Also, all the playerhouses I've noticed are down in Southridge(?), where no one goes. Put a few houses right smack in the middle of town, with high mortgage rates and such. And perhaps a few cheap apartments for not-so-rich.

They need to try to revive Morano Family but place it down south where it belongs. It was doing great when it was down there, it seperated it from other gangs and fit the whole "rich mafia" theme. If I recall the family was only falling apart when it was moved to the northern beach.

Crono, why did you have to sacrifice me to satan?

How about make something like wealth coins, that players can purchase for a set amount of money, and then use to buy like special things, (that aren't tradeable?) like special varations of guns that dont have stat bonuses but look cool. like a golden handgun or something? to show off a players money basically.

ROTFL!!

But yes, taxing incomes from businesses and making businesses get taxed and all would be a very good idea.
Another way to solve this is to get a reset because I heard one of the former GPs (who was fired for doing this) gave out a bunch of money/items to people.
Or rollback about a year. :P

Oh, and of course, giving every item an ID would help a lot. Logging ANY creation of items. So in case some GP wants to **** up the economy, you can track the items down and delete them. All this stuff is very basic for keeping track of a gaming economy, and should have been done from the beginning.

it's not as easy as you think. I just tried to give you an example but it just gets way to confusing. basically, items and money are handed through so many people's hands, and I can say this from experience. I've had to reverse over 4 trades before over a simple scam because as soon as the person scammed they went and sold / gave the items to a friend, who then sold / gave it out, who then sold / gave it out, etc. and that was when I was lucky, it can get A LOT more complicated than that, trust me.

it's extremely hard to monitor these things. especially if a staff spawns a large amount of money and trades it to numerous people (like ace did) how are we supposed to reverse all of that?

Never said it'd be easy, but it's necessary. With the SQLite databases coming out, perhaps you could move your item system over to that database, and that way you'd know who had what item with what ID at all times.

For staff doing it, you catch it before it's gets handed off to so many people. I'm not sure what scams Era has (is it just unfair trading?), but there's always a way to log things in real-time. Depending on what scams are going on, there are always ways to help prevent it; whether they be scripted or just a guide given to players to teach them how to spot a scam.

If items are given unique IDs, I have no idea why it would be hard to track it down.

Well it wouldnt be hard to find.
Just hard to fix it...

Like if someone spawned a Sten then traded it for 500k to someone would you just take the sten and say f*** his 500k?

what if the guy who sold him the sten spent the 500k and it just could go on and on z.z

Don't you have rc or staff tool logs?You can see who made it, and who they gave it to.
Then just confiscate it, or at least the money they made from selling it. Threaten to man them unless they tell you who they sold it to (if you don't have a log for that too), and delete it.


I honestly think if there were more things to buy, guns had more pros and cons (there aren't one or two that were the best), and you'd take a percentage out of the account on atm withdraws (not out of the amount they're withdrawing), you'd be making steps towards a better economy.

It's all logged.
Even things like attempting to modifying a soda machine, so that it gives you some other item instead of soda is logged and alerts RC.
But we can't check the logs until we know what we're looking for, so we need to atleast suspect somebody of spawning things before we can go through and see what they spawned and who they gave it to.

And then it's not as easy as just deleting it.

Scenario:
Person A gets a gun from their staff buddy.
We don't find out for a week, and when we do find out Person A has sold the gun to Person B for 50k.
Now we need to take the 50k from Person A and give it back to Person B so that Person B isn't inconvenienced at all for something that isn't their fault.
But if Person A doesn't have the 50k anymore and spent it on something then we need to find out what they bought and reverse that as well before we can restore things to the way they should be.

And occassionally things are made much harder when USD or cross-server trading is involved, because we can't reverse those.

But staff members spawning things and giving them to players isn't very common at all, and thankfully up until this point nobody has done it on a large enough scale to cause severe economic problems.

but when you're taking items/money away from people that had no idea the items/money was non legit, it's not fair.

Usually, you would say tough luck... but people tend to like staff who are generous. So you simply undo the trade until you get back to where it was generated. This shouldn't be a long process if staff catch this stuff fast, like they should.

