Heat issue

[gravismetallum]

That may work for legitimate people doing legitimate jobs,but CKs are not legitimate business people.

We are mercenaries, hackers, thieves, hatchet men, thugs, assassins, kidnappers, runners of illegal objects and information of all sorts.

Whether you think of yourself as a criminal or a vigilante it doesn't matter.

It doesn't make a lot of sense that you would be allowed to say to any shady dealings boss "I don't like that job, got any others?"...The boss would laugh at you,and hire somebody else (if your lucky that he doesn't try to have you killed) and move on since he can't trust you to do what needs to be done.

Imagine a criminal boss saying "Oh I'm sorry, you want only information delivery jobs instead of this high paying kidnapping job I got lined up for you. Noprob buddy!"

When your starting out it makes sense to take what they give you, when your considered a pro then you could be choosey. ;D

There are a few connectors out there that usually hand out specific jobs though. Like parcel delivery usually gives package jobs...not always though. There should be more of these I think. Hidden though.

[grävling]

Dec 23, 2011 1:41:13 GMT -5 gravismetallum said:

It doesn't make a lot of sense that you would be allowed to say to any shady dealings boss "I don't like that job, got any others?"...The boss would laugh at you,and hire somebody else (if your lucky that he doesn't try to have you killed) and move on since he can't trust you to do what needs to be done.

I don't think this analysis holds up -- at least for the street connectors. For ladder connectors, things could be different. For the street connectors, there is a market in jobs. There are always many jobs available, and there are many Knights who drop in, and are in competition with each other to receive the better jobs. Now it might be that a Connector wouldn't want to give you a better job if you hadn't already proven yourself with the poorer ones, but a Connector very much wouldn't want to give you a job that you weren't willing to do.

Because you're not special - all that matters is the job, and if you don't want to do it, there will be some other fool that will. Much better that you turn down jobs that you think you would fail at, rather than fail at them.

[Slide87]

I agree with gravling...a sort of multichoice for some connectors couldn't be bad ^^

[LordofSyn]

Bravo to you all.

[Seryin Hunter]

Dec 22, 2011 18:55:55 GMT -5 grävling said:

Your problem is that you are declining the missions. Don't do that. Accept them. Then cancel them. Then ask for new missions.

Ok, but this isn't my point. I'm trying to point out the fact it's not behaving the same way it did before the latest update. Before, I could simply ask for work and when they said they wanted me to work for blah against blah in blah territory, I would just hit back and see the new offer. Nothing tedious like actually taking the job then dropping it. I was under the impression the job giver would not be too happy about that, like if I had failed the mission.

[gravismetallum]

Currently the connectors have no problem with you accepting missions then canceling them...as weird as that may sound to some of us. ;D

[blackgauntlet]

Hmm... maybe we could upload our resume & job scope requirements (takes only such jobs for certain factions against certain factions for at least this amount of money) on the Matrix and let the Connectors find US instead?

For those that cannot wait, there are still those jobs on the free market that are dirtier and open to anyone needier for them?

[fallen]

1) Yes - jobs became persistent. If the connector at the Black Rose needs someone to run a package down to Dorchester, then he needs someone to run a package down to Dorchester. That's what he is offering, and until that gets taken care of, he is not going to move on to the next job.

2) Right now, if you want to use the tedious work around of taking a job and canceling it, feel free to use that exploit. It is now in the bug tracker to be closed with a penalty of some sort (most likely reputation) to prevent you from thinking that is a good idea (CK-256).

This encourages a network of connectors, a transient life style, having a computer which can accept multiple jobs, knowing where the good work is, and taking jobs you don't like.

[grävling]

Dec 30, 2011 9:27:24 GMT -5 fallen said:

1) Yes - jobs became persistent. If the connector at the Black Rose needs someone to run a package down to Dorchester, then he needs someone to run a package down to Dorchester. That's what he is offering, and until that gets taken care of, he is not going to move on to the next job.

