Speed up the mag-levs
Waiting 25 minutes for one isn't helping anything

Put simply, my main issue is that the mag-levs are too slow. They're so slow to the point where they're a tool of basically desperation and are outright hostile towards anyone who wants to do cross-sector work in short play bursts. Things like the state of Green crate runs are testament to this. I get that the mag-levs are a deliberately crap option to encourage vehicular use and a few jobs like taxis, etc that center around that.

I think that if the levs were 50-75% faster, people might actually use them more frequently and paradoxically, expose themselves to more of the intended risk in using them just by means of them being an actually viable option to travel around. I don't feel like these hustles would suffer as vehicles are immensely safer than taking the lev in practically all circumstances, even if the levs practically teleported people to where they need to go (chokepoints, etc).

Think about it: if the levs are empty almost constantly because people aren't really using them except when they have to, what purpose do characters have to hang around them and cause mischief?

If I have limited time to play, cross-sector work becomes basically untenable. I don't want to spend half of my play session in a station potentially without SICnal waiting for a lev to arrive. Speeding them up would give a much needed boost to mobility early on in a character's life.

I think that if the levs were 50-75% faster, people might actually use them more frequently and paradoxically, expose themselves to more of the intended risk in using them just by means of them being an actually viable option to travel around.

I completely agree with this sentiment and that discouraging players from using public transit so to encourage them towards private transit ends up being today a net negative overall even if once it was a net positive.

At a time when the only thing that distinguished bikes or cars or taxis from the starting experience was transit being very slow, it had a lot more merit, but there are almost too many advantageous reasons to use vehicles now and transit being a ghost town is not beneficial to the overall experience of all players.

Negative quality-of-life experiences for players that break up sector travel (inc. traffic) are really holding back newer parts of the game than they are benefiting the old ones.

Cabs can be expensive and PC cabbies are not always available.

The trouble with Sindome is it often tries to use motivations like 'make X bad so players do Y instead' but this really relies on players being really dedicated to playing so doesn't account well for when Y means 'play something else'.

While I think you can make good arguments that levs being so terrible and time consuming to the average experience will drive other sorts of gameplay with a captive audience, my experience has been its one of several design decisions that gives the wrong impression to new players about the game using time-wasting mechanics everywhere.

There are other mechanics that just take a long real time to use or to play out, things like skillsofts and diseases and nanos as well, but the way crates and levs function are more prone to creating all-attention, time-demanding gameplay and disproportionately impact young characters and new players and give a pretty poor impression of the game's overall design in my opinion.

In an ideal state the game should avoid ever trying to consume players' time artificially in my opinion. It does a very effective job of consuming time organically already!

Congratulations. Now you have a quasi-valuable item that people will be carrying on the mag-levs that might be worth mugging off of someone, you've made the mag-levs less annoying, and you now have an IC reason why they're faster- 'New Mag-Lev program injects cash into Mag-Lev upgrades!'

I'm sorry that this and other things cause OOC frustration. I would ask that people try to shift their perspective from 'this takes time OOCly and that is frustrating' to 'this is part of life in the world my character lives in' and start to think about how the character feels about it, if there is anything they can do about it, or do to change their situation so they don't have to deal with it. How is it impacting their mood? How is it impacting their goals? How can roleplay come from it?

There have been several posts the past couple months that propose stripping away things that set the theme, vibe, tone (whatever you want to call it) in service of making the game easier or faster or more convenient. In some cases, I can understand where folx are coming from, in other cases, it feels like a desire to strip away the parts of the game that add an amount of risk, vibes, or IC reasons for frustration in service of a more streamlined player (not character) experience that doesn't serve the theme.

I think Slither is 100% correct. There are tools you can use to track where the lev is that is accessible by everyone.

How do you know if people aren't using the levs?

Because there was four times as many discount motorcycles for sale this year as there was players to buy them. Foot traffic starkly declined after the vehicle overhaul made them much more accessible and affordable to all characters and their usage swelled massively. I don't see this as a problem overall but there has absolutely been a decline in general foot traffic in the game and especially so with corporate characters and midbie Mixers.

I don't think that bell can really be unrung, but if I was looking for good targets of criminal exploitation I wouldn't be spending time looking for them at the lev stations anymore.

grep -rn -e "^North Tamiya Station" -e "^Ashlin Street Station" -e "^Fallout Station$" -e "^New Light Station" -e "^Soma Station" -e "^Cordoba Station" -e "^Acadia Station" -A 12 * 

So… these are subjective to how many times you have personally stood at the lev station and not game-wide statistics?

Is there some other type of data I could reasonably provide in support of my opinions? Because there have been a lot of changes wrought from player opinions that weren't supported by massive data analytics, so it seems to be an odd bar to set now.

I'm really not trying to be rude at all, but it just feels weird that people even keep details like this and it sounds a little obsessive.

I gave my subjective impression from my experienced play and you asked for raw data to support that impression, so I did in the best way I could think of.

By 0x1mm

grep -rn -e "^North Tamiya Station" -e "^Ashlin Street Station" -e "^Fallout Station$" -e "^New Light Station" -e "^Soma Station" -e "^Cordoba Station" -e "^Acadia Station" -A 12 * 

I could get behind visual schedules at the stations though. Knowing the schedule without signs is helpful if you're enterprising enough, but I don't think it'd be bad to make it easy to know either.

There have been times in recent history where my character has literally had to find places to stash things in one sector, because they did not want to take the risk of losing them while riding the lev. There have been times where they made multiple trips to move quantities of objects, instead of taking the risk of moving them all at once.

Beyond that, the suck factor of the lev has encouraged them to RP and find other ways to get in between sectors that do not involve using the levs.

It has been said before, but it bears repeating.

If your character is struggling with something in game, be it levs, getting dipped, not having a job, whatever… use that as a catalyst for RP. Bitch out loud about it. Given that this game is going on what, almost 30 years at this point, I can practically guarantee that there is another character who has overcome whatever frustration any given character is currently facing.

I'm not against making the progia app cheaper, or putting signs in the station, that seems fairly common sense as a change.

I don't think we can realistically predict the time of the train arrival though. As it's on a rotation moving trains from station to station. And the MOO isn't always the best with accurate times. I'll add it to my list.