas wouldn't have to worry so much about levels (they'd have to add their own details into the store, but the overall layout is already complete), and could focus on the graphics, scripting, and concepts of their businesses more fully.


Now here's the thing, I know a classic response is going to be "too much work brah, that's stupid." And maybe it is a bit demanding. But anything of quality and worth takes time and effort. Sure, you can have 3-5 clone businesses battling it in a vicious price and location war. Or you could have 3-4 businesses each with a unique purpose, unique products, and unique vision. Each could possibly add new variations to gameplay and new ways to enjoy Era, rather than the same product at a different price from the store down the street but still a bit lower than the pawn shop.