[X] My Assistant

[Zazen]

So I guess if someone wanted to buy a genuine Ares Predator (as opposed to all the similar models and knockoffs and so forth) you'd be forced to increase the Street Index?

[Zazen]

[Arethusa]

[TinkerGnome]

A large supply in relation to demand doesn't necessarily make something easy to aquire. There's a certain base difficulty in aquiring any illegal item.

When you get right down to it, the whole concept of etiquette being used as the sole factor in determining whether or not you can get something is a little silly. Somehow you being extra nice means that your fixer happens to have a Barret laying around.

[Solstice]

[Arethusa]

Somehow, I really don't get the impression you deal in the type of guns I was talking about.

[Cain]

[Kagetenshi]

[TinkerGnome]

Yes, but at the same time, throwing wads of extra cash his way should have a better effect. I know it does, but somehow it also makes it take longer... If you could up the SI to lower the availability (without lengthening the time) or lower the time it'd make more sense.

[Solstice]

[Zazen]

[Misfit Toy]

On one hand, that would be a reflection of their actual costs as well, apparently due to quality and thus rarity. If legal, those differences in costs would be similar. On the other hand, if they're just as readily availble then they're not in shorter supply by definition. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

[Cain]

[Misfit Toy]

That's your take. It is not what the rules say or even imply. As previously mentioned, the rules assume it deals more with how hard it is to get it on the streets and how many middlemen it has to go through to get there. It has nothing to do with quality, namebrands, used status, or any of the other things you keep trying to say it does.

[Arethusa]

[Cain]

[Misfit Toy]

[Cain]

[Misfit Toy]

No, you didn't. And while I may attack what a person says, I'm not the pathetic loser who goes around saying "Duhhhhh! You typed a 1 instead of a 2! You're stoopit! Duh huh huh! It's time t'go beat off now! Wooo!!" :please:

Regardless, the point you can't seem to get into your head is that there's no difference between a legal purchase and a black market purhcase except the cost. None. Zip. Zilch. Nadda. You can buy your precious used Ares Predator knock-off pistol at a pawn shop through legal channels and you can buy a brand-spanking-new never-been-fired straight-from-the-factory brand-name Ares Predator from your fixer, and the latter one is *still* half the price. And you know why? Because that's the only difference between the two. One you bought legally, one you bought illegally. In all other ways they're identical.

Street Index does not determine quality. Street Index does not determine brand name. Street Index does not determine Availability. Street Index does not do any of the things you keep attributing to it, and the rules certainly do not say they do despite your completely unfounded claims to the contrary. The only reference the rules make to Street Index is that it's a measure of the difficulties inherent to buying it on the black market, with numerous middlemen being the typical cause.

And it's because of that that I find it hard to believe that many Street Indexes would be below 1. I can't imagine how buying a brand-new never-been-used brand-name top-of-the-line gun on the streets, getting around the paperwork, and having the weapon pass through so many different hands before it hits yours would make it 50% cheaper than buying the exact same one from a straight-from-the-factory-to-our-shelves gun store when you have all the proper paperwork and permits available.

And again, because you seem to have trouble with this concept, Street Index does not determine if a weapon is used, old, or a cheap knock-off. No matter how many times you want to say the contrary, it simply isn't. You may want to rationalize it to yourself that way, but that doesn't change a single thing about it.

[Misfit Toy]

Uh oh! There's at least one typo in that last post. Quick, get the Vaseline out and start typing your response, Cain!

[Kagetenshi]

[Pinel]

Let's see if I can try to reconcile a few views without touching the personal animosities. Apologies for being the intrusive, smartass newbie with a long post - I've been out of my home country and out of SR for a couple of years, but coming back to both next month. And since I happen to be a diplomat working in international trade and economics, and it's a slow afternoon...

First off - Misfit Toy, I don't think anybody is disputing that the rules on SI (and Availability, for that matter) are at best incomplete. The views expressed here can only be personal interpretations aimed at rationalizing a weakness in the books, unless one of us happens to be sleeping with one of the game designers :love:

So, if we don't want to review gear stats throughout the source books, how do we explain the wide variations in SI (and availability) between near-similar items ? We can pick one or more reasons:

1) Product life cycle: While having the Predator represent a wide number of similar weapons can lower Availability (through the sheer volume of similar items up for sale), it doesn't explain SI very well. What does affect SI is the product's life cycle (cf. the Predator 2 and 3 example). In many industries, old product versions are not offered at a lower price to maximize the sales of the "new and improved" item -this is especially true when newer versions offer only minimal improvements. So that Predator 1 might only be cheaper through your fixer because while everyone (legit and not) is buying up version 2, Ares isn't lowering the version 1 price to avoid "sales cannibalization". Indeed, Ares might see the grey and black markets as the most profitable way of clearing out version 1 without hurting version 2 sales.

