Auroranomics: Talk Trio

[Triogenix]

Hi y'all - so this is something that since I've joined the server has gotten brought up atleast once a month; the micro-economics of the setting, how much our characters get paid, how much stuff costs, etc. It's something that will never be explained to satisfaction, and there's been attempts in the past to do so that were either ineffective or made the situation worse. However I'd like to give it another shot - but I don't want to do it if there's no interest - this is going to be something that I not only have zero interest in "enforcing harshly", but isn't enforceable harshly, this can only be relevant and useful lore if the community at large decides to engage with it.

Therefore the purpose of this post is to open the floor for the community's thoughts on the concept itself and feedback on what I've cooked so far, so that I can gauge whether or not this is a worthwhile endeavor. Please keep feedback relevant, polite, and as concise as possible, even if that's just "I don't think this is a good idea" followed by a sentence or two explaining why. Questions are welcome, however I might take a while to get to them, as my main focus is still the scarcity rework.

Here's a rough draft that I put on the wiki(due to the math involved, trying to do it on google docs was painful); https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Auroranomics_Rough_Presentation

Thank you, and happy holidays!

[NothingNew]

I'm liking it - Especially if it's used as a rough guideline to get a general price for things, which I feel the "Wants and needs" sections help with describing. It's a lot easier to read through than the previous article on it, which makes it a lot easier to use as a reference in-game.

One thing to note that may need some re-wording though, is that how often people purchase clothing varies from person-to-person and if they do prices can vary wildly depending on personal taste - Having a price rank depending on class is generally a good idea, though.

Utilities may need some expanding as well, or linking it to the different levels of accommodation, as I'd imagine the available utilities aboard a ship would be fairly standardised.

[ben10083]

I argue to swap Command Support with Security. Security is actively doing things that would require more treatments, and the company has a vested interest in the mall cops being healthy. Command Support is a stretch as that is only bridge crew

 

Would add corpo reps to this

No talking about IPC charging and whatnot I notice, prob since it is draft

 

 

Forgot Xenoarch


HoS prob gets paid at CMO level or above due to hazards faced and importance
Due to this would have OM equivalent to XO so we dont have so much variation
 

[JeffMomentRed]

I haven't had a lot of difficulty depicting my characters' wealth or lack of wealth in the setting so far personally, not because of the tools given to me mechanically or in lore though, but because I make up the expenses in my head as I go along. Is it something I want to see more of and actively engage with in the universe? Hell yes. It is a corporate setting, I wish we would lean into that part more than we do, at least in my own opinion, and one part of leaning into that is dealing with economics, as employees of the corporate empire. 

As of now, for my main character, I have 3/4ths of his wage sent off to the Hadiist Party, who pays for his needs, like housing and such aboard the Horizon and supporting his family on Adhomai. The remaining quarter of his income goes to his wants, like brand new clothes instead of basic laborer gear, or a trip away from Biesel which has drained him of about a year's worth of savings. Bonuses are a huge thing for several of my characters and I keep how much they make from those bonuses in mind as it greatly affects their moods for days to come. In-game finances are not something I usually keep a record of, nor should they be, but I intentionally keep it on my mind as of right now, for otherwise any big decision or new outfit or a gift he'd purchase for someone would be completely meaningless in my own eyes.

[Jaeger Brothers]

I've read through this and upping Secoff and Shaft Miner to "Alright" would be beneficial because those jobs do go into the line of "Is this worth my Life" and I really don't think any Security officer would lift a finger for the Chainlink if the Vault is being robbed or whatever is going on canonically for not even 5k a month or a shaft miner would just go out once and get the bare minimum because they don't feel like the extra risk is worth the extra materials. Alternatively for Security and Miners they could get paid by performance on top of their regular pay. For example a shaft miner takes some extra risk and gets a lot of Ore out of the haul then they get a bonus. For security the Horizon gets boarded they get repelled they get a bonus or they defend the Horizon crew during an event successfully or manage to evacuate the crew successfully they get a bonus.

I agree with what Ben said about the insurance policy, because really if you want those people to hop in front of bullets if shit hits the fan they better be sure that whatever the Injuries they had to take for the Chainlink would get Insured properly.

[greenjoe]

Miners and Xenoarch/Anomalist should likely have some of the highest hazard pay of any crew on the ship due to the dangers of their jobs, and the fact they are leaving the ship to go out into possibly dangerous areas regularly.
I'd always headcanoned that miners get some good pay from the hazard pay of their job.

