Sometimes, the people on this game act like children. They are entitled, selfish and generally immature. That's ok, this is a game. It's the only form of escapism some people have; they can't be selfish when they're looking after their children and if they act immature at work they'll lose their job. So they do it here instead.

I'm not talking about the people who use the internet as a tool for acting like a gigantocunt. Fuck those guys. I'm talking about the people who want to chill out Burger King style and have things their way.

Particularly, the people who sink hundreds if not thousands of hours (and sometimes dollars) into their accounts. When you invest that much, you expect some kind of reward provided, of course, that you're talented enough to take it. That is the key element of open-world, sandbox games. More so, that is one of the key elements of the Mafia in the era we're playing in. 1st, 2nd generation immigrants living in poverty and ostracized in the country they thought that would be their saviour. They look up to the big guys on the crime scene in their area and they want to emulate them; they take shit for years and pay their dues until they're on top, and then they do whatever they fucking want until someone who wants it more takes it off them.

I feel like we've lost that from this game. People reach the top, either as Leaders, the biggest hitters or the Machiavellian manipulators behind the scenes. Whether they either manoeuvre themselves into a position of dominance, or they arrive at it through sheer dumb luck is irrelevant; what matters is that they're at the top of the greasy pole and they feel people should dance to their tune.

Many people feel robbed of that opportunity. I am not going to discuss the legitimacy of grievances each ruling 'hegemony' have had with the with the admin team; all I will say is that time and time and time again the ruling 'group' have had run-ins of varying seriousness and aggression with the admin team. The frequency with which this occurs cannot be coincidence. It usually follows this pattern:

1. The people in charge want to assert their dominance and play the game (an open world, sandbox game!) as they please. Their primary objective should not be the health of the community. From an OOC perspective, yes - this could be a consideration. As characters - absolutely not. They are mob leaders, they should act according to their wallet, their family, the contituation of the status quo. This is totally legitimate.

2. The admin team are worried about the actions of the latest hegemony. They worry that the actions are damaging to the community at whole, off-putting to new players and generally not great for the game. This, too, is totally legitimate.

This is where shit goes down

3. The admin team start subtly trying to influence how things happen. I'm not claiming anything subversive or nefarious is happening here; the admins are generally trying to do a good job, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

4. The dominant leaders of the time start getting quite upset at what they see as interference; they suddenly have more hoops to jump through. They feel is if their actions are being limited in a manner which they physically cannot respond to due to the constraints of the game. 

(An aside: this sometimes manifests itself in the crewleaders [as happened in my last period at the top] involving the admins in big decisions to keep them onside and happy, fearful that the admin team will be upset if they feel blindsided. This is just a personal opinion, but to me this is fundamentally shit.)

This starts a cycle where there is constant bad blood between leaders and admins. From a gameplay perspective, there is usually months of stagnation where PVP action is almost non-existent in terms of wars/takedowns which fundamentally alter the current order. Eventually, a big site war kicks off and of the survivors there is usually a very small group who have (relatively speaking) v. powerful accounts. This group makes up the new ruling hegemony and we restart the process.

As someone who has served as a staff member for years, and walked in the corridors of power many times, the problems seem fairly obvious. To revert to the beginning, I mentioned people being childlike at times because this game is a form of escapism. This clearly means that:

A. When you tell people not to do something, they will do it anyway to spite you. Despite themselves. This is evident when underground groups shoot the BGs of the rulers because they feel their ability to play is being restricted. It's evident when Dad tells daughter 'I dont want you seeing that boy any more.' It's gonna happen for sure now. It's also evident when admins try and impose their will onto the gameplay (which is fundamentally different from the game). It upsets the leaders who feel like their ability to play the game is being restricted.

B. Crucially, these leaders then feel that their ability to play the game is restricted in a way that they cannot respond to. It saps the will to carry on.

I want to stress this again. Many times, intervention from the admins is not nearly as severe as players like to portray it, and many times it is not some dastardly Machiavellian plot. It's just the admins trying to do their best for everybody. A game where 10 people at the top are having a whale of a time and the other 500 are miserable is, pretty conclusively, a shit game.

Nevertheless, this shows (to me at least) that there is a fundamental problem in the mechanics of this game. If the admins feel they need to be constantly involved in the day-to-day minutiae of the game, then it is a tacit concession that the game doesn't work properly. A long time ago (I'd probably estimate around 2 years minimum) Izzy made an announcement that the admins/owners/coders would be stepping away from day-to-day game management. He (and others) would be on IRC on a social basis only and any day-to-day issues would be referred to helpdesk, assistants and administrators. Not only I would I say this hasn't happened, I'd argue the exact opposite has happened.

