Donator
First off, this is no disrespect to the Server Leadership nor Network Leadership related to Civil City. This is simply my experience of the server from what I can see personally and you may potentially be able to relate your experiences to help improve the experience for new players coming to the network.
With that out of the way, I'll be sectioning off each designated part of the experience with the topic header followed by what I would personally do if I were in a position to make these changes.Job Issues.
One of the biggest issues I found with the server was the amount of both unnecessary jobs that the server has as well as how inconsistent the money making side of server is.Unnecessary jobs
Just from looking at the job titles, as a new player I would simply classify the following jobs I list right now as the same thing/in the same boundaries of relevance to the point you could classify them into one job specifically and make room for other jobs that are much more welcoming to the player base and expand the boundaries and experience the players can have.- Neuro hacker, Hacker and Scammer
Unwelcoming Jobs
The jobs on the server right now are really... not welcoming to a new player. A lot of darkrp players understand the basic principle of Meth for example as that's a pretty unanimous 'thing' that appears on most servers. It's of course mixed with the CG taste but this is a job I understood relatively well compared to other jobs.There are a lot of jobs where if I was a bored player joining the server at 1am to fuck about and make some money, I would be extremely confused as to what I should do in terms of making money with the job.
- Cryptominer
It's expensive to get into which is great actually. It means you need to accumulate some knowledge on the server by finding other ways to make money and along this experience, potentially learn new ways to make money however for realistic scenarios - the numbers are far too low to get any sort of in character help when it comes to understanding the mining aspect of the server and so with asking staff constantly for assistance, it does get a bit of a ball ache. - Trashman
A simply job, but confusing regardless as there is no interactable menu or guidance telling you how to dispense your trash from your 'blower'. I found out after asking a staff member how to dispense the collected trash but regardless, I think having some sort of guidance overall to simple jobs like this that everyone is meant to be able to access without it damaging the economy should definitely be looked into in the future. Also, I would never have thought about putting the 'Trash Recycler' in the back of a truck as there again is no guidance as to being able to actually do this. The money for collecting trash is insanely high as well as the minute and I'll explain later the issues. - Weed Grower
My issue with weed growing is that I had no clue there was even a tablet to be able to spawn the equipment in with, therefore when I was pressing F4 trying to spawn in the equipment on the entities menu and wondering where the bud was, it was quite frustrating to spend around £2,000 on equipment that isn't necessary. Furthermore, the actual tablet itself has so many different options to play around with that it's hard to understand what is actually beneficial.
Furthermore, when I had the Weed stuff actually set up, it took quite a significant time to grow the weed, cater for it, then hang it out, jar it up and then sell it all for a really insignificant amount of money. I'm sure there is ways to make up massive areas for weed farms and what not, however it did not seem profitable remotely using the cash available and for every £300 of seeds I bought, each bit of soil, water and everything else I bought, I was actually losing money as the weed sold for about £150. A business like this should be a loss profit - you lose money buying the equipment at first until you start producing weed, in which you sell it, break even with the equipment (which is where you'd like to be if you had to log off for the night), and make money after that. With the amount of upkeep and time taken for the plants to be produced, you can easily make £10,000 from being a Trashman. Even then, after the weed is created. - Gun dealer
My issue with this job was, with the player count being so low, there's no demand so therefore this job becomes entirely useless in its right. This isn't entirely the SL's fault it's more the player base not existing but it's something that could potentially be looked into in the future. NPC's that pop up around the map where you collect their weapons and a minigame to clean the gun, put it back together? I'm not sure, but there's plenty of ideas to do with 'guns' where you can make at least a 'bit' of money even when there are no other players on - as well as this would also bring unique content to the server as no other server has anything like this as far as I know. - Similar issues as listed above with DJ, Chef, Prostitute (Which I'll get onto later as I'm baffled), Bank manager, Mechanic, Security gard, Taxi Driver - and a whole load of other jobs.
- Prostitute
If you have a job for a prostitute/hooker, why is there a rule for ERP? It sounds really bad looking back at typing this however, 'erotic roleplay' to some extent is going to be required for a job like this and as far as I can see, there's no bypass of the ERP rule whilst playing the prostitute job.
MONEY
How is the economy on this server as fucked as it is?You can be a trashman and collect 10,000 kg of trash and earn around £70,000 which is ridiculous when it takes you between 15-30 minutes depending on your level. When you compare this to the other jobs such as thief as well as the other entities that require some type of upkeep like printers - it does seem quite overwhelming.
The way money should be done is quite simple but obviously at your own extent as again - I'm new, I don't know what your economy is like.
Jobs that are illegal and take upkeep to maintain should have a high risk, high reward factor.
Jobs that are legal and require no upkeep should have a low risk, low reward factor.
Jobs that are illegal but do not require much upkeep to maintain should have a medium risk, reward factor.
Jobs that are legal and take upkeep to maintain should have a medium reward purely because you are actively playing the server and clearly trying to make money by continuously doing the upkeep. It's also the 'labour' aspect.
