[Dismissed] Increase Difficulty/Consequences for Using Station Funds

[Conspiir]

12 hours ago, Senpai Jackboot said:

Carried over rounds.

Thiiiiiis isn't a good idea for a couple reasons.

 

First, and perhaps most poignant to this thread, antag rounds aren't canon. But those withdrawls for times when a hostage situation meets this will be if the accounts are made persistent. There would literally be a record of "that time the captain was kidnapped" or "we paid for Joe's safety that day but the bad guys blew him up in the end anyway because it was a ruse". An argument could be "Well,  we could just delete those". Who exactly is going to be in charge of deleting those? The Head of Personnel? The admins? Should we be forcing either of those roles into this job? One is IC and one is dealing with enough as it is.

 

Second, and perhaps most world-destroying from my view, is how laughably easy it is to make the station hundreds of thousands of credits. The game is most certainly not balanced for a persistent economy (which is part of why it hasn't just been implemented). A good mining team can literally make as much in just one round if they really dig in there (pun intended). An argument could be "well, just make the station account deduct a certain amount each round". Well, you tell me how much we should be deducting. "A little". Well, what about the rounds where we have those efficient mining teams? "A lot". What about those rounds where we don't have those mining teams, and what about say, the science funds? Do they get deducted the same amount? They aren't exactly selling their crafts, nor should they be obligated to just to keep up their own funding. "Just bring it down to a set amount every round." … Isn't that what we already have?

 

Do I think it sucks that hard work kind of vanishes when a round ends? Yeah. But do I understand why it should? Absolutely. Coincidentally, I'm also against civilian being forced to charge for their goods if the player doesn't want to. Money has no meaning. There's no difference between making customers pay credits for a meal right then or just saying "it gets deducted from your account later" or "employees pay for meal plans outside of the round". For this reason, imposing policy on hostage situations doesn't amount to anything. The best way to change it is to have characters--command, likely, seeing as they're the ones holding the negotiations--around that aren't willing to pay any price for a life. I'm more willing to believe a CMO is a bleeding heart for any life than a HoS eying the fact that this kidnapped assistant has like 19 offenses and is generally opposed to NT and "heeeyy… shaaame about that guy..."

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

There does not need to be a reason listed for withdrawing or depositing funds. Just that there was a withdrawal or deposit made. Track it for 5 days, deleting any older information. This sets a pattern for the week's funds and gives rounds a sense of consistency.

Mining theoretically makes the station tens of thousands of credits but I never see these materialize.

Your argument in the third paragraph is also not very convincing. Money doesn't matter, yet it matters when you are asked to pay for a hamburger. This mindset is very confusing. If money does not matter, why do you cling to it so fiercely? Spend it then. Refusing to let the service department play a restaurant management mini-game is hypocritical if you both believe money doesn't matter while also refusing to spend any money.

Edited January 17, 2019 by Marlon Phoenix

[ben10083]

Here is the problem, the hostage situations are non-canon, and neither is any antag involvement with station funds, so the transaction history cannot be saved over rounds. Also I agree with @Conspiir involving making the money, when I go QM I just take a portion of the phoron and all of the platinum and sell it, and I end up quadrupling my cargo account with the first sale (subjective based on yields). 

 

Overall I feel a good compromise is having a ccia notice be put in place dealing with using business funds for non-business reasons, but it is up to this thread to agree on main points to place into the notice if such a thing is needed.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

You can have withdrawls carry over with a time stamp and amount withdrawn. It doesn't need to say why.  If you see the accounts emptied out 3 days in a row then those are the breaks. Sometimes running a space station is expensive. 

[Conspiir]

16 hours ago, Senpai Jackboot said:

There does not need to be a reason listed for withdrawing or depositing funds. Just that there was a withdrawal or deposit made. Track it for 5 days, deleting any older information. This sets a pattern for the week's funds and gives rounds a sense of consistency.

Mining theoretically makes the station tens of thousands of credits but I never see these materialize.

Your argument in the third paragraph is also not very convincing. Money doesn't matter, yet it matters when you are asked to pay for a hamburger. This mindset is very confusing. If money does not matter, why do you cling to it so fiercely? Spend it then. Refusing to let the service department play a restaurant management mini-game is hypocritical if you both believe money doesn't matter while also refusing to spend any money.