Edited December 18 by greenjoe

[Mr.Popper]

Hi, I love the idea of fleshing out Auroranomics™ and it looks good so far. The biggest thing I would like to see from an economics expansion is a distinction between the different corporations: how their wages, insurance, etc. differ. I've gotten a lot of fun RP playing out the rivalry between corps, but I've realized with the current lore the actual differences between employees' experiences are pretty vague and this is a good opportunity to solidify them. A highly trained Zavodskoi Security Officer would make a lot more than some Grupo Amapola goon, a Hephaestus engineer would likely have lower pay but better benefits than their Zavodskoi coworker, Orion Express workers would benefit especially from overtime, etc. Distinguishing each megacorp's benefits would both highlight underused lore and give more accurate finances for characters.

10 hours ago, ben10083 said:

I argue to swap Command Support with Security. Security is actively doing things that would require more treatments, and the company has a vested interest in the mall cops being healthy. Command Support is a stretch as that is only bridge crew

Ignoring my suggestion of making benefits corp-based for a moment, I think giving security (or at least secoff) lavish insurance would be wasteful. Their on-the-job injuries are already covered if I'm reading the insurance section right and offering anything more would be excessive for an entry-level position with presumably high turnover. Bridge Crew are roughly analogous with airline pilots with much higher qualification requirements, not to mention they're technically combat trained for serious emergencies now.

Quote

HoS prob gets paid at CMO level or above due to hazards faced and importance
Due to this would have OM equivalent to XO so we dont have so much variation

I disagree with this for similar reasons. HoS is arguably one of the command jobs with the lowest qualifications second only to OM, while the CMO is the doctor to end all doctors. We know from a meta standpoint that the HoS is one of the most important command member as Horizon regularly gets into security emergencies requiring their expertise, but the vast majority of these situations are non-canon antag shenanigans. Looking at vaguely analogous IRL jobs, a chief of police and medical director, medical directors get paid almost double on average. (Based off here: https://www.indeed.com/career/chief-of-police/salaries, https://www.indeed.com/career/medical-director/salaries?from=top_sb)

Both of these points also apply to the idea of raising secoff's pay, however I agree Shaft Miner should get a raise. There needs to be high incentive for taking the job with the highest casualty rate on the ship.

[Triogenix]

11 hours ago, ben10083 said:

I argue to swap Command Support with Security. Security is actively doing things that would require more treatments, and the company has a vested interest in the mall cops being healthy. Command Support is a stretch as that is only bridge crew

will consider this - I decided based on payrate but this makes a level of sense, esp. with security remaining healthy.

11 hours ago, ben10083 said:

Forgot Xenoarch

Whoops.

11 hours ago, ben10083 said:

HoS prob gets paid at CMO level or above due to hazards faced and importance

Decided this based off required education. HoS's require only a bachelors, CMOs require a full doctorate - I think a 2000cr/month pay difference is fine with that in mind.

3 hours ago, Jaeger Brothers said:

I've read through this and upping Secoff and Shaft Miner to "Alright" would be beneficial because those jobs do go into the line of "Is this worth my Life" and I really don't think any Security officer would lift a finger for the Chainlink if the Vault is being robbed or whatever is going on canonically for not even 5k a month or a shaft miner would just go out once and get the bare minimum because they don't feel like the extra risk is worth the extra materials. Alternatively for Security and Miners they could get paid by performance on top of their regular pay. For example a shaft miner takes some extra risk and gets a lot of Ore out of the haul then they get a bonus. For security the Horizon gets boarded they get repelled they get a bonus or they defend the Horizon crew during an event successfully or manage to evacuate the crew successfully they get a bonus.

Will think about this because many people brought up how it feels that security is getting pennies. Might not jump it up all the way to alright, but might have them somewhere around {{AverageSalary}} x 1.5 or smth(currently they are at {{Average Salary}} x 0.9). However at the same time these are jobs that while dangerous, they are "low-skill" ones that require little to no education - I used the starting salary for the NYPD as a rough estimate, $58,580 a year, under this aurora sec officers make 53700cr a year, and currently in the code officers and miners are paid the same, so I kept that. All that said, I'll consider raising it, though officers/miners are probably never going to be making as much as engineers or similar.

11 minutes ago, Mr.Popper said:

current lore the actual differences between employees' experiences are pretty vague and this is a good opportunity to solidify them.

sadly one of the limitations of doing this on the wiki is that without a mountain of backend shitcode(there's already a ton for this page) it's very difficult to have parsing functions do more complex stuff like this. I'll see what I can do though.

11 hours ago, NothingNew said:

Utilities may need some expanding as well, or linking it to the different levels of accommodation, as I'd imagine the available utilities aboard a ship would be fairly standardised.

Will look into this more if I end up doing this.

Edited December 18 by Triogenix

[hazelmouse]

If these numbers are to be understood as canonically binding, how will this interact with synthetic wages? I understand self-owned synthetics are meant to be paid substantially less than human peers. I could see it becoming hard to justify an IPC having financial difficulties at all if they're canonically paid equal to humans per the numbers on the page, especially in some of the higher paying jobs.

