Randomized Weekly Job Allotments
No More Friday Runnerpalooza

Would be nice if the weekly cap would be randomized as well (still in a similar range but more randomized to create different amounts of gigs) so that a cargo driver one week had X amount and the next they'd have Y amount, etc etc. Same with couriers and other similar jobs.

A weekly reset would be necessary in general, due to how maintenance works in the game, and also to prevent people from hitting a "run" of 1, 2, 1, 3 etc days between their jobs being dished out.

Imagine getting lucky and doing a month's work in a week...

Then again, maybe that's a potential use for LCK?

You log on three days a week for two hours each. Hit your handful of hustles. Chances are you're going to hit your cap very easily - in part because the market isn't flooded for days on end where the NPC's just don't want anything the entire weekend.

If anything, I'd think that the part-timers and low availability people would stand to gain the most from this. Right now if you log on a weekend and try and run something on Friday, Saturday, and (usually) Sunday, the NPC's have of candy chain-rammed in their pockets.

Players are going to play as much as they want to, or feel able to, and there's already a lot of pressure on them to play more than that or risk missing out.

It's supposed to be easy and reliable and boring to get a basic level of income each week. The whole point of that is to allow players to spend their time roleplaying and doing the things they want to do be doing, rather than grinding at systems.

Only issue I see with that would be that staff would have to actually ENFORCE the cap by cutting off any/all over-allocations.

I.E. You have 250c left for the week, you hand a bozo a vial of expensivestuff(tm) juice and you make 250c, not 3-5K.

As the system is today, it's heavily abused to make far and above the actual income cap. Multiple mini-resets a week would multiply that issue many fold, to a comical extent, I think.

Again, I'm only suggesting a way to break monotony with a system that's been gamified.

If someone is playing a couple of hours at a time, a few days out of the week, their engagement is massively higher than the median experience. This is probably the last system in the game that players with a lot of time on their hands should shape the direction of, because it's really not meant for them; they would obviously benefit the most from their being no limits on anything. Which would certainly make many players and the game in general much more active, but would also stretch the divide between those who could and those who couldn't.

The whole discourse around dailies and lockouts in MMOs in similar. I don't think we want to be pushing towards things where people have to log in constantly to optimize their play, even though that is already the case for the game. The casual audience that the game does have adds a lot to the experience and helps to break up the cliquey dogma that veterans tend to form amongst themselves. It's worth protecting their engagement as being equally valid.

Randomzied lockouts mean that demand is distributed throughout the week, meaning, that NPC's are more likely to want things on any given day as opposed to being practically locked out for half of every week.

Normally if your goal is just making money, that's fine. But there's a real problem with people trying to garner reputation with certain factions, because those NPC's are just full-up a good portion of the time, starting Fridays, covering all of peak gameplay (weekends) and the demand doesn't open up for some organizations until late in the following week.

This would not be the same situation if people were handing off things on a more consistent (on average) basis throughout the week.

I also like the idea to decrimenting the maximum payout / increasing the amount of payout each day. There are a couple of ways to mitigate the obvious ways to game the system.

Limit the amount amount of "chyen left to earn". Much like staff had to enforce a maximum negative SIC credit balance, the amount of chy owed could be capped.

The bigger challenge is people who abuse the cap by selling a big ticket item "last" to maximize the overall payout for the week.

That can be mitigated by some basic calculations.

If *payout* > *remaining allowance*

Then NPC says, "Sorry Bata. I can't afford to pay you for that right now. Try again later."

Now that I think about it, why not just do that by default? It would dramatically alter the way the NPC economy works. I'm sure there will be plenty of strong opinions on it, so maybe that belongs in another Idea thread.

I didn't want to copy paste your prose in a new thread, but feel free, and we can move the discussion over. My response below.

I think we'd need to establish first whether or not staff consider your concern to be abuse before anything else. Rules like help farming seem to imply that they don't. It's always been acceptable within the rules to collect flash up to weekly cap -and- collect a big ticket item, so why would it not be ok to sell that item as well? Squeezing every chy you can out of your hustles is as capitalist as it gets. This factors into automated paycheck jobs too. These 'big three' automated incomes aren't mutually exclusive as far as I understand the rules.