Okay folks, we are working on the idea of revamping the way wacking works so as to provide a better balance among the players. As of right now, our system is archaic and is not built to be accustomed to the huge guns that exist within our game. This system was mostly coded and kept intact for when 80 kill guns were considered to be cannons. As many of you know the answers you start with don't always lead to longevity. It is widely accepted that if you start with Wack Answers you run a risk of higher WB percentages whereas if you start on defense your odds of wackback are almost non-existant but you have to wait longer to actually start training your gun. Back when an account was 3 months old and considered to be ancient this trade-off was great and worked to perfection. Since the inception of the character of Marietta however, we have grown leaps and bounds when it comes to player longevity.

As it stands right now, when you start on Defense you can build an account that is super beefy without much fear of ever dying on WB, whereas if you start on Wack you are lucky to make it to 200-300 kills. This has led to a decrease in overall relevance of those types of accounts, and that is not good for the game to have everyone flock to one homogenized group of answers and become an army of Mr. Smiths from the Matrix.

What we will be doing is essentially making it so there is grace period for when you start on answers with poor Defense (either by your own doing when starting on Wack or when you are a noob and just don't know any better and start with defensive answers that have 50% efficiency). For the first X amount of kills if you have poor defense you will still run the risk of normal wackback odds. When you reach Y kills however your wackback evasion skill will be upped when you roll into a fatal WB so you will have less of a chance of dying. This will last until you have reached Z kills and then your wackback evasion skill will be dropped back to what it normally is. This way people that start with poor defense are able to live longer and can be able to build characters that are comparable to those folks that start on straight defense. The roleplay logic behind this is as follows: You're fresh off the boat and have a gun. First instinct... Kill everything! However your first X amount of kills you're shaky and need to hone your craft so your wackback evasion skill remains as it would be with the answers you started on. Once you reach Y kills you're cock of the roost and have learned a few tricks on the hits you've pulled off and can now dodge wackbacks a bit better. However, once you're at Z kills and you've been in the shit for a long time you start feeling like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon your wackback evasion skill drops back to what it would normally be when you were at X amount of kills. Your main instinct at this point SHOULD be to use your beefy gun only during times of war because what business would a 300, 400 kill gun have hunting down gangsters? Now that boost doesn't apply for when you're shot at, when someone comes gunning for you, if you have poor defense that will remain static no matter where in the kill cycle you are.

Now, this will be a two-prong change as most of our game changes are prone to be. When you are on Defense answers the changes will effect you as well. Much with the same RP reasoning as the wack answers... You spend your first few weeks probably missing a couple shots and trying to hone your gun, however you have a higher wackback evasion skill from the jump because you are defensively minded. Once you've reached Z kills though you should be outsourcing the smaller hits to your people or considering the smaller kills to be below someone of your stature. So with that in mind, when you reach Z kills and become an older vet in the underworld and have long established your name in the crime scene, your wackback evasion will drop to a static number which makes a fatal wackback still relatively less likely than your wack answer counterparts, but definitely a real possibility.

There are high odds that this will make an entry into the game, so if you'd like to see something added please discuss.

This sounds like an interesting idea..I will think about it and probably post my thoughts on it later. I do however have a question. How will this affect old characters right after implementation?

It would be in effect for every character in the game, yes.  Mind you the goal is not to wipe everyone out by flukey shots, it's just to make sure things are kept in check fairly for everyone.

I respectfully think wackbacks are ghey to be honest but they do have their place.

A character with 300-400 kills should not get a wackback on a Gangster

I would like to see the game move away from such a huge dependency on the start up answers

The thing I like about this game is that it is straight forward. ie. killing makes you better at killing

But in my mind, a Made Man with 10k crimes and 1k drug trades should be much stronger (whatever that means) than a Made Man with 250 crimes and 10 drug trades provided their answers are not complete garbage.

Also since we are discussing start up answers, I think it would be nice and harmless to have a page on here that reminds us of the answers we chose, like a diploma or something simple.

This has led to a decrease in overall relevance of those types of accounts, and that is not good for the game to have everyone flock to one homogenized group of answers and become an army of Mr. Smiths from the Matrix.

I have suggested changing the starting answers a few times in the past. Has any thought been given to the idea of changing the startup answers in an attempt to additionally help combat this problem?