[Triogenix]

On 18/12/2024 at 21:55, hazelmouse said:

If these numbers are to be understood as canonically binding, how will this interact with synthetic wages? I understand self-owned synthetics are meant to be paid substantially less than human peers. I could see it becoming hard to justify an IPC having financial difficulties at all if they're canonically paid equal to humans per the numbers on the page, especially in some of the higher paying jobs.

This is again an issue with the wiki itself - parsing functions are incredibly irritating to work with and around, and it's not possible for me to define them with what's called magic words in mediawiki without creating a whole seperate page for just that parsing function.

While the back-end doesn't look like this now because a ton is subject to change, what I eventually want it to look like for everything would be similar to this;

'''Research Director:''' Wealthy, {{#expr: (({{WealthySalary}}) - ({{WealthySalary}} * {{Tax}})) * {{NetIncome}} round 0}}cr a month
(anything in brackets besides the expression itself is is a value the wiki is pulling from a completely seperate page, so {{Tax}} means the wiki pulls the value on the Template:Tax page, or 0.15 to then use in the math; these pages can contain only raw numerical values or expressions that output only raw numerical values or it'll error)

aka no numbers at all on the page itself, just expressions using parsing functions assigned to magic words. For IPCs, or any non-human/skrell species It'd have to look like

'''Research Director:''' Wealthy, {{#expr: (({{PosiWealthySalary}}) - ({{PosiWealthySalary}} * {{Tax}})) * {{PosiNetIncome}} round 0}}cr a month

where {{PosiWealthy Salary}} would have to be it's own page and be a parsing function of the expression {{#expr:{{PosiAverageSalary}} * 8}} and {{PosiAverageSalary}} itself would also have to be it's own page and parsing function of {{#expr:{{AverageSalary}} * 0.75}} or smth. Expand this to cover everything and for each species I'd need to create on average ~14 new pages per species, or ~70 in total for all non-human skrell species, massively bloating this project, and this is before even considering corporations. I also can't shove all these expressions on one page because of the way the wiki works with calculations; magic words which define parsing functions of expressions which have a numerical value and can be used in calculations are determined by page name alone and can't be assigned to a specific expression on a specific page, unlike hyperlinks where I could use subtitles like [[The_Wasteland#Clan_"Gawgaryn"_-_The_Punished_Clans|raiders]] to link to a specific part of the page.

Now there might be a way to work around this issue by using precedence, positional parameters, conditional expressions, and other parsing functions, but I'm still looking into it and a way to sort of force the wiki to output a raw number instead of a string or something else. For reference if someone thinks they might be able to figure it out; here's the help pages for most of the stuff I'm using;

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words#

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Expr_parser_function_syntax#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Conditional_expressions

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Representation_of_numbers_in_expr_parser_function

 

Lastly as to why I just won't make either 70 new pages or have all the raw math on one page, the whole point of this is to make it incredibly easy to edit on the fly by future writers, and sort of 'foolproof' it so that changing it doesn't require complete understanding of how the system works. For example, should I go through with this, should a future writer want to say, double the cost of food for the Horizon crew, they'd just need to change the value on the Template:FoodCost page from 320 to 640, and everything else would automatically update as shown in these pictures.

Before:

After(just refreshed the page after saving the changed value before reverting that change) it'd also update across the entire wiki, no matter what page the expression was on.

However I'll see what I can do with the wiki backend to allow for a more expansive scope.

Edited December 21 by Triogenix

[Triogenix]

I figured out a way that could work. I almost certainly missed some jobs, and species and some of the numbers are probably still wacky, and I'll probably need to reorganize the whole page; but here is every job under every corporation with every species that can play that job in that corporation*;

https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Auroranomics_Rough_Presentation

 

*not guaranteed I'm also certainly missing stuff.

[greenjoe]

Someone on discord brought up that they thought the amount IPCs earned on this was too much? Adjustments for synths is some complex stuff I imagine.

[Triogenix]

6 hours ago, greenjoe said:

Someone on discord brought up that they thought the amount IPCs earned on this was too much? Adjustments for synths is some complex stuff I imagine.

it would be but I found a way to make it easy. Also the IPC modifier is 0.45 - so they're making 45% of whatever a human in their job and corp makes. I uh - don't know if I should make it lower than that.

[hazelmouse]

2 hours ago, Triogenix said:

it would be but I found a way to make it easy. Also the IPC modifier is 0.45 - so they're making 45% of whatever a human in their job and corp makes. I uh - don't know if I should make it lower than that.

I'm personally happy with the current values for synthetics. Even the higher paid jobs, such as in medical or engineering, are relatively scraping by.