The reason Era is so screwed up economically right now is because staff ignored it for so long.

Ignored what?

It's screwed up because of duping, primarily.

Which took how long to fix? I'm pretty sure it was years.

It took about 2 months, I think.

And it was caused by server lag coming from Zodiac, so there wasn't much we could have done besides completely disable all dropping, trading and selling of items.

2 months is WAY too long for a huge bug like that :/
And you can't say there is no way to fix a bug because of lag. Lag is a part of any online game, and to have a item database system that is abused by lag is not a very good item database.

we had numerous scripters look at it and none could figure it out. andy came along and found a way. you can't blame us.

Yes I can. Ya, it sucks that it couldn't be fixed, but you all are the staff and it's your responsibility.

I tried fixing it twice with almost failsafe ways. At least I thought they were failsafe. And even though i couldn't fix it, some of us did alot to reduce items being duped. Dupers were reset and got some jailtime afterwards, and I asked people if they noticed any horrible lag lately, when exactly it was and then checked the item logs, and sorted out dupers.

Ya, I just mean the staff of a server can't say, "you can't blame us" when it's an oversight in their system. Sure, I can't blame you for the lag, but every online game has lag and a system should be built with that in consideration.

I have no doubt the staff worked to fix it, but I can still blame you all for it :)

2 months, lol...

Wasn't duping a problem every year on Era? I mean, isn't that where glitched money came from to begin with? Hell I'd go back to 2003, when people had somehow "earned" tons of money. Weren't those dupped too?

Or mabye a voting system that instead of votes goes by whatever one has the most money donated to it, like what do players want a new buisness, gun, you should get the idea by now, mabye the one that has the most money at the end of the month or something? that should give enough time to start getting money out

So you want to simulate the American voting system?

man thats way too political and its not even right.

Lobbiests

except thats not it, lobbiests get paid, but a select few members of the senate and congress are bribeable, and also, lobbiests are used to get there sponsors foot in the door, they arent used on a voting system, unless a bill they have interest in is coming up so I bring this to a /endofftrack

which is just plainly being a douchebag.

No it's not, it's placing responsibility where it is due. Who the hell should I blame?

The dupers.

I hope you're kidding man!

Sure, it would be nice if they didn't dupe, but you can NEVER expect a playerbase, in ANY game, to not dupe when there is a way. So you can't really blame them -- it's just too tempting.

I don't think staff knew it was possible until it was too late.

Communication, something... According to them, they knew about it for 2 months while trying to fix it. What's even worse is if this was going for a long time under their noses. I'm not trying to be an ass, but there is only one place to point the finger in a situation like this. Am I pointing a finger? Not really, because I don't really care, but if I were I'd be pointing it at the staff.

They should just suck it up and acknowledge what they did wrong instead of trying to blame someone else... or we'll just end up with the same problem again. What harm does it cause them to say they were wrong? That they made a mistake? I doubt anyone really cares anyways.

If Staff actually implemented a political system, it could provide jobs for people and people could get a base pay. I think it would add to a more realistic sense here, and it would most likely benefit the economy. People vote for a mayor, the people tell the mayor what they want the mayor speaks to staff on a Player-RC F6 if I am correct, and then it will try to be complete.

It's not a bad idea.

Mayor goes corrupt, staff friend keeps a blind eye, and everythings back to point A. This is Era we're talking about.

Yup.

People on graal can't be trusted with a form of government. Think about it, they'd vote against the atm withdraw charges and taxes, even though it would help the economy.

Will someone just add the withdraw fees and taxes now, and start working on a ton of weapons, items, etc for people to spend money on?
How long are we going to sit around talking about this anyway?

Well, most Era staff, Icarus, Frankie, etc. won't even answer pms of suggestions. Icarus is usually AFK, I haven't seen him do much, no offence Icy, I see Demisis away for sometime, and PR's are the only people who actually work on the server... It just gets annoying, REALLY.

I kinda find it funny with all the "people on graal cant be trusted because they dont understand stuff would help them" type stuff going on but read what forums your on..