Matterhorn that idea has been tossed around, and could possibly
complement the addition of a new wack system.  The goal of course is to
still make all answers as appealing as possible so that skill sets are
noticeable.

I always thought that death wack backs is the only "unfair" piece of code the game has. I'll save the unnecessary original thread and post my thoughts here. I think that one should not die for doing what they do best. One should also not die for playing the game right. 

One should never wack back on an IA or MIA. If we RP everywhere that they are "bums" or "comatose" then no way in hell do they turn around and shoot back.

I would like to see an actual decrease of death wack back chances with the increase of gun training. The more kills I have, the better I should be, so I should only be killed by another gun.

I can understand a death wackback from an *online* player so the "turning around" makes sense from an RP POV. Also another incentive to stay around and fight as you increase your chances of survival by increasing their chances of wack back.

A Death Wackback is not based on your stats, it is a fluke result. Therefore there is no way to "train" out of it. It also is not necessarily the person "shooting back" at you. Perhaps you step on a sewer grate that fails and you crack your head open on the sidewalk. "Something went terribly wrong" does not describe a specific instance of an IA or MIA shooting back at you.

The only thing I can see is that Defensive answers are the only ones that provide an effect where it lowers this unlikely event. Answers that don't have high defense do not have something that can be a significant advantage in an environment such as the one we currently enjoy. The original idea proposed by Billy basically reduces that advantage provided by D answers, although does not completely eliminate it. It was also be difficult to define X, Y, and Z number of kills too. I would have to think more about it to get a better response to the initial idea.

With regards to wackback odds, I've always thought that the natural defense/wackback odds connection should be flipped. Natural born killers (wack answers) I would think would be less inclined to screw up and get themselves killed while doing what they do best. People who generally don't even have a clue which way to hold the gun until they go to the range scores of times (defense answers) would be more likely to screw it up and die in the process when they're going out and shooting.

The result of that simple change would be to significantly lower the amount of defense in the game, which would result in 90000 kill guns not being as essential, which would in turn increase the viability of all answer sets as having high defense would count for more. People would end up specializing more instead of having one answer set that is the "jack of all trades" answer set where given enough time you can do it all.

Coupled with revamping the bg-wack system (cannons should be killing/injuring more than one bodyguard, in my humble opinion, so that leaders no longer have every incentive to send only their weak guns on bg-shots) there's simply no need to revamp the wackback odds that extensively in my mind.

As I see it, the problem to be solved isn't the 90000 kill guns. The 90000 kill guns are a symptom of other problems that have led to extraordinarily high defenses in the game, and thus discouraged any turnover in players whatsoever. Wars used to happen weekly. Now it's unusual to see more than one a month. That's not because people's guns are too strong. Just the opposite, in fact.

Well to answer some of the comments there are a couple of things to keep in mind. This is not being done to increase the death by wackback in the game, in fact the wackback deaths in the game will remain about the same if not decrease a bit. The difference will be making sure the wackbacks are spread more equally throughout the answer sets.

Wrap your mind around this, it has been over a year since a person on true defense has died from wackback. Now remember there is a difference between people who have true defense and those that THINK they have true defense. So is this fair? No, it is not. But we also want people to advance their characters which is why we would lessen the odds of wackback for people on Wack answers and increase the odds for someone on Defense answers after a certain amount of kills. Now would people with wack answers still die from WB at a slightly higher rate? Of course, that's the risk of those answers but we also want to make it so that they can actually develop a character like defensively minded folks.

The odds are there for a Defense account to die from WB, but it just hasn't happened in over a year. They should be included in the statistics a little bit more.

As for the argument that Wackback shouldn't be in the game at all? I'm not arguing it's gutwrenching when it happens. I've lost a couple characters to WB and it is always a kick in the nuts. But you are shooting at a living character, and while 99% of the time that might go great, realistically that's not accurate. Maybe if MR had a gameshark and you could switch on God Mode you wouldn't have to worry, but you're killing another person! It's not like going to a morgue to use corpses for target practice. It will always be a part of the game, because we think it's integral to the realism of everything.

Richard, I may have failed to express that I think it should be trainable. I was under the impression that to die, you need *two* unlucky rolls. And although the first one is obviously not something you could train out of, the second roll could be designed to depend on wack stats as well.

