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

Swayzak, are you saying this has been implemented or not? I know it was spoken about, but was it ever taken any further? Also, if it has, does this surplus of BGs then fall into place if your current ones die? It sounds like you aren't sure yourself and are surmising on behalf of the admins just to put up disagreement with Gwarble's suggestion which, albeit a big upheaval, is a solid one if the owners are serious about addressing the issues the game currently has (in the eyes of some).

If anything, they should retool defense - not make it easier to kill.
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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.

If you believe that then you're being naive.

From what I understand of your posts, your argument to a well thought out and well presented idea seems to be, basically: "It's easy to train a gun to kill these accounts. It's not easy to get piles of BGs. People on these accounts do die, therefore there is no problem. Why should people on defense be 'punished'?"

Pretty inaccurate, but there's little need for me to go into it because if you re-read all of the posts here, not just Gwarble's, it's already been identified that there are issues by the owners. The question is where the issue lies, what are just symptoms and what is the actual cause.

I'm not sure where you've deduced what I'm not sure I'm saying, the system has been in place for quite some time - At least over a year.


There is a certain limit to how many bodyguards affect your defense - after you reach that point, any bodyguard purchased after that will simply serve as a cushion until you reach the defense ceiling reached, and after that, your defense, provided with bodyguards, will begin to go down.


As for being naive, it's been said many times, even from coders, that any account can be removed with a few hours of work from a decent hitsquad and, again, a well off gun.


I have no objections with the original suggestion laid about by Billy_Bathtub - it's realistic. After a certain point, you shouldn't be running around like the Terminator zapping people left and right. Just like the real mafia, you have grunts do you work for you after a certain stage. What I do object to, is this:


- Defence cannot be continually increased through a feature on the game.

When the opposite can be done with wack through hammering left and right for inactives, introducing a bodyguard cap that can be taken out in two hours or less is way too polarizing considering the current climate, and the fact that guns can be trained much easier these days, on top of the fact that technically, a ceiling is already in place for people who have purchased a ridiculous amount of bodyguards. Why lower it when on average the success rate hovers around 75% on wacks?

I don't think the link between BGs and the top gun has been in place for a year, the top tier of BGs hasn't been in place for a year yet and it definetly came after that

Romeo, the top "tier" was made so you could get a better idea of how much protection someone had at the time, as there was quite a few Extremely Well Protected folks out there. It was just made to differentiate just what kind of protection you were dealing with.

I didn't deduce that you weren't sure, I meant that I wasn't clear, which is why I'd asked you explicitly whether it had or not. From what I'd read, it wasn't obvious to me that you were sure yourself, which is why I asked. When you say "after that, your defense, provided with bodyguards, will begin to go down", do you mean that a point is reached where bodyguards become detrimental?

Regarding the naive point, it sounded like you were trying to say a single gun could do it, so I apologise for that misunderstanding. Obviously any account can be taken down by a dedicated HS over a few hours. That's a moot point though, they're not likely to get a few hours uninterrupted. Then they have to worry about the other 20 Dons in the city they're attacking.

introducing a bodyguard cap that can be taken out in two hours or less is way too polarizing considering the current climate

I'm pretty certain Gwarble didn't suggest doing it in the current climate.

I'll be honest, your posts are confusing the feck out of me.

Also, unless I'm misreading what Romeo is saying, I'd be pretty sure
he knows what the top tier is and why it was introduced. I think he's
saying that if there is any link between BG numbers and the best guns
in the game, it came AFTER the OWP label which he doesn't think has
been around for a year itself.

Swayzak, are you sure that this has all been implemented? It'd be interesting to hear from Izzy or Anubis on this. I remember discussion in the OOC forum about this where they were trying to decide what to do with regards to a max number of BGs vs the biggest guns in the game and that was well within the last year I think.

The discussion of the bg cap is a fairly recent one (certainly one that was still ongoing until the last couple of months, so definatly not over a year ago). It's also one that I had not heard had been fully implemented to date, though we have been told it will be at some stage (possibly already? I'm not sure either way, so I'd have guessed not yet).

