Money Laundering

[ImmortalGO]

I honestly don't understand how you are supposed to launder money without essentially "cheating" the system.  AFAIK the police get alerted over $x per minute, so it's easy to exploit and just make sure to stay under that limit, but I don't see the RP value in that.  You could open a bar, but if you open a bar just to make back your money you have to price the beer/liquor so high that just a few transactions will alert the police.  If you go out and pick grapes or whatever else in the city and sell that, you are just back to square 1 where you better buy them slowly, or the police get alerted.  I guess the other option is to just sell 1 item for all of your dirty money and lay low for a few days.  But again, I see no RP value in that. 

For example, we went on a scuba mission and took over an hour to find 70+ diamonds.  We put out an ad that our store was doing a flash sale of diamonds and we put them for $50 less than you can sell them for.  We figured it would cause a mad rush and we could sneak in some of our money with the normal money and because our books would be so full of random transactions, it would be impossible/very difficult to trace.  We RP for over 45 minutes for it to essentially result in "Well we are searching the back now" because, "We have a few tips".  First two officers came in and we sold them supplies from the store and talked to them.  Then they convinced EMS to come and do a "safety check" which we passed, even with the officers saying "Check the fire extinguisher in the back!"  Then finally after 20-30 minutes of dealing with the cops and EMS, a Sargent comes and just says "We are searching."  I really don't understand the RP value or what we could have done in any way to not just get busted other than "cheating" the system.  They admitted an undercover didn't buy from us, we were in the store the entire time, we set the prices reasonably, we RP'd well and had a backstory and logic behind everything.  But in the end, the cops got their alert so gg us.  It just seems very one-sided if you try to RP it, and the other option is to skirt the mechanic and just avoid RP entirely.  I really don't think the solution should be "sell less than $x per minute" or "sell everything instantly and avoid the police."  I'm open to suggestions, maybe we just totally don't get how the system works, but from where we are sitting there doesn't seem to be a point in attempting to launder at all, from an RP perspective.

[Serena]

4 hours ago, ImmortalGO said:

AFAIK the police get alerted over $x per minute, so it's easy to exploit and just make sure to stay under that limit, but I don't see the RP value in that.  

Pretty sure that is highly incorrect. I can't find the post made by @speed but to my understanding it's a %, not a flat value like you think. So it doesn't matter what # you're cleaning.

[ImmortalGO]

2 minutes ago, Serena said:

Pretty sure that is highly incorrect. I can't find the post made by @speed but to my understanding it's a %, not a flat value like you think. So it doesn't matter what # you're cleaning.

Thanks for the reply.  I'm a bit confused though, It's a % of what exactly?  I know the patch notes were hotfixed to (paraphrasing here)"allow $2000 per minute before alerting police."  Even so, I would much prefer a system that encourages RP and not skirting around the system to accomplish the laundering.  Like take selling drugs for example, you know if a local gets scared that you tried to sell them drugs that the police may be close by, but you still need to stay on the streets to finish selling.  So you can be smarter by moving out of the immediate area and trying a new spot, but you can't just avoid the mechanic outright and be done with it.  So PD can start sending unmarked cars out to look for street sales, it's a really fair system that allows RP situations.  I would just prefer something similar to this where RP would take more priority than some pre-defined metric of how you should launder money to not be caught.

[Kevin Ross]

I am confused by this % too, As the system doesn't process dirty money unless it is exactly 2,000$ Dirty cash. And that immediately alerts LSPD.

It even won't process weird sums like 1800 dirty cash either, it has to be exactly 2000$

[ImmortalGO]

4 hours ago, BertJohn said:

I am confused by this % too, As the system doesn't process dirty money unless it is exactly 2,000$ Dirty cash. And that immediately alerts LSPD.

It even won't process weird sums like 1800 dirty cash either, it has to be exactly 2000$

Yea, but like I said, I really don't care about the money per say, but I do want there to be RP value.  To me, making laundering incentive player interaction would be a great move. 

 

Off the top of my head here is a situation I think would add more value to the experience.

So imagine you have 200k dirty money.  You decide to run karaoke, or ladies night, or some other player attended event at one of the bars.  You would need to stock the bar for your customers, advertise the event, potentially provide security for the event, and so on.  It would make sense that your liquor/beer/wine cost more than in the store so you could mark things up, obviously for more desirable events you could increase the coast of drinks even more.  You could allow your customers to use dirty money or clean money.  Assuming you have several people at the event, it would seem to me that the PD shouldn't be able to just instantly check your books and shut you down.  A situation like this also encourages RP and player interaction.  Sure, you might surpass some predefined metric of laundering, but I think the RP value outweighs that.  I still think the PD should be able to do some sort of investigation, but not just come in and say "We have calls from the IRS" and end all RP there and then.

[speed]

18 hours ago, ImmortalGO said:

AFAIK the police get alerted over $x per minute

 

14 hours ago, ImmortalGO said:

allow $2000 per minute before alerting police.

