Clearly the topic of our culture is far too vast for me to encompass in a single post, so I'm going to focus on two central shifts I've observed in the past few years, and save others for future posts. In some ways, these shifts are the two sides of the same coin, and are likely effects of a shared cause:

• We have shifted from competition to cooperation.
• We have merged OOC and IC.

Cooperation over Competition

MafiaReturns, as it was when I first joined, was a social strategy RPG. It was based almost entirely on player interaction and reaction, and boy was there a lot of that. The stats were blurred, invisible, or calculated, and the only route to progress was through or with other players. All kills were real accounts with people behind them, whom may very well log in and see your (lack of a decent) whisper you left them. These were replaced with NPCs, and slowly most of the exciting player-interactions were replaced with interactions with NPCs. A great example of how far this has come is the recent hitlist change to allow an NPC to kill a real player. However, the shift to include more NPCs is not the cause, but an effect of our cultural shift.

We stopped competing. We stopped challenging each other to get to the top, and stayed content with whatever we could get without risking our "lives" (I quote this term, because these are just accounts; ones and zeroes, ladies and gentlemen; ones and zeroes). Account lives increased dramatically, and not-so-suddenly the game became less about competition and more about cooperating your way to the top. We removed the "strategy" from social strategy, and suddenly terms like "Facebook game" started getting circled around, as if the level of socialization had somehow turned MR into a social network. What's worse is that an FB game could maintain a competitive atmosphere, because real-life friends could compete against one another without pissing each other off.

I'm going to mention the 303 group in passing, not to harp on them but to show an example of what's going on here. It's a good example because a group of friends decided to be the top dogs, and they did it. There's no denying the force they've created within this game, and now that they’re at the top they have the luxury to play the game however they want. The problem which arose was that as a group of friends started to occupy the top spots, competition disappeared. There's no viability in competition anymore. There's no honor in it, either. When we put such a chokehold on competitors, games die. Presently, the only way to have fun in this game is through total cooperation with everyone around you; or you die, your colleagues die, or you can’t have friends because they won’t trust you. And with few friends, you won’t get CL spots because no one will want to work for you (because playing competitively endangers you and your crew the current state of the game). The only problem with 303 is that there isn't another group behind them trying to do the same thing.

IC became OOC

I mentioned this in the previous section, that "people take account deaths like personal insults now". I recall an individual who was killed by a "friend", and after a couple weeks/months the shooter died, and the victim posted "I thought we were friends" in the shooter’s funeral. That's fucked up. Sure, you invested time and money into something, but you should not value this game to such a degree that you need to end friendships when your account dies. It isn't an insult. It isn't a personal attack. It's a game.

The use of IRC (which Buddy touched on in his thread) has absolutely contributed to this shift, as people are referred to by their OOC alias more than their IC alias in many cases. Or more importantly, we build such extended relationships with people outside of the game that we forget that it's all just a game. This contributes to the first problem, and makes us afraid to compete with each other.

Some Observations

If you are unsure whether or not we've departed from competitive play, please heed some of my observations:

• The existence of Durdens and RIAs to feed the hitters instead of forcing them to kill real players. The kill counts rose, the BG counts rose, and suddenly the stakes are so high no one wants to fight anymore.
• MIAs - It's illegal to steal them, allowing everyone to train up a gun completely free of competition.
• CAs - Allows players to bypass the credit marketplace and earn more than 2x the highest market value of a credit over time. But, that means you have to stay alive for that long, so people favor longer and longer account ages so their CAs generate income.
• Achievements, Levels, Drug Units, and Felony Boards - This is less about competition and more about replacing the gap leftover. As it took longer for exciting player interactions to unfold, we got bored. So the coders had to implement something to keep us around; keep us interested.
• Fortifications - This is tertiary to the problem, but indicates an unwillingness to compete. Fortifications have been used more for XP grinding than for any use in a war ever. With the scaling of guns, they’re almost irrelevant in most circumstances.
• Districts - We didn't want to compete for the top spot in a city, so we made more than one top spot so everyone could be a godfather.