2) Right now, if you want to use the tedious work around of taking a job and canceling it, feel free to use that exploit. It is now in the bug tracker to be closed with a penalty of some sort (most likely reputation) to prevent you from thinking that is a good idea (CK-256).

This encourages a network of connectors, a transient life style, having a computer which can accept multiple jobs, knowing where the good work is, and taking jobs you don't like.

I think you are seriously mistaken here. The whole thing of 'encouraging a network of connectors, having a computer that can accept multiple jobs and knowing where the good jobs are' is precisely what I like about this game; when you get down to it the reason that I play it. And if you take away the ability to see what jobs typically get offered by which street connector, then you ruin the ability to learn how to build nice networks. Right now I already think that it is essential to have a computer that takes multiple jobs, or else it is too hard to build up reputation. But this means that you need to accept jobs that are all going to roughly the same part of town, because right now you cannot take 5 jobs in 5 different neighbourhoods, even if they are all package delivery ones, and get them all finished before they start to expire. Combat related jobs take longer.

It doesn't make sense that I can go to a connector's place, and because my computer takes 5 jobs find there are 5 jobs available, while those whose computers only take 1
or 2 only get 2. I'd be much happier if, when I called up a connector he had 4 or 5 jobs available. I could take any or all of these (as many as my computer could hold) and then knew that there would be no more new jobs from this connector, not 'until those jobs were done', but until 09.00 tomorrow -- or the day after tomorrow, or whatever seemed reasonable.

So if the gang war between the Fennians and the Streets heats up, you may find that jobs in both neighbourhoods concentrate on assassinating prominent people of the other side. If things are more peaceful, then running packages to corporation land may show up with greater frequency.

I think that it may make sense for connectors whom you reach through a V-chip to have particular jobs which they need doing, this and no other, but then I think in that case it also makes sense for them to call _you_. You don't want to disappoint your ladder connector when he needs something. And we have contacts who already work this way -- they only have one job, and that is it. How a connector sees his business makes for interesting speculation. If you have a message that has to get somewhere, it may make sense to give it to 5 or 10 Knights. It doesn't matter if 8 of them die trying, and one is delayed, as long as one of them gets through, you have what you want.

But this strategy cannot work for delivering packages or people. There you want to entrust the task to somebody that you expect to be capable of completing the job. (Unless, evil grin, it is all a set-up and you want to get that package lost or that person killed. Then entrust the job to the greenest knight that comes into your office.) And if you have 2 cargoes to go to the same place, it saves money if you can give them both to the same knight. I think these sorts of 'I will pay you better but only if you take 3 messages to Dorchester' ought to be common.

But the thing that I like about the street connectors is that they are in the wholesale business. If this goes away, I think a whole lot of the fun will go away with it. Instead of planning multi-neighborhood runs based on 'profitability of route', 'where I need to improve my reputation now', 'places I must avoid until certain crimes of my past have been forgotten', and the like, it will all be a matter of the luck of the dice roll when you went to the connector's office. It's the ability to select which gives spice to the planning.

[fallen]

grävling - you make some good points. We will not ignore the advice of one of our most fervent players! The first step, in my opinion, was enabling a persistence layer within the Storyteller engine. This persistence layer has also enabled Templar Assault battles to last across phone restarts, Connectors to remember the last job they tried to give out (and you rejected) and will soon be (or already has) enabled Star Traders planets to maintain their market state more realistically.

Ok -- now we have persistence. For Connectors, how to use it in something that is fun, but also not easy to exploit? Good question--good discussion, so far.

Certainly, you mention some major points that are on the CK roadmap and coming:
1) Contacts calling you and asking favors or work directly.
2) Rumors driving types of work availability and state within different neighborhoods. It stands to reason that if the Fennians and Streets heat up and go to war for a week or two, not only will the jobs change, but the encounters and heat levels in the areas are also going to change.

