License Plate swapping
Not sustainable.

I've decided to halt all requests for anyone asking to swap license plates out on stole vehicles, and this will upset a few people but frankly you've had it too easy for too long and I need to come up with a solution to that.

Right now,

Player A steals Player B's vehicle.

Player A takes it to a mechanic and resets the security, overriding any ownership of the vehicle.

Player A then takes the car to a specific chopshop to have the plates swapped for a low fee.

Boom, instant 200+K vehicle for almost no effort and very little risk.

That ends today. I am working with Slither to plan out a vehicle registry for cars, when you buy a car, it's registered to the person purchasing it. The WJF will be able to look this up and compare it to the people driving it.

In the future, swapping plates will require an additional step of interfering and manually hacking with the license plate registry so you can insert the new plates into the system and falsify the records. (Hopefully)

I also don't want to keep magicking license plates out of thin air, so I have to think about that.

I am also sick of GMs not reading past notes and charging ridiculously low prices for doing stuff like this for players.

So a lot of stuff will have to change, for now if you steal a ride, you better be prepared to be caught in a stolen car, and you better be prepared for any Judge to assume if you're a known car thief ANY vehicle you're in, is stolen, whether it is or not. They have no way to prove one way or another, and that's a problem as far as I am concerned. So a Judge can make that judgement call on whether or not to seize the vehicle for auction.

If we make it easy for you to get away with theft like this, then we make it easy for you to get punished ICly for it as well until any changes can be done to the system.

The goal is that there will be more steps, more risk, and PCs will get paid to do all the roles associated with the act of getting a free car, and even then, there will be a paper trail, risk involved, and less GM interaction required.

I think this change can be valuable but I think it would be better to invest time into making Secure Tech a more viable skill before newting one of it's if not only ability usage.

It isn't even a concern to me if car thieves can't make good money from car theft right now, as long as people aren't losing 500,000 chyen cars over 30 seconds of commands and no RP without a way to recover the car other than small-world meta RP assuming a car is theres since the license plate was swapped and there's no way to validate that license plate to a registry.

I'm sorry, but if you need more chyen, run crates or do focus your RP on other stuff.

How about adding a license plate assembly line to the new prison, haha.

1. Paying X amount of chyen for one tool to both break in and steal an infinite amount of cars is a problem.

1A. Repeated tasks should require consumable tools, so that attempts have a cost association, success will see you recoup costs + profit, but failure has drawbacks beyond simply not having a new car.

2. License plates need to be registered and tracked to a database searchable by authorities and swapping them should only be one portion of the requirements to completely flip a car's ownership.

2A. Randomized VIN numbers for each vehicle in the game protected by encrypted which is already coded. Requiring the involvement of a hacker to bust the encryption and tinker with the VIN, this adds a 2nd layer to flipping a car from HOT to clean.

2B. Secure Tech is involved in stealing the car, Secure Tech is needed for uninstalling and resetting the security system. Resetting the security system should require a tool. Car Dealerships would have a tool to do this, reset the system securely and enter their code. Secure Techs should be able to possess a tool, not consumable, but possibly be destroyed on failure. A tool that tries to brute-force authorization to modify the security system.

2C. If your tool blows up, your security system is locked out. In comes the first step for a hacker. Hacker has to override and make usable again, doing so allows the system to be re-set from a hacker's perspective, but only after the Secure-Tech has flunked his checks and his role is over with.

2D. Security system changes ownership, wipes out authorized users, and enables a player to authorize people. This data needs to be recoverable from the security system, so it should be stored on the object. So a stolen car, can have some Forensics done in it involving WJF Comp-Sec divisions to find out who is authorized on a car for investigative purposes if it's not registered.

2E, Once ownership is established, Hacker is required to breach the vehicle registry potentially over Grid 3.X to find generate a usable car registration, inserting it into the WJF's registry. They use that information to hack the VIN encryption and insert the new VIN, along with the newly registered plate information, which should no longer be physical, but also digital, probably.

2F. Failures at any point in the hacking process leave identity traces behind, alert the authorities on the Grid and the WJF as to what was attempted and to what data to provide some kind of path to follow for law enforcement PCs and giving a choice to the car thieves at that point. Ditch or ride it out.

3. After all is said and done, you can repaint the car, swap out some parts for more disparity between it's original and current state and move on with your life.

3A. Profit after appropriate steps and effort have been invested in robbing someone entirely of a huge chyen investment and vehicle asset.

Also, i'm not sure about the mechanics of the whole thing or what is in place already, so this may be implemented already, but why does car theft have to be such a linear process to get from theft to resale? Why can't the thief actually "chop" the car for parts and redistribute them piecemeal or even chute them for some profit? This gives ranges of difficulties/ rates of failure, etc and if the corpie didn't want to shell out for insurance then its their own problem if their out a ton of flash.

Just curious about this. I love how these things play out in-game. I agree with cerb that the WJF needs more access though. Its lame to park a stolen 500k car in front of a judge, hop out looking like a dirty ass mixer, and not even raise an eyebrow.

I don't see Cerb cutting down on what Sec Tech can do but increasing what it can do.

Something to keep in mind:

Stealing a car / vehicle is not something that's a simple in/out job. Especially in Withmore where you have almost 5x's the amount of people in Red that NYC has.

Yes, there are the Legal Authorities you have to look out for but don't forget about the Authorities of the Street. You start boosting vehicles off of someone else's turf, they're going to pay attention.

Once, maybe they shrug it off as it comes with the territory of living in Red, but you do it more often, especially in a short time frame and you're not doing it for them? You have yourself a problem.

Especially if you happen to steal someone's vehicle who is a high in the family's hierarchy. Anyone who's watched a certain action flick knows the "Oh shit" moment the family leader had when he found out who's car his son stole. "He stole blank's car." ... "Oh." (hangs up the phone)

In Red, you have TERRA, the families, and the gangs. Let alone the people in it for themselves selling to the highest bidder.

Also, stealing cars, especially multiple in a short time frame, is a multi-person job with a long planning stage. It's not something you do in 5 minutes. I like the idea of the additional people who would be involved in a job like this which he's come up with.