Why? The admin team are forever playing Robin Hood. They are trying to ensure as far as possible a re-distribution of wealth and equality so that everybody has a shot. They need to do this because, and I really don't think I can say this enough, the system is fundamentally broken. The mechanics of the game are not sustainable and require constant intervention for the simple reason that if the strongest 10% of the game work together, they have a combined strength that the rest of the userbase would find very, very hard to challenge.

We've heard many times the arguments that 'you'd be surprised how little effort it takes', 'If X people worked together they could be Mr. Z dead in 2 waves!' and so on. The fact is, the mechanics of this game do not lend themselves to such an approach. The community is too small to bring in such a wide number of people; and account length is a huge factor. The older my account is, the less inclined I am to throw it away on something that's not a sure thing, or to trust someone that I don't absolutely have to in order to survive. Everyone having a similar attitude that results in, other than the odd inconsequential take-down, we proceed procession like in a boring, tepid, inexorable march to the next site war.

TL;DR:

The huge amount of work it takes to challenge the folks in charge makes people very nervous about embarking on an action they're unsure of because the loss is so much greater. The people in charge then have a much longer timeframe to consolidate their power and instigate change that is great for them but not for the game. Because the majority are either incapable or unwilling to act as a check and balance, the admins have to artificially fill that role instead and it results in many problems down the line.

I'm not saying if account-length was reduced that suddenly people would be more inclined to take out a leader on the basis 'ooh, this will be good for the game long term'. What I am saying is that, if the risk of making a move were less, people would be more inclined to make a move for their own in-character/RP reasons.

A more organic turnover of accounts, and a shorter account cycle in general would solve so many problems with this game. It would negate the need for any admin involvement, any bad-blood between the admins and userbase would essentially dissipate. Perhaps most importantly of all, if you  as a leader knew that the people under you were much more likely to make a move on you, and you knew that the gap in power was much smaller you'd be infinitely more inclined to instigate policies that didn't piss everyone off. 

Shorter account cycles leads to an increase in regular conflict. Regular conflict is a far greater mediator, a far greater means of redistribution and a far greater check/balance than irregular admin intervention could ever be.

Just my two cents, anyway.

You seem to have excluded (deliberately, perhaps) any actual policy changes to bring about your theoretical gameplay. In theory, you make sound predictions. In practice, people don't always act the way we want them to, or the way we think they should. Some people simply don't strive to be at the top. As a matter of fact, a decreasingly small minority of players actually want to be at the top, and the fraction of those willing to do something to bring that about is even smaller.

What you're talking about, practically, is lowering the BG cap. The BG cap is the single most important attribute of the game when it comes to account length. Because it dictates the gap formed by wars; winners can get to cap, losers start at zero. This is the fundamental component of this game's cycles, and to try to affect cycle-length changes in any other way would fail and likely contribute to a greater gap rather than a shorter one. Additions like making more MIAs available will not shorten cycle length. In reality these changes will make people at the top more powerful, as the number of individuals willing to "turn" on them is substantially smaller than the number of individuals willing to fight for them. Those willing to fight for them increase the influence of their leader at a much greater rate than a malevolent individual could destroy it. If you're walking a marathon and the official says now you can run instead of walk, that doesn't make it easier to get to the finish line. It's faster, but you're still putting in 26 miles of effort. If you shorten it to 20 miles, or 10 miles, you'll actually see more people willing to race.

Now, you make statements like: "A more organic turnover of accounts, and a shorter account cycle in general would solve so many problems with this game. It would negate the need for any admin involvement, any bad-blood between the admins and userbase would essentially dissipate." This is like the old adage "Communism always looks good on paper." It's easy to compare theoretical goods and compare them to practical problems and insist that they would be solved. While you may actually be correct, it's unhealthy to base drastic game-wide changes on these sorts of contentions.

I've kinda jumped all over the place in this response, and I apologize for that. I do genuinely agree with your sentiments. However, I foresee two problems:

1. The players are already conditioned to this state of the game. The new players we bring in are being conditioned to play the way we play presently. To try to bring back the run-and-gun conditions, or even shorter cycles, could have a negative impact on the group of players that are content with stability and boredom.

2. Those at BG cap will not want it lowered (obviously). They will view it as an attack on their progress as a player, though this is an entirely false view. I'll happily discuss this with someone if asked, but I consider the view defending the higher BG cap to be wholly unjust to the rest of the playerbase. It betrays realism, it betrays ambition, and it betrays a number of different components that would make this game more fun (social strategy, alliances, etc.).

