Doctor Archive
Thread: New economics... The service pool
I've heard this idea pushed around in many forms but I think this idea would benefit all the service professions.
Every player gets a service pool accessible from a bank terminal. All service classes and draw from that money pool when performing a service. The amount you charge for a service is dependant on kill boxes much like how a merchant gets new vendors.
So a starting medic can get 100 credits for healing effort but a master medic gets 1k for the same heal and a MD gets 2k.
I prompts that person that's receiving the treatment of the price/point and who is offering. If they accept then the healer gets to do as much heal as they can in 10min. If the person doesn't have enough money in thier service pool then it will tell the healer that they are broke and you cannot heal that player in the facility.
A similar thing will happen to the entertainers where if you have no money then you cannot watch a dancer for thier benefits.
I think it would be the easiest way to solve the money issue and at the same time allow for those who wish to give away free service a chance to do it outside on thier own terms and no alienate others in med centers trying to charge for services.
You can also add the option in your house if services rendered are deduced from a players service pool.
Sounds a lot like the great American medical system to me. . .
"What you're dying and you don't have insurance? Get your skinny butt out of my hospital!"
One way around this would simply be to tell the medic whether or not the person has enough money, and if they don't, to still give them the option of treating the player. That way medics can still heal members of their guild in a med facility even if they are broke, and so on.
I hate this idea. If you're a medic and having problems getting paid, then try a few of the following:
Craft. Sell what you craft.
Join adventuring parties and get paid for your field work.
While in the hospital, try muttering "Ah, you have XXX damage. healing you will cost me $YYY". you'll be AMAZED at the effect saying this just a few times will have. Other players don't always realized that it costs the medic money to dish out healing.
It undermines the novice medic by disallowing them from healing a person they may want to heal who does not want toor cannot pay for the service. Whether the reason is an altruistic one or simply because that medic thinks he shouldn't have to be paid becuase he's getting "XP" (yes, i know the stupidity of that argument, but they will make it nonetheless) I cannot see a reason that the system should not allow them to heal. We also need to consider that there are, and were, many medics who perfer bartering for their heals, either by trading their heals for goods or even for intangible or future services. This system would preclude that.
I can't see how that level of service can be provided without an opt-out option for the medic who may not have themeans to heal anyplace other than in the Med Center.
this is akin to not giving professions a gun to start with, or any weapon, and saying, go kill things for money to buy a weapon...
you cannot expect to get far with sweeping changes to the fundamental game design like this, especially since it DOES favor certain classes and scenarios, and has no workarounds for newbies with no droid/house/pa from getting xp when noone has money..
would you like to force ALL trades to require 2cpu per resource for items traded?
if you dont do this, then those weaponsmiths giving weapons to their guild are seriously undermining the other smiths who SELL their weapons for profit, we had better fix that and require ALL trades to require at least 2cpu per resource used tomake the item in question. and drops should cost, hrmm, 1/10th the payout of a mission that involves the mob it dropped from, otherwise no trade.
just a thought ya know..
Snooze821 wrote:
"Or they could goto thier house or guildhall or even outside the med center and heal them."
All solutions which exclude the new Novice Medic since they generally would not be able to afford any of those options (i.e., a house, having even met someone yet to be in a guild, or having a droid to heal out of the med center.) So while it would be great to get them moeny this way, it would also mean that these medics couldn't really be very altruistic in thier healing if they just wanted (for whatever reason) to heal for free.
This would be especially poignant on newer servers where you might get some new folks starting new character who don't know what they are doing yet and get really banged up. Those folks complained a LOT at first on our servers about the speed of healing, how much slower would it be if they had no money ('cause they screwed up, or even just cause they turned insurance back on and need to make a corpse run to get thier money) and thus had no option for getting healed unless some medic is feeling generous (or unless they want to try to work up the skills themselves).
At any rate, I think such an option would have to include the option for a medic to at least "opt-out" of the system and offer free healing if they wanted to.
Without an opt out I would find this system very troubling.
I understand the dismay medics feel when they are not compensated for healing. I have 4 characters who have put in their time in the med center healing and rarely getting tipped. But I like to heal people, paid or not, thanked or not. The only people I won't heal are those who are arrogant or abusive. They get the addignore.
There are ample ways for medics to make money in the SWG universe. A medic can get as rich as he wants. Missions, Mining, Farming, Pharmaceuticals come to mind. The same is true of Entertainers. In fact one of the interesting things about SWG is that fact that Doctors and Stars are not automatically wealthy, in contrast to RL.
If such a system were implemented without an opt-out I would be sitting by the starport entrance with a medi-bot healing all comers.