Billy said: "But you are shooting at a living character,".

I understand that, but following that same logic, it should never happen while shooting someone IA. Ever (imho).

Well to answer some of the comments there are a couple of things to keep in mind. This is not being done to increase the death by wackback in the game, in fact the wackback deaths in the game will remain about the same if not decrease a bit. The difference will be making sure the wackbacks are spread more equally throughout the answer sets.

I don't necessarily think that wackbacks should be spread more evenly by answer sets. I think it's realistic that people who are "natural born killers" would be extremely unlikely to mess up so badly that they'd die in a hit gone wrong. If you're the sort of person that has killing in your blood, you're the sort of person who automatically senses the things that could go wrong in your hit and avoids them instinctively -- the same thing that makes you good at killing makes you good at not dying while you do it. If you're the sort to duck and cover and get out of harms way when the bullets start flying (the sort that's more likely to survive if someone is shooting at you) I'd say your more likely to have nerves strike at a critical moment, misread the situation, or just generally mess things up beyond repair while you're fumbling around your hit. That's what makes you end up dying. Same thing that makes you live when being shot at makes you bad at planning your own hits.

But beyond the RP perspective, and looking at it from a game play perspective, the problem I see is that right now the "trade off" isn't much of a trade off between wack and defense answers. With wack, a fairly dedicated hitter will save themselves two to four weeks of ranging, depending on how obsessed they are with hitting the range at all hours and how many MIAs they'll contract before maxing out and whatnot. In exchange, they'll have just about even odds of surviving through enough shots to hit the average crew leader nowadays and on top of that they get low defense. Thing is, that's not a trade off for anyone who survives long enough that they decide they can slow their training or stop it altogether. Anyone who ever gets to that point has basically wasted the opportunity to have a stronger character if they're not on the uberanswer set when they get there. That's 100% benefits at zero cost. Put another way, "quick, risky rise to a lower summit vs. slow but safe rise to godhood" is only a trade off if you are assuming you won't live long enough to reach your peak (and also note that with this choice, you're actually more likely to reach the more desirable peak due to random chance factors). But most people won't assume that when they make their character. They'll put their hopes in the best case scenario unless they have good reason to assume otherwise. Thus our army of clones dilemma.

Thing is, even if odds of death wackback were evened out completely across the two, the end result is that we'll still have one answer set where if you live long enough you still will be "jack of all trades and master of all" and it's only that it will take you about a month longer to get there (and one month nowadays is not so long as it used to be). The trade off still disappears over the long term. The only way the trade off persists through the entire analysis is if it's actually advantageous to your chances of getting to that point to have answers that make you weaker when you get there. "Quick and safe rise to a mid-level summit vs. slower and riskier rise to godlike heights" is a trade off no matter what time frame you consider because of the risk factor involved -- you might not reach godhood and then you're just SOL. The evened-out wackback odds case, "quick rise to a mid-level summit vs. slow rise to godhood" still is only a trade off in the short term. So you're still going to end up with an army of clones, provided people are assuming they'll live for a long time.

Yes, if you even the odds you'll have the benefit that reaching that uber-account status is riskier and it's not as much of a no-brainer to go with the uber-answers. But there will still be an uberanswer set. So I'm not arguing the original change does no good whatsoever. I'd simply say it's a partial-fix rather than a complete-fix.

So .... Short version: I agree 100% that the "army of clones" we have going on right now is a negative aspect that we should seek to remedy. I agree the wackback odds between answer sets (combined with the huge numbers of shots taken per account nowadays) are the source of the problem. I just think an even better solution would be to make it so high natural wack rather than high natural defense is what provides the saving roll for death wackbacks.

And as a random aside, I'm a tad tired. If any of what I just said is unclear or just plain doesn't make sense, just point it out and I'll try to organize my thoughts better.

Whilst I don't particularly have any problem with the proposed changes, I would question whether it's the right solution to the army of Mr Smiths, and therefore even worthwhile?

I think the bottom line is this; Will this change stop the 'flock to one homogenized group of answers'? No, not in my opinion, because regardless of the journey there, it's still going to be the best approach and best "end-game" in the climate we currently play in. With this in place, I still think you will see the same approach by players.

