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.