So after a long 4 years break I've returned to MR and have been playing for almost a month now. As expected a lot's changed. A lot of little tid bits have been added where necessary such as the new wacking format and then there's the bigger changes such as the Districts.

To my understanding, districts must hold a CL within them or NPC's will come out to play and start shooting BG's. I mean feel free to add in what the other repercussions are but to my knowledge that's all that happens. I'm not sure why this happens or why the admins feel the need to spread members out so much but ye, it happens.

This in turn has led to there being a mass amount of CL's in order to fill the districts to stop our BG's from being shot.

For anyone who recently saw my street thread, I commented on the fact that there were a lot of inactives within crews these days, some reaching as high as consig, there may even be a few Dons around too, I was too bored to keep looking tbh. This isn't just 3 or 4, there's actually quite a lot of these inactive sponsoreds around. Now while I understand the point of having them around, in order to;

1/ Make crews look bigger

2/ Justify the need for more leaders

3/ Make the crew stronger as a whole

It's led to the interaction within a lot of the crews dwindle. IRC's used to be buzzing with people, especially crew rooms and city rooms. Now the crew rooms have the 5 or so active members within a crew and the city rooms, which now seem to be district rooms have perhaps double that number. The more established crews which have been around a while will understandably have more people within their irc rooms, but even then you're looking at smaller numbers compared to how things were a few years back.

The streets used to be buzzing, people used to have something to say and there used to be a lot of people who had an opinion to share. Now, the streets are full of the same faces. As stated previously I made a thread in the street, I posted on my crew wall (or whatever it's called) a suggestion to go check it out but alas, nobody did. In past times, you would get those within your crew backing up your point in the streets, some may disagree of course and that was fine but usually you'd see 1 or 2 backing your point as these crews were usually quite close-knit due to the amount of interaction going on within irc rooms and via mail.

The HQs, this is not a reflection on my current HQ, but prior to this character I had joined several crews on several accounts and noticed that crew activity within the HQ's were very poor. Even to the point where you had members just not signing rules, which is something I find to be very very basic. People just didn't seem to want to take the time to go read the rules and sign them. Again, I assume that this is because there were very few active members within these crews. Those who were active as stated, just didn't seem to be bothered with signing them.

Which brings me to ask just what are people doing when they're playing this game now? Despite the inactive member count there are still a lot of active players that seem to be just ambling along on here, becoming click monkeys. Sign on, petty, wack, drugs, jail, sign off. The interaction within the game is at a very low point in my opinion and I ask myself is this what the game's about now? You have a text based game, where the interaction levels have decreased massively. I ask what's caused this and I can only assume that it is the fact that the admin staff have introduced the districts.

Now, while I like the idea of the districts I feel they are too many and the demand for CL's is too high for the current user base. 41 Crew leaders we currently have and the active member base is spread out amongst these. Each district now acts like a city and the only thing bringing some of those together is the fact that some of the current GF's are part of a clique. Back on to my topic though, the interaction levels have dwindled and as we can see via the Crews page there's only the GF crews which are full. Out of 41 crews currently on the game only 7 of those are full. Surely this screams out STOP AUTHING!!!!?? Alas, no. We now have a contest whereby we have more opportunity for people to set up.

The mass amount of crews are killing the interaction within the game, while the amount of districts around are spreading us too thinly for us to be able to become full or nearly full, close-knit families. Added to this, the shameless whoring that is going on upon starting a new character is just embarrassing. I know it's something that some frown upon and others don't see as a problem, but when you have 72732973 mails off people asking for you to be their associate it's just pure cringey.

So, suggestions?

A decrease in the amount of districts, maybe?

Get rid of the inactive players to make room for active ones?

Allow the current crews to fill up before forcing more auths?

I think the changes need to come from both players and admins, depending on what sort of game people want now? One where people interact more or one where people click?

I applaud the admin team for bringing the game this far, the changes that have been made since I left are massive and obviously the community has grown, although there are some prominent members of the community now gone it has definitely grown somewhat. I also appreciate a lot of time, effort and money goes into this game and so this thread isn't about knocking down what the admin have put in place, it's more to try and ask what would be a way to bring back the interaction we once had and many loved? This is what made our community so close and hopefully despite this new breed of player around, it's something that we all still want from this game.

Cheers,

Tes.

First things first, why should any regime determine how the district setup is made? They're going to pick what's best for them personally, not what's best for the game. That sounds like a conflict of interests to me.