If the only issue you're concerned about is wackback spread, then it seems like a reasonable solution. However, it sounds to me like the spread of actual answers is also being viewed as an issue (?) and I don't think this will address it. Some of Lucretia's ideas sound very worthwhile, but then again, if wackback is based on wack skills rather than defense, do you risk swinging the pendulum in the other direction?

On a side note, this is a good idea (haven't heard it before myself) though possibly not related to the issue here: "cannons should be killing/injuring more than one bodyguard, in my
humble opinion, so that leaders no longer have every incentive to send
only their weak guns on bg-shots"

I'm hesitant to respond to this, but I'll take a stab anyway.

The larger problem that this bumps up against but doesn't address is the impact massive amounts of money have had upon the game.

If you traditionally played a wack character, you had the bonus of not wasting your first few weeks missing everything in sight and it was balancing the risk of wackback and wars that you had to worry about. With the cap of 10 bodyguards being removed in order to provide a means to use all the money, this has had the effect of increasing account life into the ridiculous and the extra month it takes to start hitting does not matter in the long run, because the amount of kills required to shoot at the very elite accounts takes many months to accumulate anyway.

This effectively makes wack answers redundant as Lucretia has made a point of highlighting in detail. The traditional benefit that came with being able to amass kills in that first month is now gone because 450+ kills doesn't guarantee you a hit on some accounts today and you need to survive for several months to accumulate a total like that, regardless of dedication.

The system will continue to be flawed whilst you have an option to continually increase your defence, which poses no danger at all to your health and the only option to increase your attack is increasingly more likely to kill you.

An average crewleader can encourage his members, even if low ranked to donate in the region of $5,000,000 per week. A good crewleader with an average ranked crew of 30 members should be getting that every single day. I shudder to think how much money the likes of Deimne, ScipitaRourke and the other Godfathers are earning daily. With this much money available it seems impossible that any amount of re-jigging of the wackback is going to bring things back into kilter.

Moving on to how I believe the problem can be resolved.

A cap on bodyguards - 10 was a good number. The reason that 10 was a good number was because it was achievable and then meant that a crewleader did not have to keep looking to themselves steadily and repeatedly increasing their defence. The only way to keep improving was either to rank again or for their crew members to rank. This means that every member reaching their peak is more important and keeping them alive is also a high priority.

The cost of bodyguards if you only had 10 would have to be addressed. Simply doubling the amounts back to what they used to be in the past isn't going to work here as well as it did in the past, because drugs are not individual and you have drug front properties which can generate a massive income. However, $8,500,000 per bodyguard for a Boss is going to take some doing.

How will this work with BG wack - They become more difficult to kill. I believe the theory behind BG wacking was to bring more people involved into wars, but to be honest, in practice this has never been the reality. Most untrained guns are still useless and wasted, just as they should be. Therefore it seems that your 10 highly skilled bodyguards would need highly skilled guns to take them down.

How this would affect the current game - With a change of this magnitude I would not suggest implementing it in the current climate. Mainly because it will severely weaken the top accounts and incur deaths that they frankly don't deserve to suffer. It would require a reset to implement properly and I certainly understand the reluctance of the administration to destabilise the game when they don't have to, but I imagine the influx of returning accounts would be greater than the reduction caused by players leaving.

How this would affect game play in the future - The bodyguard limitation being removed would massively alter how the game is played, the longevity of accounts and the turnover of leaders. The exact extent to which this would affect the game play would be determined by the numbers affecting wack and defence, but reducing the bodyguards would massive lower the defence, which would mean that a much lower wack total would be required to topple the best accounts.

I believe in the current climate, with MIAs and the shooting range a total of 200-300 kills should be considered cannon, capable of hitting virtually everyone. This would likely take a good hitter a similar amount of time to accumulate as a Godfather account would take to build, which I believe is logical. This is a game after all and whilst we have people willing to devote multiple days at a time to this when they need to, is that what we really want to promote? I'm sure the game would have a much wider appeal if you could play for a few hours and still be capable of achieving success. At the moment we've achieved relative success through account length, but 95% of the Dons are not capable of posing any sort of challenge to the established Godfathers and it is very unlikely they ever will without many more months of safety and training.

