Food Businesses.
 

Are completely out of stock of their main items.

20/40 heals
and 3.5/7 heals.

Ive noticed this is the case for the past 2 weeks or so since I've been back, maybe longer, idk..

After speaking with a few of the owners/co-owners, they actually expect to sit back and let all their workers take the entire workload, instead of putting in the some ELBOW GREEEEEEASE

Right now their pay system cannot compete with the public works department (trashpicking, shelling, mining), BUT THAT IS NO EXCUSE.

We either need new owners or someone needs to yell at these nerdos.

I am really surprised food businesses are still player-owned. Would it not make more sense just to have them server owned and designed in a way where you can hold them up x-amount of times a day to get cash out of them. This way you don't need to worry about who's owning which business, which business is stocked, which isn't, who works where and have to listen to a lot of unnecessary complaints.

It makes more sense to do it the way i said rather than to have them player-owned imo.

That's what I said. There's really no way to balance them in the new Economy (we discussed this a couple times amongst staff).

Ideas are welcome though.

delete every ammo store and make one giant NPC owned... screw the owners

The past few years of changes to food businesses have been half assed and poorly done. Food that is no longer in stores is now useless to me and does nothing (I have like 7k crab rangoon that's 100% worthless now thanks obama). Almost none of the changes to food were documented, much like everything else on the server. I think having an NPC store to sell food would be the best solution as well.

Food sucks too much now. How's it possible that various years ago with 6$ you could buy a +60hp cheese/donut with non freeze or cooldown and now a cookie (300$? 500$? value) is worst than that.

Something needs to be done.

food itself is fine, it prevents mid fight healing which turn sucks ****ing balls and im glad we freeze upon using high healing food.

its just that the owners are too lazy to do the work themselves and the stockers realize they make more money shelling picking trash and digging than they do working at one of these businesses.

so its either up the price of food which sucks, replace the owners which will just let this happen again unless theyre og as ****, or automate it.

atleast those are the options i can see imo.

player owned businesses are a thing of the past.. there's really no point in having them around anymore. I like koho's idea.

I'm surprised no one has bought them out yet, we're giving free cash away every day, whats giving the food business owners 2mil each and taking their business going to achieve? oh them making 2mil in 4 years even with the new economy, they won't complain and nor will the players because I made 2mil in 2 days from raiding lol

Why not just increase the price of food relative to the increase in other jobs, and then tweak food so that it's slightly more useful than it is at the moment?

Seems more viable than just removing half of all player owned businesses.

Because that would essentially require tripling the prices, and as said prior nobody buys it right now when it's dirt cheap/they're all rich... so I don't exactly expect that would work.
I personally just use whatever food I get from killstreaks/quests if I ever need food; which is rare considering every base has beds + medkits + the ability to get kill-streak heals/use healing crates/use healing boomerangs/be revived.

And we recently buffed and balanced the foods; Blue even made a whole new system for it a little over a year ago. The guns and health system haven't changed at all; buffing food doesn't seem like a smart idea.

Beyond that, food businesses have always been a novelty (or some would say thorn-in-our-side) because they don't require any material/monetary input to get results. It's basically a money spawning/profiteering venture where you get some noobs/friends to hold down the A button every once in awhile. I really don't see any way to balance or improve such a thing (which is probably why they've gone untouched for a decade).

I don't buy or use food either. I have a bunch of coffees from PKing, I don't know what any of them do, there are no decriptions on them, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.

It seems like the first post in this thread was complaining that food was sold out since everybody was cashed up now, and that the issue is that it's not worth while for the business to restock because theyd make more money from mining for an hour than from restocking their own business for an hour.

So it seems logical that increasing the price of food, or increasing the qty stocked per "labour unit" would solve that problem.
The other problems, as far as not requiring anything for production and being "pure profit" aren't really a problem as long as the potential cash generation of the business (assuming 100% demand) isn't extraordinarily above the public jobs which are all "pure profit" also.

No owner, player ran.

NPC hires players to make the produce. I know this would work on iEra with the playercount, I wouldn't be sure about PC.

I think we did this with Speedy Pizza for the longest time.

Yeah and this way there's no need to balance profit margins for the businesses. Who really cares if making a piece of pizza lets you buy 2?