There are two major issues in the game brought up here today that need to be fixed: number of IAs left alive and number of districts. Both were well spoken of as issues by the original speaker so I won't delve any further into them, but I would also like to add in auto-promoting because a CL is hurt if he or she doesn't basically hand out promotions. As much as everyone here likes to pretend it's not happening... it's happening because you'd lose a ton of earnings if you tried to do anything about it and fall way behind everybody else.

How would I fix them?

From an Admin Perspective.

• Base Tax on having a crew of 2 Mill per week for the 40 Man HQ and something comparable for the smaller ones should lower the total number of crews and encourage people to remove Inactives to avoid that extra cost if they can't afford it.
• Auto-Retire Function after 30 or 45 days. Because they're basically worthless other than getting the 20th GF set up. How many of those guys actually come back after being 30 days inactive? And if they were planning to return how many wouldn't be able to access a computer for 30 days if they knew the auto-retire function was a thing?
• Some type of small punishment for promoting a person that should be lower than the expected increase in earnings. This way Promotions are only handed out to those who can cover that cost of a promotion.
• All of these taxes will lower BG numbers, so maybe dial back the number of Durdens to compensate for the lowered number of BGs out there which should make the game more interesting and bring back the prominence of rogues and underground movements because you don't need a gun that took at least 75 days to build to drop a high value target.

Players Perspective

• Shoot IA members and then determine if you need a new auth or if the CL being considered for Godfather really did enough work to be a GF or just collected as many IA members as possible. This should help with both the absurd number of auths and the inactive problem.
• Govern total number of Dons, Consiglieres, Bosses, etc... per family. Too many changes to lower number of CLs would be a bad thing because then we'd have a population big enough to expand that doesn't... again. RIP Boston. If you don't do this, please at least
• Set recruiting standards and heavily enforce them. Begin punishing leaders for rogue members, not overwhelmingly but not a slap on the wrist either.

I don't really see much difficulty putting in a system and then Grandfathering people in for either side of the table from my suggestions, to be honest. Either way, great thread Achilles. I hope something comes of this.

I've tried to write this post several times now explaining why I think the introduction of LV and LA was without doubt the worst most detrimental implementation this game has seen in quite some time but I couldn't. It just is for so many of the reasons already laid out. 

With the exception of a small few who like to complain about everything, I'm fairly sure in a vote most would be against the idea of the additional districts and cities when the current ones were far from full. 

Opening LV and LA was a horrible step onto a horrible series of steps, in my opinion. We were barely able to keep up with just 4 cities with around 15 districts, and then they opened up LA and LV. Why? Because people were bitching that things were too close to each other and they wanted more space. Sooooo then came in the west.... 2 more cities, 6 more districts. At first, they were ignored by the Godfathers because we thought it was stupid and made no sense on why they were there.

But then there's only so much bitching you can take. People complaining there are new cities and everything is so crowded, and they want to see the west being used. Admins are the same in this category (no offense). Telling us that they are losing out because we don't fill the west.

So you have the admin bitching at you and the users bitching at you. Seems like you may as well attempt to populate the west to make people happy, regardless of how you feel about the whole ordeal. My first thought was.... yayy, 6 cities again! But Jesus fucking Christ, 6 more districts. Just what we needed.... more districts. It's like finding hay in a hay stack.

So then you get bitched at no matter what you do with these districts, by the public in general. Examples above of what happens when you don't fill them, and when you do, you're run so thin for yourself that it's barely even worth having your own district. Especially now since Godfathers don't make money off the profits in their district (Horrible idea, because GFs hardly make fuck all now). At the same time, you want to try and fill out the game, but you have to look after yourself and your own at the same time. So people cry that you should set up people who deserve it, when you'd rather do that in your district than outside ones, because it just makes common sense.

Then as Alexander brought up on the competition thread, you have to give your own to reap a little benefit of sending someone out to another district, which is so unbalanced that it's not even really that considerable.

Sure, people say it's up to us, but how much of it is really? There's just no logical reasoning on why the game mechanics are what they are... To play them to your benefit hurts the game, but helps keep you strong. I guess I'm just selfish. We've been taught on this game to build, grow, expand. (And do it the right way). Now if you shoot for those goals, you weaken yourself and it's not as big as a reward as it once was. So then, the logical thing to do, would be to send people out anyway. Watch them sit at a low number, sometimes just their crew in the district, and take an unusually long time to build.