2) Supply and Demand: Ironically, this produces two contradictory effects which can cancel each other out (but not always). First, a very popular product will not tend to have a SI below 1, by virtue of limited stocks (cf. the Barrett rifle mentioned earlier). But that tends to be an early phenomenon. The second effect occurs afterwards: copycat items start arriving, usually at a lower price. This tends to lower the price of the original item - sometimes a lot, sometimes not much, depending on factors like proprietary technology and the quality / reputation of the original. But this factor has a lesser effect on SI as the others.

3) Shadow Production: A very popular but well-controlled item might stimulate the development of illegal production. This is not an automatic consequence of point 2 above, BTW, since some products are licensed legally but are very hard to copy, while other products are the opposite. The Ares Predator you get from your fixer might be a re-engineered Phillipino copy, without the legal process or physical tracing measures incorporated by Ares and other "public" manufacturers. That would give it both the same game stats as the "official " Predator, and a reduced price to boot, but only on the black market since it comes from some hidden jungle factory and the sales revenue goes straight to the Huk Rebels' war chest (litterally). The Browning would not enjoy a similar low SI because it may not be the object of similar production (maybe the design isn't as easy to re-develop as the Predator's ?).

4) Shadow trends & popularity: It makes sense that legitimate buyers don't have the same shopping habits than black market customers. As was mentioned earlier for the laser axe, a SI might be below 1 because runners don't trust a particular item or the excessive number of low-quality versions flooding the black market: that Predator is so popular that runners aren't sure of what they're going to get, and only cheap copies are available on the street as opposed to the certainty of getting a brand-name item at the local gun store.

These are just a few of the many reasons why similar items might have not only a different SI, but one that is below 1. I could elaborate until everyone's computer screen bled, but I don't want to be barred from this forum on my very first post !

[Baatorian]

You know, in regards to street index, you can look upon the fact that things can be cheaper aboard.

I mean, I can get a 50 gram packet of golden virginia from my local shop for £9.50 (roughly), that's the "legal" price. However, if I get someone to bring me the same 50 gram packet from overseas, the price works out to about £3.50 a packet.

Now, it's brand new, packaged, exactly the same, everything is the same, yet it's a HELL of a lot cheaper (thank God).

In regards to the laser axe.. uhm... perhaps they THOUGHT they'd sell really good, so the happy-happy workers in Korea or something made a serious boat load of them, then everyone realised they were actually crap and they couldn't shift the things, so they're selling them cheaper to "other" sources, who then smuggle them into Seattle and sell them off on the streets for a little profit. Dunno, weird street index for that one.




- Baatorian

[John Campbell]

The laser goofyass axe's numbers make perfect sense. They have nothing to do with all of the axes on the street actually being cheap knockoffs of the expensive Ares ones that you have to buy legally in the store (and I have no idea where you came up with that idea, or what makes you think it's a rational explanation), and not much to do with the number of middlemen the weapon went through (while that is a factor, it's not the only one, and the referenced rules passage does not, in fact, say that it is... and uses too many "usually"s and "tends" to support a hardline interpretation of even what it does say). It's just straightforward supply and demand.

They're expensive to buy legally, because they're complex and technically advanced devices that're expensive to manufacture, and because they're illegal to possess normally (no permits, even), so there's undoubtedly lots of red tape that has to be expensively cut through to sell them legally, and Ares wants to recover those expenses and make at least a small profit selling them.

The Availability is moderately high, because there aren't many of them floating around out there, because they suck and no one buys them, which keeps both the number manufactured in the first place and the number of those that find their way onto the street low, so it's difficult to find someone who has one to sell at all.

But the SI is low, because they suck and no one wants to buy them, so if you do find a shadow dealer who has one, he's probably going to be quite willing to let it go cheap just to get rid of it, because he doesn't know when he'll find someone else who's willing to buy it for any price. He doesn't have to worry about recovering manufacturing and similar costs, because he probably didn't buy it for full legal price to begin with... it may have been smuggled in and bypassed the bureaucracy, or some Ares employee who doesn't care if Ares makes a profit on it as long as he gets his personal palm greased might have knocked it off the back of a truck, or it might have been stolen, or looted from someone who got themselves dead trying to fight with the ridiculous thing, or whatever. In any case, his investment in it is lower than a legal supplier's, so he can charge less and still be making a profit... and will, because if he charges too much, he won't be making a profit because he won't be making a sale.

[Nikoli]

Isn't street index a percent of markup?
Item-x is 100:nuyen: and has an SI of 1 would cost 100 at char-gen but 200 (before negotiation) afterwards.

that equation would be price*(SI+1)=Cost before negotiation

therefore an SI of .5 at a base price of 100 would cost 150 after SI markup