Conclusion/Solution

My conclusion; we need to turn this back into a game. It's uncompetitive in its current state, and that turns off a lot of players. How can I "sell" this game to incoming associates, when I know they're going to be grinding for months just to get to the middle of the pack? It's absurd. We either need to open things up and allow people in the middle and bottom to compete without restriction/intervention from the top, or those at the top need to compete. Otherwise, we're just going to keep bleeding players indefinitely because they have no reason to stay.

Seconded!

I do agree and that is why the reason of some players who tried goes out of us coz they thought they have no chance to achieve what others had

I strongly agree with this statement.

As a new player, I completely agree with Denam. I personally am not too excited to be grinding for all this time, just to get to that certain point. I enjoy when something is competitive, and right now it doesn't seem competitive at all.

I am a patient person, so I will likely stay on regardless. However, there are many that don't want to have to grind in that way, and still not really get anywhere. 

I completely agree

I completely disagree. This game is perfect the way it is.

Fully agreed. You summed it up well.

I greatly disagree with a lot of this. Your new competition involves getting a gun to pick other people off. Yeah it takes more time and commitment but there's competition in that and anyone who doesn't treat it like one lags well behind those that do. Your use of the 303 is also easily countered by the era of Roman. He and Prem pretty much exclusively authed their guys, they still died. Everyone dies, just takes more effort when the rest of the community slips up and lets one group get so securely set on top of the game.

IC became OOC is centered around the concept of out of game relationships. They've always been there, all IRC did was create more of them. People played with their friends from RL before and are doing so now and people have always overreacted to dying. Saying "I thought we were friends" in a funeral is childish and pathetic but nothing new. Much worse used to happen, I remember a GF who treating everything like a competition who'd go nuts in people's funerals because they said anything negative about him IC or OOC at all about 4-5 years ago.

The existence of Durdens and RIAs to feed the hitters instead of forcing them to kill real players. The kill counts rose, the BG counts rose, and suddenly the stakes are so high no one wants to fight anymore.

New hitting dynamic, sorry you have to do more to kill your enemies nowadays but it's actually nicer for hitters to see the numbers build up rather than die to a guy who spent a week building a gun.

• MIAs - It's illegal to steal them, allowing everyone to train up a gun completely free of competition.

When this rule isn't in place nobody buys them because everyone on Info races you for them and you end up paying a CD for less than 50/50 odds to kill the MIA you paid for. It's player mandated because if it wasn't that feature would basically die and the Gods would have to intervene.

• CAs - Allows players to bypass the credit marketplace and earn more than 2x the highest market value of a credit over time. But, that means you have to stay alive for that long, so people favor longer and longer account ages so their CAs generate income.

7 Million is the most earned nowadays. That's 1.4 times the cost and spread across a 30 day period. They're actually risky because if you can't log on for a while because of RL issues they won't produce units and if you die they lose all their units. The risk is relatively low but the gain compared to cost and time isn't even remotely close to imbalanced. These drive the price of Credits up which is a good thing, because it rewards people for supporting the site.

• Achievements, Levels, Drug Units, and Felony Boards - This is less about competition and more about replacing the gap leftover. As it took longer for exciting player interactions to unfold, we got bored. So the coders had to implement something to keep us around; keep us interested.

Drug Units? How far back are you going to say drug units are a change? These are the money making aspects, some were boring or pointless so they were coded to be fun because this is a game. The admins are trying to keep people interested... because this is a game. It had nothing to do with total "exciting player interactions".

• Fortifications - This is tertiary to the problem, but indicates an unwillingness to compete. Fortifications have been used more for XP grinding than for any use in a war ever. With the scaling of guns, they’re almost irrelevant in most circumstances.

Forts aren't used in wars? Wrong, forts aren't used in take downs but they are in wars and there's a big difference between the two. Shooting forts isn't done very often, I'll give you that, but forts matter in wars because it reduces the number of people capable of hitting the pros in the home city. It offers a reward for fighting in your home city but punishes you for being predictable.

• Districts - We didn't want to compete for the top spot in a city, so we made more than one top spot so everyone could be a godfather.