Cory and I will talk some more about this one. I still like the change, but that's just me. I "cheat" a lot less now (abusing my Connectors for very specific, high profit jobs that I like) and my life as a CK is much more spicy, dicey, and now involves lots of jobs that I'd just rather not do... but I have to pay the bills (keep my runners alive, buy medkits, and I NEED my crammers).

[Slide87]

Point one is a future development??? U guys are crazy!!!!!! =) Wow!!!!!

[grävling]

Dec 30, 2011 13:30:11 GMT -5 fallen said:

Cory and I will talk some more about this one. I still like the change, but that's just me. I "cheat" a lot less now (abusing my Connectors for very specific, high profit jobs that I like) and my life as a CK is much more spicy, dicey, and now involves lots of jobs that I'd just rather not do... but I have to pay the bills (keep my runners alive, buy medkits, and I NEED my crammers).

If that is the behaviour you want to limit, then I think it would make sense to change the general-purpose nature of street connectors. So 'Escort Service' only has jobs where you take people from one place to another, and 'Finnigan's Parcel delivery' only delivers packages, and so on and so forth. The public-facing connector shops should hand out these jobs, and they should be legal. There should be a choice of serveral always on offer, or rather always on offer until <specific time>. They also shouldn't pay all that well. Some places should be even more specific -- they concentrate on jobs run in the Finnian area, for instance. The danger here is in the mean streets themselves.

If you do enough of these jobs you should then be offered keys to the back rooms of places -- I am thinking of the back of the Blue Steel Parlor, or the Silver Empress Club -- i.e. real buildings that have more than one door -- where you can be offered better jobs. Well-paying package runs. And the odd capture mission, perhaps an assasination.
The difficulty with these jobs will not only be that they take you to dangerous areas, but that they are illegal. So no more submitting to patrols -- they will confiscate your cargo, and lock you up for long enough that the time-destruct messages in your brain will dissipate, if not longer depending on the charge, and how you are fixed for bribes.

These jobs should also have the other gangs or corps sending agents against you. One of the annoying things with the game as it stands now is that if you are in Territory X, having just taken a job for X, you get jumped by X's sort of gangmembers/salarymen. I.e. the troub le you get is indexed to the neighbourhood you are in, not the enemies who want your mission to fail. It would be more fun if, in addition to the random encounters with neighbourhood punks, you also got targetted encounters with those sworn to stop your mission.

And then, of course, it would be fun to *be* one of those who are sworn to stop a mission.
Where that sort of thing comes in --and where the bulk of assasination, capture and threaten missions come in, is on behalf of a gang or a corp you want gang-membership/citizenship with. And these should be made by V-chip
only. Most of these chips should be faction specific, and you should get them through
your ladder connector/citizen recruitment representative (or whatever you call corp
ladders).

It is fine if these connectors have very few, or indeed only one job that needs doing. But they should have 1 job reguardless of how many slots you have in your computer.
And they should pay well, to go with the greater risk.

Does any of this make sense? I think it would make for a lot of fun. And while it would take the wind out of the sails of those who only want high-paying jobs, it would not do so at the
expense of those who only want jobs to suit their heat-management stratgey, or who are looking for particular regions of the map.

My 45 cents, anyway,
Grävling

[fallen]

grävling - its a good on-going discussion. A couple of comments.

1) Nothing a Cyber Knight does is ever legal. Otherwise the Connector would pay you about $15, or actually, he would pay a thug, or corporate citizen to do it. The very nature of a Cyber Knight, the secure memory of your computer, makes every job you do high risk. You are a criminal, an expendable urban soldier, paid to do dirty work.

2) When the Encounter system gets its full overhaul, one of the additions will be job-aware encounters. Therefore, if you have a package, thugs are going to show up and tell you turn it over or they will take it, or a patrol will become dangerous because it would take contraband, etc. This has been on the road-map from the beginning.

3) One of the benefits of the contract change is that it limits my strategy of replaying high paying jobs. It has other benefits, and it fits into a vision of the NBZ and the Cyber Knight caste. I recognize that it has an effect on your game play strategy. It completely changed mine. Cory chooses to set special rules for himself when he takes contracts that are even more limiting than those set in the rules today to test future changes. As a BETA game, things are bound to change.

