While I'm not currently playing a PC that attacks NPCs, further making there be a difference between robbing an NPC and a PC just further reduces immersion, I think.
This is because if you take an item off a NPC who's going to perpetually stay on the street and have a 'life' in the game world, their code will allow them to buy it back if someone asks them if they "need anything" or some variation of that phrase.
In short, I think the suggestion is meant to make it so the ganger NPCs that actually buy gear are the only ones you can take gear from. Gear sells more often and doesn't pile up as a result. It turns off a faucet to account for a slow drain.
1. They're the most likely to jump in to assist in big fights, and lowering their "danger level" is beneficial to not getting rolled or having your gear cut up.
2. Beating on and taking gear from those NPCs places the burden of maintaining the health and equipment of the gang onto the active ganger PC. There are a few historic examples where gangs were getting steamrolled (for this reason) and the associated PC(s) in question started avoiding fights because they refused to invest the money in getting their allies patched up and geared.
3. Having all of your NPCs laying around half dead and naked is a really bad look for any ganger.
–---------
Now... from the economic perspective... I don't think anyone should be relying upon these items for chy, and I certainly don't think we need to create an opportunity for fixers to effortlessly churn items for scalable profits off everyone else's weekly cap.
In an ideal world, these items would be generating some form of conflict. But what ends up inevitably happening is mid-high UE characters just gank a ganger in the middle of the night when nobody's around for easy chy. For that reason, I like that they're both devalued, and hard to sell off. It's like a special little break when you find an NPC that's actually buying one of the higher value items.
These items also allow some characters to reequip when they're down on their luck. There's nothing particularly amazing about them, so you don't generally see anyone carry them for longer than they need to. And as a reminder, not all factions are equal. Some are composed almost entirely of mementos. Others can be tucked away behind closed doors where only affiliated PCs can reach them. I can imagine people are just going to cluster non-mementos together to protect them, or hide them behind said doors.
P.S. I literally haven't pulled a "big ticket" item off any NPC in years, so I don't have any skin in this game. I actually don't like that there are people who do this every week like clockwork even as their character advances. It feels too gamey.
The game only supports turning a very limited number of these items in for chyen, so their economic value is very low. It's just taken a while for players to accept that an item they once saw prices at 9000c is worth a fraction of that now.
I'm not sure why players would think that the payouts for these items could be drastically cut and they would still remain as valuable as they were in 2019. The player market for items is only going to pay what they see the item as being subjectively worth to them, which may have nothing at all to do with what the inspection value is or what it gets sold for some NPC stores.
(Edited by Slither at 11:57 am on 4/13/2025)
It used to be the 'meta' among gangers and even non-ganger lowbies and midbies to attack gang mementos where they can't call for backup and take their weapon, and it would get flipped in a few days or a week at most because the bug was allowing weapons to be sold at a significantly higher volume.
Now the demand was cut in half or maybe even into a third or fourth or less, and the ability to easily procure one of those ganger weapons still remains. However, I'd like to mention that being able to easily steal a ganger weapon is sometimes not a money source but rather a way for a combat PC to get a weapon when they are down on their luck and can't afford to pay for one, so making that harder should weigh into consideration.
The rate at which these items were being taken has been in steady decline for many years from what I have seen, but it has just taken quite a while to reach something like equilibrium because if you have say, a total stockpile among all players of ~30 items in 2020, and the rate at which that stockpile is being replenished is only decreasing slowly while the amount of weapons being taken out of it decreased overnight, it's going to taken a while (several years) for the excess to be depleted.
IMO we're close to that now. I don't believe the rate at which these weapons are being collected is excessive and I also believe it's decreasing overall when you correct for how many people are playing gangers at any given time.
Low cost street weapons are vital to the player ganger economy in my opinion, really the main criticism you could make is that one of the gangs should have knives so more skillsets have emergency backup weapons they can seek out from them.
I mean… if you have more of an item than you actually need, and you continue to pull these items off NPCs... is that a problem with the system, or the player?
By 0x1mmReally the main criticism you could make is that one of the gangs should have knives so more skillsets have emergency backup weapons they can seek out from them.
There is a gang with knives.
The fact that so many melee options are available is odd, though.
The rules already limit you to taking only one of these items a week. Play a ganger and lose your weapon to a rival twice a week? Better find something else to fight with.
Absolutely, these weapons are extremely important to the game for a variety of reasons and I don't want anyone misunderstanding my comments in a different to create the wrong impression. Gangs are a very active part of the game's economy, one of the few parts of it that is, and if there was a feedback problem it would manifest in a dramatic way. There wouldn't be one or two excess weapons, there would be suddenly 20.
Ganging sort of works and remains active, somehow, we should not touch it.
I don't believe I am inventing anything in my mind when multiple people used to tell me and continued to tell newer characters to "just steal or yank a xxx out of xxx factions hands." Meaning spot the MEMENTO and take theirs. As Slither has stated he sees no problem with that I will drop the issue.
I don't believe I am inventing anything in my mind when multiple people used to tell me and continued to tell newer characters to "just steal or yank a xxx out of xxx factions hands." Meaning spot the MEMENTO and take theirs. As Slither has stated he sees no problem with that I will drop the issue.
I'm referring to the other thread where you said:
Personally I think that fixers who sell things too low do damage to the economy.One player in theory can have facilities that do shift the economy, because it sets a price floor others can’t compete with unless they engage in the same loop of steal hatchet from NPC sell hatchet for next to nothing to be sold back to NPC to be stolen from NPC to be sold to NPC and so on, which defeats the purpose of roleplay-driven trade.
You saw cheap weapons for sale at a price you thought was too low and imagined the scenario (fixers or their minions farming NPCs) that had caused that to happen, based on what you seen others doing before, and raised a solution here to fix that hypothetical problem.
But what you didn't realize is that the cheap weapons you saw had all come from dead players.
