"There is no way on earth or heaven an entire city can be taken out in such a short period of time without them being aware isn't there anything we can do to balance this out? where is the strategy? where is the guile? now it's just a case of who shoots first meaning anyone with a hair trigger wins."

Have friends? be stronger? be smarter?

When Roman and myself were in power, and our time came, do you know who got the first shot off, and the first kill?

Me, I had two people call me, while i was at busch gardens, on a roller coaster with my girl. Missed both calls and a text came through from a good friend. "war is coming they are there to kill you now, shoot whoever is highest rank now"

I logged in on my phone, shot A godfather in my city. SecretAgent posted "isnt a take down suppose to start with the other side first" in irc.

The war lasted roughly 12-16 hours or more if i recall, and that was a very one sided war.

We were strong enough to last for a while, we lost in the end because ENOUGH people wanted us dead.

When you compare today to then building a gun is easy. In fact, it is way too easy. Having to shoot bodyguards in order to take someone out is a thing of the past. Bodyguards are only for building your guns even further afterwards now.

Boy oh boy truer words were never spoken. Do you know how I used to build a gun, back when we got paid to kill other people? I random wacked as many people as i could, pure wack answers hit wiseguy from gangster-goomba, rank to earner in 15 days, yes 15 days then shot as many people as i could but stay under radar. Break 65 kills and be a beast.

Stay tuned.... we got more to talk about

LaPagila, while you say it's easy to train a cannon so disagree can you remember how easy it is for people with money to train defence?

Do you remmeber when you used to have to take shots at yourself to build defense, and how Uncle Nicky did it to take down mrevilman because even his gun was to strong? Oh sorry...

That's it. 0 skill required. To train a cannon in a month or two would require being here most Durdens spawns, racing RIAS, taking contracts and lots of locals searching.

I can do same effort with credits towards kills, and by having friends sign up and shoot them. Both are easy compared to passed, and both can be done.

The investment of time to build a cannon is monumental. It takes so much time and effort. Building your defence does not. Unless you do so with game cash only. Then kudos.

every charcter i made, i put zero effort into defense, i only focused on killing, just lasted long enough to get revenge or kill someone for a good laugh

You only find out the true value of good leadership when the shoe is on the other foot and they've been the victims of a planned takedown and are forced to respond. That is when people are truly tested, not when producing a pretty spreadsheet.

I agree see above post

You didn't need to BG wave anyone when I started playing. In fact. You couldn't even shoot the BGS when I started I don't think.

No you had to wave the crew because we had so many members.

How hard is it?

How many have you planned and been apart of?

Generally if you walk round shooting people on hear say you'd last doing that possibly twice. After that no one will be able to trust you at which point you're as good as dead in this world.

Wonder how that is working for me LOL

I've never seen anyone reach that stage who is so reckless. Certainly not in this world.

See you havent been around tooooo long

You only find out the true value of good leadership when the shoe is on the other foot and they've been the victims of a planned takedown and are forced to respond. That is when people are truly tested, not when producing a pretty spreadsheet.

I agree see above post

You didn't need to BG wave anyone when I started playing. In fact. You couldn't even shoot the BGS when I started I don't think.

No you had to wave the crew because we had so many members.

How hard is it?

How many have you planned and been apart of?

Generally if you walk round shooting people on hear say you'd last doing that possibly twice. After that no one will be able to trust you at which point you're as good as dead in this world.

Wonder how that is working for me LOL

I've never seen anyone reach that stage who is so reckless. Certainly not in this world.

See you havent been around tooooo long

Then a new group will take turns stroking one another. Stop complaining like a little cunt.

That's exactly right ladies and gents, you are going to hate whoever is in charge and think things aren't fair, its just as old as people saying rank up and do something blah blah.

Things aren't harder now, nobody takes 60 days minimum for made man, godfather didn't exist, witness statements didnt exist etc etc.

Don't get me wrong. I loved .or and everything it had. But this is a new world where RL money buys perks. If you can buy yourself invincible tgen there's no point people without money playing. That's just the way it is now. So you will need to adapt

I never used credits for rank or kills and they were there during my prime time, guess im all natural

Frankly, I'm not going to say things need to change. The players seem to like the way the game is now, despite the concerns I may have, and that is perhaps the best reason to leave it be. However, I can't help but see some... dishonest? ways of refuting some of the things I've heard for years either from admins or players. After someone comes into power, or someone loses power, or power eats itself, etc. we get someone saying "heyyyy it's too harrrrrd make it eeeeasier" and Izzy, rightfully, says "nu u too bad. be better and maybe it work."

I'm paraphrasing obviously, but that's generally the admin response. Though some times, Izzy has taken the time to recalculate BG caps or tapering or stuff like that. And the response from the players is the ominous "rank up and do something about it," which comes with its own limitations. But it seems like the "crying for fairness" is almost universally dismissed, particularly by whoever is either in charge or supports who is in charge.

