A MORE FASCIST WITHMORE
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

Open services (banking/sensenet/genetek) in Red Zone (albeit at a higher price). Disallow travel by mag-lev unless the character has clearance. If a character without clearance travels by taxi and gets scanned by "the authorities" or a security checkpoint then they are fined and deported back to the nearest zone that they have clearance for.

It would work in a top-down manner, with clearance levels granting access to the zones below them.

Immigrants/bums/gangers - Red Clearance

Wageslaves/Low-level corpo rats - Gold Clearance

Mid-level security/corpo/celebrities - Green Clearance

High-tier security/corpo/celebrities - Blue Clearance

This would open up opportunities to use stealth to bypass it (excepting checkpoints) or for technicians to provide forged passes. I imagine the forged pass would be a skillsoft that you can slot. It would also allow the players who want to be grimy gangers and never interact with higher society to do so.

Might need to move Withmore Wholesalers to Green Zone, so it doesn't cause problems with couriers with Gold Access getting into Green.

FIXED FIXXERS

Let the prices in Gold Zone be the baseline and raise the prices of those items by 20% in Red Zone (or whatever math works) and lower the prices of those items by 20% in Green Zone. So a character (fixer) with connections to access zones above Red Zone can procure these items and then sell them at a marked-up price, profiting, but still providing them at a lower cost than prices in-zone. Put neXus in Gold Zone to account for the loss of access to armor, with Protek staying in Green Zone to be the premium gear.

It would be a lot of relocation of items, mostly, and some new rooms (Red has empty lots), but it doesn't need to be fancy for the mix. The structure would give fixers a way to work the system (without waiting to resell hand-me-downs) and create a new money outlet for programmers/technicians.

Who's going to run crates to Green?

Maybe have the 'crates' to Green just be delivered by scarab pilots. Gold and Red zone would still have courier jobs.

Mostly, what I see is that legit 'new players' just run a few crates and then go to Gold Zone; there they can avoid tolls, hide from the consequences of their actions, and never interact with anyone. It would be a gate, not an inconvenience. You can still work towards a forged pass or use stealth if your profession doesn't grant clearance to the upper zones.

Topside has always been 'dead'. There's very little crime by design (it's the seat of the Justice System). But… if you restrict access and raise the prices in Red, well, then there's a reason to go there. The only time people go topside is for items Red doesn't have at Ashlin, to update clones, or deposit chyen. Also, everywhere that isn't Red is already a ghost town. It has been for many years, back when I first started in 2014 or so it was nearly vacant, and it still is.

One of the things that the game needs is more Mixers heading up to Gold to do crime. To the point where it becomes normalized. And "everyone" responds to reports of crime on Gold like they respond to reports of infections in the Mix.

The proposed changes create barriers between Red and Gold.

Sindome is fairly genre illiterate at the best of times but crowbarring in 2000 AD's anti-Thatcherite satire except unironically is by far its worst thematic misstep. I agree that the Deus Vult mecha-copaganda the game sometimes gets hung up on enabling is poison to the genre core of high tech, low life but I struggle to see how increasing and tightening that authority makes things better and not worse.

Megacorporations, organized crime, street gangs, and civilians – to me those are all the components of conflict necessary in a cyberpunk setting. Anarcho-corporatocracy where what is a crime depends on whose money is involved and a high-stakes low-life heist might be secretly a shadow plot to tank a rival's stock price. To me, iron-clad central governance and central totalitarian rule and enforcement in single supreme authority all run directly counter to that vision.

Mate. I mean OOC rules. It's against the law to kill people in Red. Turns out murder's illegal. But you're allowed to kill other players in Red and Gold without having to notify staff or anything. Not in corporate towers or in Green though, because those are safer zones. Gold isn't meant to be the safest place in the game.

" What they should be doing is going to where crimes are committed, because they already have superior vehicles/weapons/armor and - most of the time - skills. They also have crowd control mechs as an incentive not to impede them."

You do not understand the setting. It is, as 0x1mm says, a setting with a lot of dumb janky shit, but the reason Red isn't fully policed isn't that they don't have the resources and skills to do it, it's that they don't give a shit.

–------

The Mix is the overwhelming majority of the populace. Even if corporations theoretically have more advanced technology, financial resources, etc. It is...

1. Too costly to wage a civil war against those numbers. Look up the details of guerilla warfare. Or literally any recent formal militarized movement against a target that is both great in number and can move independently/regroup.

2. Not financially incentivized. Wise overlords allow the masses some illusion of freedom to mitigate the risk of an uprising. In this way, they continue to profit from those masses, and keep them under reasonable control. Occasionally someone will trickle up from them and join the ranks, as well.

3. The chaos of the Mix provides a buffer between the corporations and the uncivilized masses. Because Mixers are prone to target each other, that keeps most of the violence away from the upper sectors. Why make yourself a focused target, when you can simply make the cannibalization of your own people a more attractive means to climb out of poverty?

...

Now, from a 'game' perspective, let's analyze your ideas.

You want to... Give all of the high end equipment to corporates (who won't use them), give them more chyen than anyone else (to spend on what?), reduce the costs of everything for them (for what reason?), incentivize red sector citizens to funnel more chyen up to them (again, why?), and deliberately make interactions between those playerbases more difficult.

I don't think anyone playing for any length of time here will be able to see any benefit to this. Corporate characters are given a higher level of income already. Combine that with the relative safety of being topside, and they collect a considerable level of wealth without the risk associated with Red Sector. The idea is that they are supposed to be using a portion of that wealth and allowing it to 'trickle down'. Realistically, it appears it may only encourage them to deposit money back into the system (purchasing items from NPC shops, cars, aeros, etc.) or hoard coveted items as a simple statement of wealth/accomplishment. There is nothing more disappointing to me, personally, as a player, than a character who has the means to easily recover from a loss, but they choose to have their chrome uninstalled, and put on a set of inconsequential armor the second that they realize they might actually take a loss. Your perspective on funneling cashflow upward is likely only to exacerbate this, or incentivize more people to go corporate, play it safe, and only drop down when they have enough UE and resources to feel confident enough to overpower anyone else (which is already disappointing, and sometimes annoying, but not necessarily an issue).

This will not result in more conflict. It will result in considerably less.