I don't know. I have so much more to rant about, but at the same time, I feel like it's just a waste of typing out into novel form, because it has came too far to change and I don't see it changing anytime soon. I have always stood by the saying "If it's not broken, don't fix it". It just seems to me that MR tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and pooped out districts as the result. Which after a year of it, I think the majority will agree that it wasn't the best idea. And the addition of even more districts, is a poor choice.

I blame all the people who did nothing but constantly bitch about how the game was, so they tried to change it for you... That's who the blame should be on, and my mindset won't change on that. "Omg, I will never be able to kill the top guy". "Omg, I never get auth or get a chance, same with a ton of other people". "Omg, I will never get Godfather". Shut the fuck up... The game has been served to you on a silver platter not and I hope you're happy with the result. This is indeed what you've been begging for over the years.

Okay first off I'm not gonna be patronized by someone who set making it to Don as an actual goal and then took years to accomplish it and didn't read the reasoning of the original speaker, so stop that. Don't state someone's ideas are 'retarded' without spending two seconds thinking about it because your criticisms and suggestion aren't as well thought out as you think.

Next, one of the main things I agree with him on is that there is a MASSIVE loss in crew interaction. There needs to be more active people in families to promote that. Removing the IAs by lowering the cap doesn't do jack for the problem of removing IAs either because a lot of people are currently looking to get enough members for a GF switch and sit there... and the IAs will never stop adding on because they're failed accounts that we'll never run out of because not everyone is gonna try this game and wanna play. What you're suggesting includes a change in culture, which would be on the players' end.

Now onto going after my idea,

This would probably the most retarded thing to get implemented to date. Some folks simply can't/don't earn very well, but are extremely efficient Hitters or Posters.

That's the point. If someone has a skill that makes it worth the hit to the family's earnings then you promote them. If they don't offer anything worth the promotion... you don't promote them. You put an actual dollar value on the CL for promoting people. Just because you're incapable of seeing a dollar value for a gun or a street speaking presence doesn't mean others aren't. I actually have specific numbers in my head already... so yeah, it wouldn't get only earners promoted, and maybe it would lead to some people forcing themselves to developing new skills to be worth that bump in weekly cost.

It removes the total number of active people in each HQ. You're killing communication that likely got you to start playing this game with this idea. I'm not even gonna argue the rest of it, you're dodging the main speaker's point on the matter and this back and forth needs to end.

Just going to chip in on this thought of "lowering the numbers of people per HQ".

No.

That won't force people to shoot the insane amount of IAs that each crew currently has. It'll just put even more pointless bold and italic suits in our world. 

in my opinion taking away the districts would be a giant step in the right direction. with the districts gone the scales would start to balance themselves out.

^Amen to that.

If you remove districts, you are going to just get stockpiled cities again and the only real way that a group such as this one start fighting each other is by forcing some of them away from the others, getting people outside of their circle into trusted positions and requiring them to make a choice on whether they let their valuable members die to protect the group. Eventually, one or more will be unhappy with stabbing their own people in the back and decide to look after them rather than the group. This is always how these things are pulled apart and letting everyone go back to New York isn't going to make that process occur any quicker in my opinion.

Once this group, or the next group, falls apart then we should look at revising the districts because the current implementation is quite lacking. I'd still love for there to be a restriction on the amount of crews you can have, dependent upon how many of the existing ones have space to prevent people moving somewhere and setting up 5 people just to insulate themselves. I would also welcome a revision of the structure of crews as they are just way off these days.

The easiest way to get rid of the IAs is to make anyone with "inactive" status add nothing to crew. They don't increase any of the CLs stats, they don't count towards GF crew numbers, they don't do anything other than take up a space. Alternatively, we could just automatically drop anyone who has been inactive for 30 days or more from sponsorship.

Personally though, I don't think it will help all that much towards restoring interaction or communication. Obviously someone alive is going to communicate more than a corpse, but worthwhile interaction is a choice; one which is currently not being made by the vast majority of the game. The reason for that is more than just having inactives in families and would require a change in attitude as much as a change in crew personnel. 

Stopping IAs from counting removes another incentive for CLs to now have crews full of them.

7 cities, 2 hour flights, goddamn shoot IAs, no districts, 1 GF per city. That'd be a huge step to fixing things.