TL;DR:

Lowering the BG cap is the only way to shorten cycles realistically. Any other feature implemented will be used to empower those at the top rather than slow them down. Which, honestly, is how it should be. We should not be implementing features that only help those at the bottom. We should be implementing equitable features but have a shorter gap between top and bottom. And rather than adjusting the BG cap as the game goes on, you should just make it one opaque number. The game has enough components contributing to keeping CLs in place that reducing the BG cap would actually do very little harm.

The bg cap should be set in a static cap mode such as

Godfather 100 max

Don 90 max

Consig 80 max

Boss 70 max

Capo 60 max

Made Man 50 max

Wise Guy 40 max

Earner 30 max

Goomba 20 max

gangster 10 max

An additiona1 15 could go to a GF

An additional 10 could go to a CL not a GF

An additional 5 could go to a hand

Reduce the added defense given to GF's CLs Hands etc to an unknown number which takes their starting answers into consideration. If their starting answers have sacrificed defense they shouldn't be handed more.

As far as I am concerned, this would shorten cycles and be tied to ranks and positions.

Hand in hand with this, since there is a large amount of easy kills out there on a regular basis the math per kill should be adjusted down for bgs and kills (.8 per kill, .4 per bg kill, .2 per hit/wound or adjust to numbers where no one knows exactly what their kill ratio is and make the math tie into someones starting kill answers. Okay, that might be a little complex but I still like the idea. I know it is currently tied into the length it takes to max your gun and I believe that should continue on through game play. 

Squishy

I'll admit that was posted on the fly. I'll think more on this because some sort of change would be a good thing.

Squishy

Before I formulate a response, what are your comments on the rest of the post?

I think there is a natural BG cap for non-CLs. Basically, you can only earn so much money. So you really can only sustain so many BGs as you rank up. The problem is when 30+ people are earning money for one person's BGs, and there's no longer a "natural" financial cap. That's why we have the BG cap, so that even if you can earn money at an exceptional rate (or with the help of crew members), you still can't pass a certain point.

I think any number proposed for BG caps have merit; because it defines the cycle length. If you choose 200, you'll have long cycles. If you choose 20, you'll have very short cycles. I think it would be a very good idea to sit down and look at some of the numbers about how quickly money is generated in the game, and base the cycle length off that. I think the cap should be less than 100, simply because I favor shorter cycles and have a distaste for the unrealistic nature of walking around with 100 men following you. I think the people who favor longer cycles have a much narrower perspective and don't realize that you can have fun on more than one account. People would rather prolong death than making it more fun to start over.

I'll say 50. I realize that's a huge jump, but we need somewhere to start. I'll gladly represent the "low" end of this discussion if someone would like to defend the higher BG cap. Then we can come to a compromise and give some stability to cycle length and end the discussion about it. I don't think anyone would really argue that we need longer cycles than we do now, but if there are please step forward.

I think that's sorta the basis for my argument. No one really wants longer accounts. After a certain point of character development, there's not much left to "gain". I think it would be more fun to reach a certain point of progress over and over with different people than to try to extend the progress as a whole so that no one has to lose their progress.

Personally, I've always thought this game should have "Seasons". 

Seasons would last two years, then the game would reset and a new season would start. Credits would carry over to the new season, but nothing else would.

Prizes (an extra point or two of a stat, a couple credits, whatever) would be awarded at the start of the new season for things like "Longest Living" or "Most kills" or "Last man standing" at the end of the previous season.

This would encourage more dynamic playing with less stagnation, especially towards the end of the season. While this may devalue credits, again especially towards the end of the season, it may also result in people buying credits and planning for the next season. 

There are, of course, kinks that would need to be worked out in that sort of system, but at this point in time, it certainly would not be any worse than the current system of "Spend butt tons of cash, get a group of friends, take over the game for a year+ and make everything boring as shit".

I think there is a natural BG cap for non-CLs. Basically, you can only earn so much money. So you really can only sustain so many BGs as you rank up. The problem is when 30+ people are earning money for one person's BGs, and there's no longer a "natural" financial cap. That's why we have the BG cap, so that even if you can earn money at an exceptional rate (or with the help of crew members), you still can't pass a certain point.

After Squishy's post I understand where I failed at least on the limiting per level however what you say can easily be overcome by credits and 10 days.

I will stick with my top number in the previous post. I'd like the bg cap at 100 and the defense of CL's bonuses tied more into their starting answers.

After Squishy's post I understand where I failed at least on the limiting per level however what you say can easily be overcome by credits and 10 days.

Credits come from somewhere. They aren't free. And if they get their BGs by supporting the game, I'm okay with that. They worked (presumably) for their money, so it does have some cost to them. But with shorter cycles, even credit-fueled leaders could be removed and they won't be propped up by IRL money.