 

9 hours ago, BertJohn said:

And that immediately alerts LSPD.

This is all wrong.

Not being able to process < $2000 was a bug, but it definitely didn't call the police.

[ImmortalGO]

1 minute ago, speed said:

 

 

This is all wrong.

Not being able to process < $2000 was a bug, but it definitely didn't call the police.

Is there someway we could understand how it works then?  We literally laundered only 4k of our own money.  I have no idea if the other players in the city used dirty or clean money.  I just know we got raided near instantly because "the irs called".

[Kevin Ross]

4 hours ago, ImmortalGO said:

Yea, but like I said, I really don't care about the money per say, but I do want there to be RP value.  To me, making laundering incentive player interaction would be a great move. 

 

Off the top of my head here is a situation I think would add more value to the experience.

So imagine you have 200k dirty money.  You decide to run karaoke, or ladies night, or some other player attended event at one of the bars.  You would need to stock the bar for your customers, advertise the event, potentially provide security for the event, and so on.  It would make sense that your liquor/beer/wine cost more than in the store so you could mark things up, obviously for more desirable events you could increase the coast of drinks even more.  You could allow your customers to use dirty money or clean money.  Assuming you have several people at the event, it would seem to me that the PD shouldn't be able to just instantly check your books and shut you down.  A situation like this also encourages RP and player interaction.  Sure, you might surpass some predefined metric of laundering, but I think the RP value outweighs that.  I still think the PD should be able to do some sort of investigation, but not just come in and say "We have calls from the IRS" and end all RP there and then.

I like RP that has a driven cause and effect. Its the main reason i actually chose BLRP is because if i did X, it caused Y. Launder money, Run risk of getting caught = cops RP. Those vMenu servers where you just give yourself whatever and a car aren't my style admittedly. But i do understand what you mean you aren't doing it for the money and looking for RP here.

2 minutes ago, speed said:

This is all wrong.

Not being able to process < $2000 was a bug, but it definitely didn't call the police.

Has this been fixed? I havent cleaned money that wasn't a fixed sum divisible of 2,000$ in a very long time.

[speed]

3 minutes ago, ImmortalGO said:

Is there someway we could understand how it works then?  We literally laundered only 4k of our own money.  I have no idea if the other players in the city used dirty or clean money.  I just know we got raided near instantly because "the irs called".

Then you got extremely unlucky. The system actually favors people trying to RP rather than trying to make money, but it's still not risk free.

The system is vague, and has never been truly outlined, intentionally (because if people knew how the system truly worked, they would obviously min-max it like they do everything else on the server).

A couple people have come close to figuring it out, but to my knowledge, nobody has been able to correctly outline how it works. And I intend to keep it that way.

Quote

Has this been fixed? I havent cleaned money that wasn't a fixed sum divisible of 2,000$ in a very long time.

It's fixed in dev. It'll be patched to the server sometime in the near future. This is why bug reporting is important.

[Kevin Ross]

Im pretty sure i have it. On transaction of an item greater than 2500$-ish = Send Alert to LSPD about store. Because if it was set to alert LSPD every time it cleans money, It would be pinging them constantly for those cleaning larger sums. And i don't think you guys would permit a spammy system like that.

[ImmortalGO]

7 minutes ago, speed said:

Then you got extremely unlucky. The system actually favors people trying to RP rather than trying to make money, but it's still not risk free.

The system is vague, and has never been truly outlined, intentionally (because if people knew how the system truly worked, they would obviously min-max it like they do everything else on the server).

A couple people have come close to figuring it out, but to my knowledge, nobody has been able to correctly outline how it works. And I intend to keep it that way.

It's fixed in dev. It'll be patched to the server sometime in the near future. This is why bug reporting is important.

Understand, probably silly to ask.  I guess we just feel frustrated because it went from fun RP to "well the IRS says XYZ so it's over."  If that makes sense.

[speed]

1 minute ago, BertJohn said:

On transaction of an item greater than 2500$-ish = Send Alert to LSPD about store.

Nope.

1 minute ago, ImmortalGO said:

I guess we just feel frustrated because it went from fun RP to "well the IRS says XYZ so it's over."  If that makes sense.

It does, and that's not what should be happening. On the PD end, it's designed so that there's supposed to be an investigation that happens before the store is raided, and that's your chance to get out of it. Of course, if the store owner isn't around, that RP can't happen, but that's the idea.

[ImmortalGO]

47 minutes ago, speed said:

Nope.

It does, and that's not what should be happening. On the PD end, it's designed so that there's supposed to be an investigation that happens before the store is raided, and that's your chance to get out of it. Of course, if the store owner isn't around, that RP can't happen, but that's the idea.

Yea, they did do an investigation.  We RP'd it and it was fun.  They had EMS come and do a safety check too which we answered the questions and it was all great.  But then eventually just ended with "IRS called so we are searching."  Just seemed very lame and like there was no way to continue RP unless we just wanted to start taking hostages and shooting.