So rather than receive the same old dismissive response, I'd really just like someone to provide some rebuttals to my concerns, and I can be on my way. It won't change how I play the game and it very likely will have no impact on the game's mechanics; I'm just curious why people truly think the present wack/defense system is the best. And if we're going to concede that it's not the best, can we agree that if we discover improvements to be made, that we can make them? 

1.) The "effort must equal effort" response (primarily from the admins) seems problematic to me. That's not really how life works (and in a way, this game should at least somewhat resemble how the world is). It doesn't take someone months to prepare to kill someone, they can just get a gun and do it. Now, I'm not saying that's how the game should be coded, I'm just saying the "you have to put in the same work as your target" argument seems almost-facetious. Like a challenge that the players who actually have the desire to "rank up and change things" (which in my experience is a quite-small minority of players growing ever smaller) are not mafia-enough to make their concerns valid. Or more importantly, that because we maintain a "rank up and do something about it" mentality, we're categorically invalidating any opinion that perhaps the route to ranking up and doing something about is actually too difficult/long/time-consuming, especially given the rather abrupt nature of a character's death (all that work can be immediately ended at any time). When, in reality, killing people is easy but extremely dangerous and difficult to get away with (and our witness statement system speaks to this). It seems as though we've deliberately refrained from making this pillar of MR's awesomeness resemble... the Mafia. It's more like a high score table at an arcade game than the Mafia.

2.) Along the same lines, I don't see in the math of the wack/BG mechanic any evidence that the "effort must equal effort" claim is actually valid. And this, I'd contend, is rooted in a number of difficulties. The first of which is what I call the "gap problem," that any hitter who is not strong enough to remove an important target is wasting most of their gun's wackstat (they're in the gap). And this actually is an indicator of an even larger problem, that training up a gun in order to kill one bodyguard is substantially more difficult than purchasing one bodyguard. Basically, training to be a BG shooter is detrimental to your crew or your cause; because you'd be better off having the kills you've acquired go to your stronger hitters, because kills on their gun are worth more than kills on yours (because the kill difference of shooting over an additional BG on your target is exponentially smaller than the kill difference of shooting and killing a live BG). So there's a gap in the game where guns are effectively useless, both for loyal and honorable pursuits and also devious and mischievous ones. And so if you say "get together some friends to BG wave who you want to take out," what you're really saying is "fuck you." Because the total kills your group would need to drop the BGs is greater than the kills you'd need to just shoot the target in the first place on your own. In short, BG shooting is obsolete and therefore makes BGs inherently obsolete (because a defensive mechanic built on an obsolete means of reducing that defense inherently makes the defensive mechanic obsolete as well).

3.) Now, I truly think it's really easy to build a gun in the current state of the game. And if you compare the ease of training a gun to the ease of purchasing bodyguards, you'll find that it's easier, as an individual, to get the equivalent "strength" in wack than in defense. However, the individuals who are buying BGs are usually not purchasing them alone. The cost of the BGs is spread out across a crew, or a district, or even a city; while the effort of training a gun cannot be similarly distributed (see: #2 BG wacking). So, presently I think it's easier to train a gun than purchase protection, but I also think it's easier for a crew to BG up their CL than it is for a hitter to train up the equivalent gun strength necessary to shoot that CL. Especially when you factor in kill tapering (which is entirely necessary to calculate for important targets); which seems to only contribute confusion and mystery surrounding one's gun strength. And if we're deliberately making it harder to track and manage one's gun strength (which, I don't really understand why), why isn't there a corresponding mechanic to BGs that makes them harder to track and manage? I'd argue that tapering alone makes training a gun more difficult than purchasing BGs, even as the BGs get more expensive. Because you can always see exactly how strong your BGs are, but once your gun starts tapering, you have no real way of knowing exactly how strong it is. And you'll be liable to either waste wackstat by training beyond what's necessary or miss your target.