I've no problem letting them if they want to. But you have to look at it this way, too: why bother going to the chef when I can get food from a vending machine. The best thing going for the kitchen, as big a burger meme as this is, is the fact that there's good food without hassle or pay. When you add the roadblock of limitations and extra steps, it feels worse for most people involved because the payment options we have aren't exactly the most streamlined feature we have. From an IC standpoint, t's also kind of jarring and annoying, having to pay one round and not having to another round and being given a piece of paper that says you can have one free meal the next and...  But some chefs I've spoken to don't actually want to. They're being forced to and they get yelled at if they don't. People are actually being reprimanded for trying to play the role they signed up for: cooking food and enjoying conversation with people (that doesn't revolve around the fact that yes, this shift you must pay for a meal and its this much and this is how you do it), not restaurant management. That's where my problem is. And that might be a separate suggestion to make, to allow both styles of play (the chef/cook dichotomy, maybe, where chefs are considered visiting and paid for by NT and cooks are your restaurant-management players).

 

I don't believe Kaed's issue can really be fixed. It's too multifaceted and attached deeply to something players don't have any reason to see as "yes this matters, this is something we're giving up". A CCIA notice won't fix it because people could brush it aside to say "hey, this isn't about a hostage situation, this is different!" And anyone that says "Dude, don't pay for someone like that" is liable to get icly lynched. How many people are willing to say "Yeah, I won't give up my multibillion dollar employer's money for someone I work with if they're kidnapped for ransom." It's a mindset and no regulation can change the morals of a character or the morals of the person behind the screen. It's a twisted sort of metagaming that can't really be stopped.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

You dont need to go to the chef and you dont need to go to the vending machine. Its a choice.

 

You already spend money at the vending machine. You already have to swipe your card or deposit money.

 

For a chef you swipe your card or hand them money.

 

There is no difference. You spend money either way.

Edited January 18, 2019 by Marlon Phoenix

[Kaed]

9 hours ago, Conspiir said:

I don't believe Kaed's issue can really be fixed. It's too multifaceted and attached deeply to something players don't have any reason to see as "yes this matters, this is something we're giving up". A CCIA notice won't fix it because people could brush it aside to say "hey, this isn't about a hostage situation, this is different!" And anyone that says "Dude, don't pay for someone like that" is liable to get icly lynched. How many people are willing to say "Yeah, I won't give up my multibillion dollar employer's money for someone I work with if they're kidnapped for ransom." It's a mindset and no regulation can change the morals of a character or the morals of the person behind the screen. It's a twisted sort of metagaming that can't really be stopped.

People are always free to ignore CCIA notices or regulations at literally any time they want to if they think it fits with their character.  But there has to be a CCIA notice there for them to ignore for it to have meaning when they say 'fuck The Man, my coworker is more important'.  I don't know why this concept is so difficult to grasp and people just keep saying it's impossible to fix so let's not do anything about it.

It's probably impossible to accomplish world peace or have as much money as you could want but that doesn't mean we just let wars happen or give up trying to seek wealth or affluence in a sort of throwing our arms up gesture. 

I don't want people to start being bwoinked because they didn't make a cost-risk analysis about the value of a cargo tech and exceeded their corporate ransom window by 11%, time to file some fucking incident reports everyone. I just want there to be SOME guidelines and regulations, and some fucking conflict during hostage situations instead of forking over meaningless money to pirates without a second thought and ignoring everyone who says 'hey no don't do that' because their words are nothing but the meanie mean greedy sounds of a jerkface with no backing.  It should exist 100% for people who want to play the corporate moneymonger to have something they can point at other than vague corporate loyalty to back up their point when they say "hey, that's too much money to be paying for a janitor, don't.'

Edited January 18, 2019 by Kaed

[DronzTheWolf]

I half hope this happens so I can play a Chinese QM and every time someone who isn't an Head of Staff gets kidnapped, I can yell over the radio that Cargo won't be helping because their social score was too low.

[SkullMagic]

On 10/01/2019 at 19:45, LorenLuke said:

Or show up for one round and leave for two years, then find you have 40k in debt.

I may have around 90k in debt.

[Alberyk]

Taking in consideration the discussion we had, I don't see any real policy changes that can be made to solve this. The number of people that access the station's accounts are already low. Reducing the ammount they start with would be better as pr/project.

Voting for dismissal.

[Flamingo]

I don’t think this is necessary. If the amount of money antagonists are asking for is payable via station accounts and messing up gimmicks, then they can ask for a higher sum, or simply drain/freeze the accounts themselves. 

 

Voting for dismissal.