Let's say for example,
High risk high reward factor should make around 100k an hour
Low risk low reward factor should make around 30k an hour.
Medium risk reward factor should make around 60k an hour
Medium reward 60k
The values at base set can be changed obviously to suit whatever you need to change it to, however the fact that a trashman can make more money than someone doing something highly illegal and with a lot of upkeep says a lot about the state of the economy.
On a slightly different note, because of the issues mentioned prior regarding the jobs and the confusement on the jobs, it means having to spend money to work out how to use the equipment and to make money of which if done wrong can actually leave a player bankrupt and potentially leave the server.
This literally happened to me with weed as it was that hard to understand. I spent about £5,000 trying to figure it out, lost all my money, had £92 and found trash man of which then I never want to touch weed again because it's simply just not worth it.
Interacting with other players entities
Plain and simple - it was extremely annoying. There was absolutely 0 way for us to interact each others entities with each other and with no guidance on how to actually do this, it got extremely frustrating. I had my weed equipment and I was trying to connect it to my friends of which wouldn't work and we were there trying to figure it out for far too long, of which we only found out because of a staff member.Players you are buddied with should be able to interact between entities.
Map
Coming across from Military Roleplay to try it out, looking for the map was actually extremely hard. It's not displayed on the F4 menu in a subsection like Military Roleplay and I was quite surprised when the staff member told me I had to click Escape in order to see the map - of which I was even more surprised when there was no system in place for way pointing! Such a missed opportunity.
NPCs
Extremely hard to find specific NPC's. How on earth is a new player that spawns in the Suburbs meant to know you have to buy properties from a real estate NPC? Or the truck dealer?
Or the countless other dealers scattered across the map.
The official one's should be listed on the map.
Remaining dead after an event /event join
More of a bug complaint but an issue is that if you die and try respawn as an event ends, it sometimes glitches out. It should be fixed as it's quite annoying. Furthermore actually, a warning saying your entities will be removed if you chose to join an event needs to be put in place as well.Casino
As someone that's played a lot of FiveM, I was excited to see a casino as doing jobs to make some money and spending it at a casino in hopes to make more is really fun. When I found out you had to (mainly) use external credits which had no correlation to in game currency, it was quite annoying after winning a few blackjacks.Also the amount of which you can put in being 50/100 credits is criminal !
SUGGESTIONS
- Work with the community to establish a stable economy where jobs are actually worth playing and roleplaying withSUGGESTIONS
- Try thin out the content that wouldn't be understanded by new coming players.
- More guides that are a simple UI that pops up asking if you need a tutorial after switching to a job, of which if they select yes gives a basic overview of how to play as the role you are playing as
- A level system where more complicated and higher 'money earning' jobs have to be unlocked via XP. This way, your issue of worrying about people giving out too much money and fucking up the economy is not abandoned as if someone is given £100,000 as a weed farmer, they can't actually use the £100,000 and turn it into £200,000+ without putting some work into it.
- Make it so the map is in the F4 menu as well to cater for the MRP people coming across as well as to just make it a whole lot easier to access
- Make the casino work in cash rather than credits or add a conversion for the credits to be able to be used as cash.
- Add a house district where there are HIGH costing houses for people to work towards which act like permanent residence for 14 days where in which, they have to come on the server and pay a residence fee. This way you have activity spikes from the returning players wanting to keep their houses resulting in the player count increasing therefore making other people want to join as it climbs up the server list. With a house that's permanent that should also be customisable, it would mean that because it's a unique feature, regardless of the price you list the houses at, there will always be a person on that wants to earn enough money to be able to actually afford the house.
^ This also gives more RP scenarios as if someone owns the house, they may offer to rent it out to someone for a certain amount of time.
- Make a nicer UI where you don't have to access an NPC in order to purchase/rent out a property. Add it to the phone kind of like in GTA where you can buy a property off a market - only this time the listing would be removed for X amount of hours after a purchase
Some final notes to leave you with.
The experience was fun because the staff and pre-existing players on were there to assist wherever was needed, but you need to understand that, that care is not always going to be there to set the important first impression for a new player. CC is actually a really decent server and I believe that with a simple economy fix and some new jobs that actually sound exciting, as well as guidance to the currently existing jobs in the server, the numbers can easily maintain 40 players each day and increase.
I am not in the flow with CC however, as a basis if these things aren't already being done - try them! Effort goes a long way.
- Communication from serverleadership as to the changes being made
- Votes and community opinions on changes and whether changes should be made
- Valuing each member of the community and taking their opinion on board
I'd also like to point out, yes I have talked on, and on about the state of the server when it comes to economy however, this retrospectively has a knock on effect as if people aren't playing, the police team don't have a community to serve, therefore the police force dies, therefore the economy gets fucked up as no one is preventing illegal crime and so money is made quickly and it goes on and on and so yes economy plays a huge huge huge role.
Anyways, I'd love to hear other people's opinions from old players to knew and know if the issues have persisted for a long time and if there is any reason these issues haven't been changed or edited to better the health of the server.
Discord Xeno#9147
Programming Team