Wrong. Districts were meant to be greatly divided in a way that interacting with other cities would take days. The game is slowly transitioning. There are still game features being added for the current game which is slowing them down some but they are working towards the long term goal of making it so each city is what the whole site of MR used to be. They were built to make it so the game could transition into a larger game with more people. The people aren't here so we're making due. Complaining just gets more people to leave which makes us go further down the rabbit hole of turning a long term large map game for tons of users into something it was never meant to be.

My Conclusion, do your homework. There are lots of things wrong, I'll give you that, but it isn't any of these things. They're just not the way you'd like them. Real problems: New Player Retention Rate and Old Bloodline Return Rate, the game is shrinking; Lack of stress on Role Play aspects in a Role Play game, this is entirely on the users being too lazy to RP and has nothing to do with OOC relationships; but by far my biggest one which is an old one... Too many people complaining and not enough people even trying to come up with solutions.

Cassi, all I hear from you these days is "Be the change you want to see in the world." It's just as easy to say that as it is to complain. It's almost as if you are answering  all the complains with your own complaint. They complain about the game, you complain about how everyone just wants to sit around and not do anything. 

I greatly disagree with a lot of this. Your new competition involves getting a gun to pick other people off. Yeah it takes more time and commitment but there's competition in that and anyone who doesn't treat it like one lags well behind those that do. Your use of the 303 is also easily countered by the era of Roman. He and Prem pretty much exclusively authed their guys, they still died. Everyone dies, just takes more effort when the rest of the community slips up and lets one group get so securely set on top of the game.

I knew you would! But you are mistaken; my "new" (which is really a return to old) competition isn't centered around everyone killing each other. My point is that the game isn't very engaging in its current state. Much of what we do presently is centered around building up for some massively important moment that many involved in will completely miss. I think the reason 303 got where they are is with a competitive attitude, hence why I included them as such a good example. I wish we had more 303s! They slowly but surely took out EVERYTHING. Old players, new players, they paved the way for their new empire and no one stopped them. It was absolutely marvelous, and I wish I had been here for more of it. But since the rest of the community has taken a cooperation over competition stance, we'll always be vulnerable to players or groups of players who actually play the game for what it is. I'm not saying we need to kill everyone, I'm showing what you CAN do with a competitive attitude.

Plus, while I did direct a challenge to the "top," the challenge is equally made to the rest of us. Anyone can do what 303 did.

IC became OOC is centered around the concept of out of game relationships. They've always been there, all IRC did was create more of them. People played with their friends from RL before and are doing so now and people have always overreacted to dying. Saying "I thought we were friends" in a funeral is childish and pathetic but nothing new. Much worse used to happen, I remember a GF who treating everything like a competition who'd go nuts in people's funerals because they said anything negative about him IC or OOC at all about 4-5 years ago.

Out-of-game relationships have always existed, yes. This is a tight-knit community; it's not surprising. My concern is that we don't challenge our friends to the same degree as non-friends. And this contributes to a very clique-like community (and this is a VERY clique-y community), which really bums a lot of players out. The reason I brought it up was because I think it contributes to the lack of competition, not because it's an entirely new phenomenon.

New hitting dynamic, sorry you have to do more to kill your enemies nowadays but it's actually nicer for hitters to see the numbers build up rather than die to a guy who spent a week building a gun.

I forgive you, IronSight. Thank you for your apology. But it's pure inflation. There isn't more value in having 500 kills than having 50, if that's all it takes to kill your target. It's just more work for the same payoff. Sure, hitters don't die to someone who spent a week building their gun, but they also can't just spend a solid week training up to kill someone else. My concern is that as the numbers get so inflated, many lose interest in the diminished value of "a kill". Considering the BG tiers and GF counts, kills are worth a lot less than what they used to. I don't see why the diminishing value of the kill is an improvement.

When this rule isn't in place nobody buys them because everyone on Info races you for them and you end up paying a CD for less than 50/50 odds to kill the MIA you paid for. It's player mandated because if it wasn't that feature would basically die and the Gods would have to intervene.