With a maximum kill total of around 200-300, would wackback still be out of kilter? The reduction in bodyguards would mean that on defence, that extra month it takes to start killing would mean that you have to make some very good choices to stay alive, as it should be. A system that incorporates an achievable kill total would certainly mean that only the most skilled could build themselves a dynasty.

At the moment we've got a situation of tolerance, which is bred from the utmost confidence in defence. I don't think this is healthy for the game or for the enjoyment of the majority of the players. I base this on the fact that Deimne really has no need to strategically attack anybody. He can effectively sit back and let things happen as he wishes, because he's holding a cannon and he's permanently surrounded by an impenetrable wall of bodyguards. I 100% applaud him on how he has played the game - it is exactly the strategy I've always adopted and failing an error in the code, am certain I would have achieved.

What are the downsides from this change - The most obvious one is that it would need a reset to be implemented. I would never advocate doing something like this on live accounts because it isn't fair. I wouldn't want to see the elite accounts cheated out of their hard work by a code change, which would open them up to shots that didn't have a chance in hell of getting through to them earlier. It would be a situation of chaos.

I believe that a line should be drawn under this cycle of MafiaReturns, just as it needs to be from time to time. Anita's era was a good time, excellent accounts and really good performances but it was stale in a similar situation to what we have now, an unassailable position held by a handful of accounts. To those who lose the most, the Godfathers and Crewleaders, I'm sure prizes could be awarded to reward them for their performances in this cycle and I highly doubt anyone could say that they haven't earned it.

The removal of the bodyguard cap was an experiment that has led to some excellent strategies, but the end result is always the same. It should not be viewed as a step backwards, because some of the game play that was built as a result of it has been commendable. I personally began building for 2-3 account A reset would present an equal opportunity for any player to compete in, new and old alike as it would be a completely level playing field.


Advantages

- The game would fall back into kilter. Defence would have a purpose - you're safer from wackers that can kill you, but it will take you longer to train a gun capable of hitting the highest rank. Wackers can reach a total of kills quicker but they do so at a cost to their defence.
- Defence cannot be continually increased through a feature on the game. Interaction and development of a crew will be more integral to each leader and the strength of your members will be of paramount importance.
- Wars will occur more frequently. Hanging on to your position won't be a matter of trusting in your defence, it will take skill and dedication, ensuring that you're away of the politics at play. You moving first could be the difference between success and failure, rather than waiting to see what happens.
- Account length will be shorter. The top accounts won't live for millennia, because they will be able to be killed.
- The game won't have to rule your life! You will be able to go out into the sunlight sometimes, because you won't have to stay for 72 hours at a time whilst 200 BGs plays against 300 BGs. Accounts will be killable, wars will be shorter.
- Rogues. I fucking miss rogues so much; it was another element of the game that bodyguards have written out entirely. You will have to make sure your troops are happy because if they aren't they can cause colossal damage if they've trained themselves into a position of quality.
- Increased Revenue - I would be extremely surprised if more people didn't return to the game and be more active for longer periods if it was reset. This will mean an increase in the volume of credits purchased, MIAs purchased and this all translates into more money.
- Higher level of game play. It will be more difficult to hold on to power, which will mean the weaker leaders will be exposed and required to raise their game. Organization, decision making and politic understanding will be paramount to success, if accounts can be killed by an achievable kill total as a result of a BG cap.

Disadvantages

- Reset. Hard work is taken away by means beyond player control. This is a last option, but I think it is the right one.
- Wars will occur more frequently. Whilst the majority of us would consider this an advantage, I suppose some may quit if they die a lot.
- Some features would require reworking. I'm thinking of BG wack in particular, as a hitsquad would pretty much be able to topple everyone very quickly otherwise.

I am sure I've missed some off there but I believe those to be the main advantages and disadvantages to a change in the system.

Gwarble, there is a cap to how many bodyguards provide you with defense. After certain point, they're only there to be cannon fodder provided you're in a pretty massive war. Also, the only other way you can increase defense is by being shot at someone who actually has a legitimate chance of hitting you.

As has been witnessed - Godfathers, ridiculously well protected Dons and Consiglieres have been taken out with a single shot from some of the most elite guns that are being toted around the site.. If anything, they should retool defense - not make it easier to kill.