I will stick with my top number in the previous post. I'd like the bg cap at 100 and the defense of CL's bonuses tied more into their starting answers.

I do like the idea of tying the CL bonus to startup answers; but with the recent defense answer buff I think that may make it a bit crazy. I think any defense derived from their CL status should be based on the number of loyal members, not their answers. They already get one stat bonus from their answers as players, I don't see a reason to double up that bonus just because they're a crewleader. If anything, stats like stealth and defense would (realistically) go down, because you can't really "sneak" around as a CL with 100 BGs.

I think 100 BGs is too high because the primary focus of all crewleaders is to earn, earn, and earn until they get to cap. The full cost of 100 BGs is $111,875,000. Reaching that point basically marks where a CL should start strategizing with other leaders if they want to stay up, because their fate is now wholly in the hands of the other players. I think that point should be reached sooner rather than later, because with such a high cap all crewleaders are in a passive "be nice" state until they reach it, thus contributing to even longer cycles. And with the sheer number of CLs in place now, that means we have a majority if players serving CLs that simply can't afford to act like the mafia. And that's the core problem I'd want to solve.

The full cost for 50 BGs is $40,312,500. Combined with fortifications, it's still a big expense, but it allows the CL to start focusing on and relying on his/her crew for power instead of simply training/buying BGs alone. The difference is $71.5m, and that becomes available funds for things other than simply BGing up the CL. And I think the less we really focus on the numbers, the more time we can spend actually role-playing as members of the mafia.

Squishy, you are quite right, and I agree that laziness shouldn't be compensated. But can't the argument you made be reversed? There are a ton of vets, vets who know how to play and train and build and fight, but they aren't doing that. They're here, but they aren't really playing like they once did. Is it more likely that all the vets simultaneously have become apathetic, or that the state of the game has simply made the investment of time not worth it?

Plus, I don't really want to think in terms of rogues, which has become a common perspective. I think it's unwise to set up a BG cap based on the length of time it should require one person to make a difference, when in most cases it's a group of leaders who make the real changes. What I think would be beneficial is simply to reduce the amount of time it takes between those instances of leaders vs. leaders rather than try to accommodate rogues. While the reduction of the BG cap would certainly make roguing more lucrative, I think that's simply a side effect of what we should really be pursuing; allowing crews to make moves without having to focus on getting people capped beforehand. I think much of the time crews spend "waiting" for their time to strike is simply the time it takes to train the gun and hire the BGs. If those numbers were reduced, I think you'd see more crew-based conflicts rather than just rogues.

If I remember right, the forts (when a member is in their home district) provides the equivalent of 50 bgs. Now, mind you, my memory is withering away so correct me if I am wrong ...

A leader should surely have the potential of at least double the fort yes?

Squishy has said he believes the ratio of bgs is about right...

The one thing I would like to see is WB death reverted back to the way they used to be. It used to be the game, in a sense, did some cycle shortening. The removal of this took that element away.

First, forts provide less than 50 BG strength. Second, I see no reason why the cap should be double the forts (even though that would be much less than you're calculating) or even based on the forts' strength. BGs preceded the forts, not the other way around. The forts don't even really do that much in a practical setting anyways.

Of course Squishy believes the ratio is right; he set the ratio. If he thought it was wrong he'd change it.

I may be mistaken. I don't know how much forts are worth.

if it is, in fact, 50 (and I believe it is) then 50X2=100 (double)

I think what Izzy is saying is this isn't meant to be only a bg discussion (or even a bg discussion) but rather an overall discussion on the steps necessary to address the following summary:

A more organic turnover of accounts, and a shorter account cycle in general would solve so many problems with this game. It would negate the need for any admin involvement, any bad-blood between the admins and userbase would essentially dissipate. Perhaps most importantly of all, if you  as a leader knew that the people under you were much more likely to make a move on you, and you knew that the gap in power was much smaller you'd be infinitely more inclined to instigate policies that didn't piss everyone off. 

Shorter account cycles leads to an increase in regular conflict. Regular conflict is a far greater mediator, a far greater means of redistribution and a far greater check/balance than irregular admin intervention could ever be.

At one time people were complaining about putting so much time into something only to have it taken away. Changes were made including the WB death change. The WB death change is one of the elements that have lead us to where we are.

While I would like to see the bg cap reduced, we have had shorter cycles in the past with larger bg amounts (again my memory thing but I believe it was 230+ at one time BEFORE all these durden spawns and gun tapering.) BG amounts has been a matter of contention for a long time.

Forts don't give you 50 bodyguards of defence. They just give you nothing if you have 50 bgs. That's not the same thing :)

I knew 50 had come from somewhere in my memory bank. Thanks for clarifying.