I'm not requesting that we take away the rule; just making an observation of something that has gone from a competition (IA racing) to an exchange of money for gun strength.

My Conclusion, do your homework. There are lots of things wrong, I'll give you that, but it isn't any of these things. They're just not the way you'd like them. Real problems: New Player Retention Rate and Old Bloodline Return Rate, the game is shrinking; Lack of stress on Role Play aspects in a Role Play game, this is entirely on the users being too lazy to RP and has nothing to do with OOC relationships; but by far my biggest one which is an old one... Too many people complaining and not enough people even trying to come up with solutions.

Why do you think players, new and old, are leaving? It's not engaging. Sure, there's a tremendous lack of RP but there has always been a tremendous lack of RP. No one actually wants to be a mobster, they just want to rank up, shoot stuff, or talk to their friends (or all of the above). 

I'm not complaining. I'm making observations and interpreting them. Not all negative opinions are complaints, IronSight. You can simply say "I prefer not to swim" without complaining about swimming pools. You can say "I don't care for some of the things you have to say" without complaining about them. I just wanted to put my thoughts in text, and it appears many agree with my sentiments.

As for solutions, I think we need a cultural shift towards competition. The only way to do that is to talk about it. I want people to be excited to play this game, as excited as I was when I first started playing. I mean, morty spent a solid hour last night telling me everything I missed in the past couple years, and I was devastated to have not been around for it. But I think if we want those exciting stories to tell, we need to get back to competing. 

I completely agree with everything said on this post. I started playing 5 years ago, and the MR today is significantly different than the one I was used to. Wars were frequent, and players were involved in many disputes. After coming back, I was surprised at the amount of tools available to make ranking up easier. Back in the day, one had to go through locals and make an IA list himself, hoping to shoot the mobster before others, without even knowing how many people were racing. It certainly has made things "easier". I would rather have people get along, otherwise we would have wars all the time, but (in my personal opinion) I feel like some of the thrill has gone away.

I like the game as it is now. 

It easyer for a new player to get startet also. 

ok,  my general take on the game is quite simple,  Many people get to the top not coz their ability or activity, more due to the size of their gun, or who they are friends with.    It has happend for a long time so like many other things is almost etched in stone it will happen in future.  As a non-irc, skype, teamspeak etc user i miss out on some of the flaming as well as the friendships and advantages that can be gained from it.

Am i a fan of the districts, not really, and the groups that sometimes call for change, aren't always going to be here by the time changes are made so how do you decided on what changes are helping or hindering the game.  Should everything go to community votes?

Nearly every day is NPC's or NPC's bgs are left over taking out a lot of the skill in the game the same way ria's, mia's etc but i understand the counter balance to bgs being in place.   If someone can sit under the radar long enough can do some damage.  Same with vision being easier and ranking the biggest frustration for some seems gaining credits to buy timers, perks etc as dunno if we could set limits on how much of a credit storage someone can build up so 1. not to just bg them up for the next x characters, or 2. release credits more regularly in the market and 3. maybe more motivation to reward more people within a crew.  I know some people won a lot on dice, which has caused some uproar but dunno if more with people who never won as much.

When i look around what do i know coming here, well i know is a ton of work to get to the top, when such high amounts are needed to kill the people at the top i can understand how off putting it is to some; especially those with jobs, families etc or limited time online.  No i am not saying everyone should or can get to the top and i am not saying work shouldn't be rewarded but it can be intimidating and frustrating.  I think to a degree this is a large part of the why people don't want to throw it away with wars either, they don't want to lose that work, when sooner or later will probably be shot in their sleep anyway.

do i believe you can simply will the way you want the world to be, no.  When you get a new potential recruit come your way, and was like i was with x and was shot after 3 days, then joined y and shot after x days in the takedown it is not that simple.  You can try and make small changes from within, but is limits.

For a long time was a tea and cookies social aspect to the game has what kept people coming back, where it bordered over for some so chose friends over family to non-combat i am unsure.  I am not saying everyone should go out shooting today, but in a world where not everyone even trains a gun is often hard to see change of any form coming.  It is not about one, group or any group, but individuals can only make a limited change, groups a bigger one.

