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# Mark Attempts to Fix the Unfixable - An Economic Overhaul

## The why

Have you ever wondered why money in many SS13 servers feels rather useless after a certain point in a round? I have, too. I aim to remedy this with multiple changes, some drawing from real-world economic theories (which I will not be listing because that would open up to real-world oriented debate, which is not my aim.) **Important:** I do not claim to be a professional economist, or even anything more than a hobbyist, so please take any mistakes I can and will plentifully make lightly.

## The what

### Get that money moving
Money that's not moving does no good. I want to make sure that credits don't end up pooling up unused on departmental budgets and personal bank accounts. Sitting around with 1,405,024 credits on your card because there's just nothing to spend it on is boring, not helpful, and most importantly, it's not fun. I've experienced it myself, throwing around money at any place but cargo is more of an RP thing than anything, since the person you're giving the money to likely has more than enough already. Introducing scarcity will make money a commodity, leading to people actually caring about the money they make and use, and being more hesitant to give money or things that required money to make away for free. ~~Except for metabuddies. They're always going to do it, and we're going to have to live with that.~~ All in all, having a circular flow... or, rather, *any* flow at all in the economy would make it a much more fun and engaging system.

### A (somewhat) closed system
Where does the money go when you buy something from a vending machine? Nobody knows besides the vending machine gods. Vending machines are just one example of something that takes money that could be circulating in the microcosm of a SS13 round. On the inverse side, you have the departmental budgets. Where do they get their money from? You'll be quick to say, "Nanotrasen, of course!" but... that's about as good of an explanation as good ol' bluespace magic. I think that severely limiting the cashflow in and out of the round, we can make a truly dynamic system where players can feel like the economy is controlled and run by *them* instead of some confusing external mystery benefactor. Now, of course, there's cargo, whose main job is to bring in and shill out money to said external benefactor, but I think that cargo as a whole should be one of the few exceptions, as while it "creates" and "destroys" money, it also brings in supplies for the station.

*A rough example of the proposed system.*

## The :how:

### Make SS13 Poor Again
At the beginning of every round, there's a lot of supplies on the station, more than will be needed by even servers with much higher player counts than we have. For example, medbay is so many easily accessible supplies, to the point that you can coast by entirely off of what is in the Nanomed Pluses and the medikits in medical storage. This defeats any motivation for chemists and other medbay staff to produce and gather medical supplies, leaving ways to get them (such as cargo, chemistry and botany) sorely underused. Greatly reducing the amount of supplies at the beginning of the round on all maps will likely increase the motivation to produce and otherwise gather supplies through methods that aren't *quite* as immediately and conveniently available. Some suggested new cargo packs are listed [here.](/Yxq0q5zMSNimCKOiJlZDPg#Appendix_2_-_Additional_cargo_packs)

*who needs anything else*

#### Departmental Storage Units
I had an idea to replace the previously-common vendors found in many departments with something similar to an access-locked smartfridge that can hold anything. The idea would be that it holds mass amounts of equipment for the workers in the corresponding department. One way to make it very useful is to give it a button that sucks up all items in a nearby tile, making it easier to restock en masse. For example, medbay could bring their shipment of medkits or medicines from cargo to right next to it, open the crate, and hit the button to suck up all the items, and "cataloging" them in the storage unit. Then, departmental staff who either need new gear or need starting gear can just go up to there, withdraw what they want, and be ready, similar to vendors but mostly empty at the start and only refillable with actual items.

### No more free materials
Cargo's one main source of income, shipping, is nowhere near as engaging or profitable as it should be. An alternative method of getting money, which is requiring employees to pay a fee for the use of materials through things such as lathes will both give money a use, as well as provide cargo with more income that they can use to supply the rest of the station, as undoubtedly the original creators of the cargo department intended. Having a better passively-funded cargo department who knows that they're using the rest of the station's money will hopefully make at least some of them realize that they owe it to the rest of the station to do what they do best, **supply.**

*an example of what you might see in a normal round*

This may look and seem intimidating, but in all reality, it's just making a previously seldom-regarded but usually plentiful resource have a use. All the prices scale according to availability of the resource, so it's more expensive to use the less there is, causing a subconscious shift to where players who previously splurged and used up a load of resources every round for things that aren't that useful to anyone but them (I'm looking right at you, roboticist mains) instead try to prioritize or at least use slightly less than normal. Another side effect that at first doesn't seem like a good thing, but I believe will be a fun interaction, would be when people stop offering services for free, and instead ask the person who wants the good to pay for it. No longer are the days of one scientist spam printing bags of holding for every assistant in a mile radius, welcome to the age where money is treated like... like, well, gold. I have listed the current formula [here.](/Yxq0q5zMSNimCKOiJlZDPg#Ore_fees)

### The "invisible hand" of the ~~free market~~ Quartermaster
Like I said previously, an economy where most things are handled externally with equations and random numbers just aren't that fun. Yes, there are ways of making it less tedious, but there's no way to make it engaging. Anyways, why track some stupid randomly-generated economics graph when you can track a graph that shows *real information* caused by *real players?*
I believe that having the controls of the economy in the hands of the players, specifically the higher-ups such as the Department Heads, the Quartermaster, and especially the HoP, would make for a much more engaging experience. Now, due to the fact that players aren't a resource, we can't just stick 5 players in the code and make them run in every game, so we need to make it so that if there was no interaction at all by anyone, the round's economics would stay decent. I propose that giving heads the ability to cut paychecks, give raises and promotions would help make people want to do their jobs better or at the very least, suck up to their head of staff (which isn't always a bad thing.) Also, giving QM much finer controls over the distribution of goods, such as setting an overall markup on material costs and by allowing them to tweak a lot more settings, allowing them to stay busy trying to find the perfect settings in a system where there *isn't a perfect way to do things.* Making them overly complex , like giving them control over the entire equation would likely be too much, since we want to give players control without overwhelming them. Another feature could be giving the HoP a job similar to the Quartermaster, but managing the whole station instead of just the distribution of materials. He could monitor bank accounts, create new ones, distribute funding to different departments, nothing is really too small to give them, since around the time when the economy really starts to shine in a round, people will likely have stopped rushing the HoPline for access.

#### Your Head of Staff and You
Now, we all know there's a general disdain towards heads of staff, and it generally doesn't help anyone, obviously mostly the head of staff themselves. But, give them the ability to increase or decrease your paycheck when money is actually worth something? That might get your attention. I feel that giving heads this power would allow them to exert a bit of authority, which, previously, they could only enforce with a baton and likely sec's side (when sec actually bothers to respond to minor stuff like insubordination.)

## The who and when

I aim to work on this overhaul until the economy is in a much more engaging state than it is, or until people start to want the old system again. Due to the nature of this kind of change, there will be many, ***many*** tweaks to do, which I will need a lot of input on. I may start an issues thread on github for it, since it will end up being rather spammy otherwise. Anyone is welcome to help, although I cannot guarantee that all changes will be accepted as part of this overhaul since it is rather specific.
> [name=Mark Suckerberg]

## Side notes
[Appendix](/Yxq0q5zMSNimCKOiJlZDPg) - A lot of lists, but something that I need a lot of input on since this is the true meat of this. If you can, please help out.

###### tags: `economy`