At the core of this discussion is the Connector-Knight relationship.

===
You walk into the smokey den called the Black Rose and breezing by the Fennian tough at the door. You and the bar tender exchange a knowing nod, and he slides you a vudka. A few minutes later, you loiter to the back corner to talk to the street Connector when he has finished talking to another criminal. You sit down and he slides a small package across the table. You know the deal--you don't know or want to know whats in it. You have a location, a name, and a price. No questions to ask, you don't want the answers. No one, no thugs, no corp, will stand between you and the delivery.

... then you slide the package back across the table and say, "How about something else? That's too far away today" or "Ya know, I'm kinda not welcome in that part of town, got another one?." ... Up until that Contract reject, you had my imagination. Maybe, "The price is no good, chummer" or "Not against Mars," but if you walk out of that shady corner, he isn't smiling and making up a new job when you come back. He has work to get done, its still against Mars, he ain't budging (much) on the price. If you come back a few hours later, you can get a different job, cause someone else picked it up.


===

That's my feeling on the situation. Its wrapped up in the seriousness of the Cyber Knight profession, the choice you made, the computer you carry.

[grävling]

Dec 30, 2011 17:26:05 GMT -5 fallen said:

grävling - its a good on-going discussion. A couple of comments.

1) Nothing a Cyber Knight does is ever legal. Otherwise the Connector would pay you about $15, or actually, he would pay a thug, or corporate citizen to do it. The very nature of a Cyber Knight, the secure memory of your computer, makes every job you do high risk. You are a criminal, an expendable urban soldier, paid to do dirty work.

I don't see how this follows. Escort service, for instance -- you are there for protection. There isn't anything inherantly illegal in that -- though, if you get jumped and and end up killing somebody, then that would be illegal -- unless the courts ruled 'self-defence' so keep a record of what goes down ... (Will we have records that cannot be forged, or edited? If not, then skip that idea, as personal records won't be evidence in court..)

For package delivery, I had in mind something more along the lines of Snow Crash. Some people _really_ care a lot about their trade secrets. So if a parcel is stolen, or abandoned, or just gets out of range of the designated courier ... WHOOSH ... the whole thing self destructs. You have to pay people extra to walk around with a small bomb.

Messages are for things that you do not want to trust to the Matrix. They don't have to be in the category of information that is illegal to have -- more likely they document crimes, or they come from sources who are off the net for a very good reason.

2) When the Encounter system gets its full overhaul, one of the additions will be job-aware encounters. Therefore, if you have a package, thugs are going to show up and tell you turn it over or they will take it, or a patrol will become dangerous because it would take contraband, etc. This has been on the road-map from the beginning.

So cool. I am _so_ looking forward to this.

3) One of the benefits of the contract change is that it limits my strategy of replaying high paying jobs. It has other benefits, and it fits into a vision of the NBZ and the Cyber Knight caste. I recognize that it has an effect on your game play strategy. It completely changed mine. Cory chooses to set special rules for himself when he takes contracts that are even more limiting than those set in the rules today to test future changes. As a BETA game, things are bound to change.

I take on special rules for the fun of role playing it. For instance, my top brutal game has a character who is sworn to take no human life. (Blasting robots to bits is fine.) 140,000 turns 564 XP spent -- and with one agonising exception, every human that has been taken down in this game has gone down with a taser. I make other interesting personal rules, such as 'stay on the good side of both faction X and faction Y' which is what makes this game replayable.

The character classes do not do it -- no matter what class you select to start off with, your best strategy for avoiding heat is to keep your guns in your pocket and use your taser -- except on those nasty grey robots with the huge number of MPs and APs. You will probably have to shoot them.

At the core of this discussion is the Connector-Knight relationship.