Until very recently, literally none of the causes of conflict on this game have been created by the game. In the past when the majority of accounts didn't live much beyond a month and the prospect of killing something like a Capo with 50 kills was a reasonable assumption, it didn't really matter too much. The 'cycle' of the game was short enough that the critical flaw was hidden, to a degree.

Recently (and I use  this term meaning within the past few years, sadly) this has stopped being the case. Some answer sets mean you need to rack up 50 kills before you're even on a level playing field! The proliferation of credits and the almost exponential rise in the number of hours you need to dedicate to create a good character give a fairly predictable result; accounts get longer.

People constantly moan about leaders. It's not like the good old days. The insinuation is that the power  wielders now don't have he principles of the people who preceded them. I think that's untrue. The principles are still there, it's the willingness to act on them that isn't. Go back 5 years and a Leader taking a principled stand on something was pretty regular. I did it a few times myself knowing that death was a pretty likely outcome. If I did die, I wasn't too bothered because eh...I'd lost a month, 2 at most. These days, to sit at the big boys table you need to have committed at least 6 months, at a conservative estimate. Do I want to risk all that work to take a stand on principle? Do I really want to wager 6 months of my free time on getting my first wave right on a war that's based on nothing but my moral stance vs. my opponent's? Suddenly, the eagerness isn't there anymore.

In this regard, it is a case of OOC and RP merging, but not in the way you defined it. It's not f 'I don't want to war my friends'. It's that I'm no longer RPing. The roleplay is dead because I'm not acting like a Mobster should. The question of 'If I was a mafia Don, what would I do here?' is replaced by the niggling worry that if you get it wrong you sacrifice so, so much. So a lot of the time, you do nothing.

That's totally understandable, it really is; and we return to our main point now. In the past, the fact that the game created no causes for conflict wasn't a probem. These days, I think it is.

I haven't been around in around 8 months so apologies if my information is out of date, but on my last account I was a Godfather and I can honestly say that in every war that I took part in (including the 1 wave affair that killed me) and in every war that I had knowledge of, there was a single occurrence based on principle. Every single war, other than that, was based on paranoia. Let's fuck them up before they fuck us up. Were they ever going to fuck us up? Who knows! That is the prime cause of conflict in this game, and a combination of this and the intricate web of alliances we creat ultimately lead to an atmosphere that, if we're honest, is very stale and dull a lot of the time.

In the absence of anything else though, it's a pretty natural way for the players to play the game. The shortfall, and I genuinely hate to criticise, has been with the admins.

However, good things are hopefully happening. The price of HQ's being tied to the 'availability' of them in a certain area is a step forward. The fact that 1 GF per city is objectively and publicly more powerful than the others is a step forward. It creates a situation in which there is competition for finite resources. If more changes of this ilk are made, it will create a situation in which the game ensures conflict is an eventuality.

Ultimately though, the changes need to be bigger. Ingrained practices and a stubborn desire from boring players who refuse to change will stubbornly try to maintain the status quo. We saw this with districts; they were meant to herald a new era of 'smaller' game playing, with powerplays within cities, and districts in various players scratching each other's backs. What we got was districts of each city closing ranks and creating homogeneous gloops as players desperately crammed round pegs into square holes so they could keep playing as they'd always played.

In short, more fantastic changes like the ones I've mentioned (and on a bigger scale) will force conflict. This won't take away from our existing conflicts that may be built on powerplays, paranoia or principle; but overall it can only be a good thing. It will reduce the average account cycle. This, generally speaking, will make the game more enjoyable to play as more will be 'going on'. It will make users act with their hearts rather than their heads; the desire to play the game like a real mafioso will outweigh the fear of throwing away an inordinate amount of time that has been clocked up on one account.

While most of you think this is just a game, and rightfully so it is, there's other people on the other side of the table (spending countless hours of their time) who don't exactly see it that way. This game is a business. The changes that are being made contribute to a delicate balance between the user base and a business model.

It is what it is.