4.) Winners create a problem, and I believe this is what contributes most to the dynastic nature of MR's regimes. Because, I don't think that those who are in power now put in as much effort as the sum of every single one of the CLs, districts, and cities that they've removed. I think that because there's no maintenance on BGs (any active person can maintain even capped BGs) or wack. What this means is, if you put in the effort to get to the top you are, at least numbers-wise, able to stay there indefinitely. There's nothing requiring you to put in more work to kill more players. And so, the "effort must equal effort" argument once again breaks down (at least in my mind), because the effort required to kill an additional rival is zero. There is no effort. The only effort that has to be put in is on the rival's side (rank up and do something about it). But if the existing regime wants to make changes, they don't have to put in any effort. In addition to causing a dynastic system, we also have a very stagnant system once those at the top have reached the peak of their character's stats. They have no reason to log in, make money (except for BGs, which their crews or CAs will pay for), train a gun, jailbreak, etc. There's no feature in the game that requires them to do any kind of maintenance in order to stay at the top. All they have to do, realistically speaking, is log in every few weeks and remove whoever is problematic, threatening, or even just untrustworthy. And the game requires zero additional effort to do this. I mean, we see it even now by looking at the crew page; there are a few CLs that are high or extremely high activity, but they're the newer CLs that aren't at "the top" yet. Those at the top are at Low, Extremely Low, or Obscenely Low activity. And that in no way makes it difficult for them to stay where they are. So is it really the best system that lets those who are extremely low-activity remove those who work their asses off for months simply because they got there first? And if that is the best system, can we stop saying shit like "equal effort must be put in," when in reality that only applies for those who actually want to rank up and make changes to the game, rather than existing regimes?

5.) I don't want to come across as someone clamoring for a "fair" system. Because I don't want it to be fair. Life isn't fair. This game isn't fair. There's no real reason to ground features in fairness, so long as the features treat all users equally (that no player or group of players benefit more from a feature than any others for any reason other than their current role in the hierarchy). However, I think the objective of the BGs, wack, and BG wack features are somewhat... misdirected. That, wacking is something you do to improve your character, not kill another character. It's a numbers race rather than an act of violence. And when we have to rack up monstrous sums of kills just to be relevant to the game, it raises the question of "why bother?" The game is literally built to make it as hard as possible on those who want to remove those in power, and simultaneously built to make it as easy as doing nothing at all for those who are already at the top.

To conclude, I think when we look back at how the game was years ago, we see that the "difficulty" when you got to the top was keeping your rivals at bay. That, there were a decent number of players that could pose a threat to you, and therefore you had to be active, and maintain your connections, and be ruthless at times in order to stay at the top. And because those at the top were reachable (in terms of gun strength), it emboldened more players to pursue such endeavors. And so it had a positive feedback loop that required the game to keep changing instead of staying stagnant for months on end. But we've replaced that with a seemingly-deliberate negative feedback loop accomplishing the exact opposite; show how difficult it is to "rank up and do something about it," which discourages ambitious players from doing anything ambitious and forces them, if they still want to play the game without dying every month or so, play it in a subservient/subordinate role to those who are in charge. And if any players appear to be "ranking up and doing something about it," the nearly-inactive players at the top wave their finger and have them killed.

This isn't a "kooky hypothetical," this has happened for years. And I get that eventually, after enough time has passed and those at the top either become so inactive or so insufferable that the players can't stand it anymore, they're removed. But that's almost always started by an ambitious player who is willing to put in the work to remove them. And I think that the way the system is now, we're driving those players (slowly but surely) away from the game. Until eventually, we will have a perpetual dynasty. When we've finally driven away or subordinated everyone willing to "rank up and do something about it", the game will be run by a single regime that can stay in power indefinitely. And that, I guarantee you, will push a lot of players away.

So, as a player interested in attracting ambitious players (see: "The action is yours, the reaction is not"), I'd rather see some changes in the features to accompany that. Or at the very least, an answer to some of my concerns that ventures beyond the dismissive responses I've gotten in the past.

This is not what happened for years. You stand to be corrected. What has happened is a clear case of incest that consists of a tiny group who hold old grudges thus saying fuck many who have played for years nut are nothing but pawns. The IA's on these supposed monsters families (small group) are dying due to being IA. Who the fuck makes many of these IA's made men? I will tell you who. Only the desperate in pursuit of revenge. Thus saying fuck all else. Like the topic of this thread reads something needs to change. 

As much as I value and respect Admins efforts in making this a great place to play I also cannot help but to think I aid and abed to the numbers (log ins) when I know damn right well something needs to change!

That doesn't answer a single one of my concerns with the current system. It's bordering on incoherent rambling, frankly. And calling it "incest" in OOC is either idiotic or deliberately inflammatory, and neither impress me.

Whatever Cato.. If I wanted an education I'd go to school. I am humored how you think running to the streets critiquing and insulting my thoughts is exciting to you.  And I am boring?  This is funny.  More times then not when we see the type of response you gave it is because the words hit home and stung a bit. ;)

The topic itself was an invitation for me to speak my mind.

Well... No... You said I stood to be corrected (as if I said something factually untrue), but really just postured your own opinion accompanied by, like I've said, either idiotic or inflammatory remarks. And considering you weren't directing those "incestuous" remarks at me (at least I don't think so, as I don't recall being a part of a group that's run the game for the last few years), don't really see how they can "hit home" or "sting."

Also... I'm not in the Streets? And trust me when I say this, responding to you is a pretty dull part of my day. I'm quite confident you're incapable of making a conversation that would be exciting to me.