===
You walk into the smokey den called the Black Rose and breezing by the Fennian tough at the door. You and the bar tender exchange a knowing nod, and he slides you a vudka. A few minutes later, you loiter to the back corner to talk to the street Connector when he has finished talking to another criminal. You sit down and he slides a small package across the table. You know the deal--you don't know or want to know whats in it. You have a location, a name, and a price. No questions to ask, you don't want the answers. No one, no thugs, no corp, will stand between you and the delivery.

... then you slide the package back across the table and say, "How about something else? That's too far away today" or "Ya know, I'm kinda not welcome in that part of town, got another one?." ... Up until that Contract reject, you had my imagination. Maybe, "The price is no good, chummer" or "Not against Mars," but if you walk out of that shady corner, he isn't smiling and making up a new job when you come back. He has work to get done, its still against Mars, he ain't budging (much) on the price. If you come back a few hours later, you can get a different job, cause someone else picked it up.


===

That's my feeling on the situation. Its wrapped up in the seriousness of the Cyber Knight profession, the choice you made, the computer you carry.

Yes indeed, this is the core. But the core of why I went into this business in the first place is my desire for independence, and for control over my own life. I'm not an employee. If I had wanted that kind of life -- safe and secure -- I would have just taken some corporate ticket. Become a good little girl, and do what I was told, and not ask too many questions.

So here is how I see things playing out.

I walk into the same sort of bar that you described. A group of Cyber Knights are sitting around, discussing shop and bragging about themselves, same as usual. Since there is nobody there whom I particularly despise, I order from the bar and sit down.

'What's the latest on the job board?' I ask.

'A few packages to Camden Street, an escort job to Washington Square, and two pickups. One in River Park, and one in North Square'.

I sigh, knowing why the table is so full. The advantage of having a deck like mine, which can hold three jobs, is that you can stack up jobs and thus get paid two or three times for about the same amount of risk. But this job list is for locations all over town. You'd never get a connector to give you several of these, because there is no way you could accomplish more than one of these on time. And that's if they all go smoothly. The exception would be those Camden Street packages. But the rate offered must be terribly low, or else somebody else would have taken it.

I jack in, and take a look. Yes, 33Y a package. Terrible rate. So that's why everybody's waiting. Sometimes when a job is particularly urgent, the connector is given two prices by his client. The first price is the price that he is told to offer the job at, one that makes it look like a 'nothing special' typical run. If somebody takes it, then that's all good for the client. But if the job begins to look a little stale -- the connector has extra funds so he can be more flexible on the job price. Or sometimes they fake up a new job. 'Want a *high-paying* job to Camden Square? Catch is that you have to take those two cheap-o jobs off my board list as well, to get it.' See why my deck holds 3 jobs? And it's not even the best around. I have my eye on a Dallterrix NaviComp which can hold *5*. But the cost! the eternal, damnable cost!

Speaking of which, I don't have time to waste hanging out in bars today. The door to Stinky's office is open, which means that nobody is trying to hustle a contract with him right now. I finish my drink, look around at my peers, and say 'Well, I think I am going to see the man ..."

Snide comments and laughter around the table. I thought I had the desparation under control, but I guess not.

"Which one(s) are you going for?" Roger asks.

I frown at him. This is one of those questions you never ask. And it is not as if Roger and I were ever particularly good mates.

"I have a bet on." he explains.

"The North Square one.", I lie.

"Hah!" snorts Sandy. "Don't waste your breath. Stinky is _never_ going to give you another job to Aztec land for as long as you live!"

"Not after he got shot up and _lost his package_, the last time." adds somebody whom I don't recognise. So the story has been making the rounds, I see.

But none of this matters. The fact is, it's the River Park job I am interested in. I know some people in River Park. And maybe the job market will look better over there. But I won't let this lot know. Even though they are the closest thing I have to friends in this cruel world.
If they found out I have a bit of a good thing going down in River Park, they might just want to cut in for a piece of this action.

And somehow, though there is always plenty of action, there never seems to be quite enough of it. Same as there never is enough money. or chems.

[LordofSyn]

+1