I'm not sure if you're an admin and know these things for facts, I lose track of who is who, but I've always believed that repeatedly taking fire will weaken you, not aid you. I'll obviously be corrected if I'm wrong there.

The cap was talked about, I wasn't sure that it was actually ever introduced? Again I'll stand corrected if it has been introduced.

The majority of those shots are fired by a single account which has an insane volume of kills, which have been accumulated over many, many months. The answer system is already massively weighed towards defence, how would retooling it to aid defence further benefit anything or anyone? Being on wack answers at the moment is pointless, being on defence will lead you to becoming a master of both wack and defence as a result of piling bodyguards on top of that. I assume that was never how it was intended to be, else why have the option to choose between the answer sets?

The best way to rectify this situation is re-introduce the old benefits of being on wack answers - being able to kill. The shooting range and an endless stream of targets mean that any answer set can be trained into a cannon, the wackback chances just differ between them. That isn't the way it should be, which was probably the cause of this thread. The real problem however is that tweaking wackback isn't the longterm solution to the problem. The problem stems from the trade off as Lucretia put it, between wack and defence. The balance would best be rectified by restoring the primary benefits of the answers.

The easiest way to achieve that is to lower defence, which in turn will lower the kills required. Lower kills will mean a more achieveable target for more people. This will mean an increased chance of dying, which means an increased level of difficulty for those who earn their right to preside over MafiaReturns. Rather than having everything geared towards excessive devotion and pumping 12+ hours a day into the game, which will only ever be achieved by the few, that would appeal to the vast majority of the target market for this game. This current method will never maximise the popularity of the game as throwing your life into MafiaReturns is not going to appeal to most people. The success of Mafia.org was largely based on the fact a casual player could have an impact on the game, which is virtually impossible on MafiaReturns.

Rather than having everything geared towards excessive devotion and pumping 12+ hours a day into the game, which will only ever be achieved by the few, this change would appeal to a far greater proportion of the target market for this game.*

Personally I think it should go as follows.

Wack answers = higher chance of wb at the begining till X amount of kills.  Once reaching X, your wb chance should should drop to the static odds.  RP wise, At the start youre a noob with a gun shooting everything without much skill, once you've honed your skill you would be less likely to wb.

Defence answers = low chance of wb till you reach Y amount of kills.  Y would generally be a higher # then X.  This would allow Defensive people to train their wack to a respectable lvl then only use it when needed afterwords.  

Right now theres almost no benifit to being on wack answers. Ya you can save alot of cash, but no matter how good of a player you are, you are bound to death sooner or later.

Why should a person on wack be penalized when they dont get the benefit of any defence?

Coupled with revamping the bg-wack system (cannons should be
killing/injuring more than one bodyguard, in my humble opinion, so that
leaders no longer have every incentive to send only their weak guns on
bg-shots) there's simply no need to revamp the wackback odds that
extensively in my mind.

That is a quote from Lucretia.

I am curious as to your reasoning as to why you think a cannon should be killing more than one bodyguard?

From my understanding we players are shooting a hand gun, the term cannon was put in place because you could kill anyone not based on the size of bullet you shot. However I think sniper is probably a better description in that you have trained your accuracy to such an extent that you are able to aim with a high level of reliability through a crowded area. A hand gun is highly unlikely to shoot masses of bodyguards unless they were stupid enough to stand on top of each other and the bullet passed through a mass of them. However I'm not an expert on the guns of the time, I do think it unlikely that they possessed the power to shoot through masses of bodies.

The bodyguard cap has been mentioned quite a few times on IRC, including from admins.

Why should defense accounts be punished by actually lowering their defense? The original suggestion sounds fairly sound, but you imply that it's easy to get piles of bodyguards and there is absolutely nothing that can stop these monster accounts.


A credit costs roughly $160,000 each.

x 30 a month killing MIA's.. $4,800,000, plus if you actually hunt the regular IA's that are lurking about.

One bodyguard for a consigliere? $4,750,000.

Besides crewleaders, who fairly deserve what they make, why should defense accounts be punished? The entire point of defense is so you can't hit them unless you truly trained up your gun. Any single account can be killed - bodyguards included - with a few hours of work and a single shot from a well off gun. Not necessarily a "cannon", but one that's been trained enough.