The Sewer/Barge NPC

[Bullets]

This is an idea I’ve had for a while, and I just remembered it because it might be more useful now due to the fairly recent change with NPCs spawning “rare” guns and attachments. It could also give some purpose to a very overlooked item.

Currently, the Sewer and Barge NPCs are static, they don’t move at all. With the Barge NPC, this is fairly reasonable, as you want to ensure the map has the best chance of being used and explored. However, with my idea, it could expand the exploration aspect a bit further.

My suggestion is to have the Sewer NPC move around every restart. Obviously, he would still have a few regular spots, such as his current location by the fire pit in the sewer. But placing him in a random alleyway somewhere on the map would fit well with how black market dealers should operate. This NPC has been sitting in the same spot for 2 years since I started playing.

This idea is inspired by Perp. Whenever their black market NPC moves, players receive a message on their phone. Why not put the pager to use in a similar way? You could add a notification sound, and the black market NPC would page every player with his location at each restart, repeating every time.

This would help prevent the need for Sewer NPC characters, and, if you feel strongly about it, the same could be applied to the Barge NPC/chars as well.

[Canadian-bacon]

I thought about doing this with other NPCs like drug buyers ultimately the 'novelty' wears off very quick. Especially for players who know the map, people would just have the preset positions memorized and have to run about every day checking which location the NPC is at.

Even when sending a notif it sort of defeats the purpose of the teleporting to begin with.

Every potential teleport position is limited to public areas that cant be owned or built on.

Also with the map updates and other conflicting NPC positions having to re-edit the teleport positions is administratively annoying.

When you say sewer NPC characters do you mean people that park a character in a spot then load it to check the NPC? Could always block that with code or make it more annoying. Like 10 seconds of no NPC access to prevent this and other little abuses. (God forbid theres a cooldown between actually switching characters too)

 

Tl;dr doable but it's a hassle and does little to enhance RP imo

 

[Bullets]

26 minutes ago, Canadian-bacon said:

Even when sending a notif it sort of defeats the purpose of the teleporting to begin with.

This idea was more or less just trying to add more pros than cons, because as of now nobody really uses or needs to use the pager.  The only time I've ever used the pager was when I was doing UC work as a detective.

 

27 minutes ago, Canadian-bacon said:

When you say sewer NPC characters do you mean people that park a character in a spot then load it to check the NPC?

They'll leave their char infront of the NPC and load it to check if anything is new in the NPC