If/when it is implemented, my understanding is that it opperates very differently to that outlined by Swayzak. I had believed that the idea of the cap was to stop a huge buildup of these 'spare' bg's, to keep a target at a level where with 'significant' work from an attacking HS the target is brought into range of the best gun(s) in the game and that the only time that 'spares' came into play was if/when there was a dramatic change in the best gun in the game. At this point, someone now above the 'current cap' would be capped at their existing bg level until such time as the best guns improved to raise the cap above this or their bg's dropped/get killed to a level below the 'current cap'.

I'm also very confused by the 'will begin to go down' comment, though everything here is my belief/opinion on the situation and not 'facts', so I'm very open to correction on it.

My understanding of the situation echoes what you've said, Deimne. I remember there was an OOC discussion thread (deleted now I think) on this topic and I made a point of participating quite heavily.

introducing a bodyguard cap that can be taken out in two hours or less is way too polarizing considering the current climate

I'm pretty certain Gwarble didn't suggest doing it in the current climate.

I'll be honest, your posts are confusing the feck out of me.

Swayzak, in all honesty it seems that you're grasping at straws. If you had thoroughly read Gwarble's speech you would have noticed him mention that you couldn't do it now, the feature he was proposing would more likely deem a reset.

Hence exhibit 1:

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.

Swawzak, you also mentioned that there is a BG cap in place, the only two BG caps I have heard proposed was the upper level cap for the number of BGs you can have which is equal to the strongest gun in the game. And since that came in place at a time when there was already a hell of a lot of strong guns in the game, that cap was and still is ineffective as the strongest gun continues to improve. Allowing people to amass ridiculous amounts of BGs well over 100 (as we saw with PedroRourke's account).

On a personal level, I feel it is useless seeing as how people will train their gun to be able to knock of the person who is sitting at the BG limit, but said person would just be able to buy BGs once the hunter trains their gun further.

The other code (which I know has been implemented) is the one regarding BG health affecting their effectiveness. This code is some what of a fix to the mass amounts of BGs being brought. However, there is a down side to this change simply being that if you're a city head or even a CL with a captain family, who lets say for arguments sake that they have 60 BGs (OWP), the earnings that they will receive from their families will allow them to buy more BGs or train them which won't be very hard (as their health doesn't drop below 60hp).

Now I would like to voice my own opinions on the matter. Going back to Billy's original idea of changing the likelihood of wackback for people on wack answers in comparison with those on full D. To cite Lucretia.

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.

This would be the likely scenario if we're going of RP, if I'm on wack answers I know how to handle a gun, clean it, and all other miscellaneous things that go alone with using a gun and keeping it in grade A working conditions. However, if I'm a timid soul (on full D) I wouldn't be all clued up on the business of guns, outside of knowing how to pull a trigger, which is why I assume they need to visit the range so much.

Also the point of putting a static BG cap in place is something I agree on whole heartedly. Now I don't like to keep mentioning RP all the time but this is an RPG so we can't run from it. In the eyes of RP, how likely was it to see John Gotti going to rob his local post office with 100BGs trailing him, he may have had a couple private enforcers but the bulk of his security he relied on his button men. In game we don't have the privilege of having our button men with us at all times. However, a static number of BGs some where between 10 and 30, especially since some re-working of the BG wack code would have to be implemented, would be an ample amount.

In my opinion it would also change the dynamic of the game as Gwarble already mentioned. Politics would have to be played much better where not only between CLs and city heads but also with CLs and their family members to prevent members from becoming rogues (I know a lot of people don't like rogues, but we're dealing with RP here) if you don't like the way you're family is being run you're going to do something about it, in this climate it is more or less impossible.

There is probably some other things I could mention, but I'm tired.

I made a mistake with formatting, but please don't let that distract you from the point I'm trying to make.

How abouty something where if a person kills several people in quick succession, they get serious jail time (randomly), like 4 or 5 hours or even a day?

After getting some clarification from Squishy, I am indeed incorrect when it comes to the cap introduced. It is a feature that has been ready for quite some time, but not implemented. Deimne is correct in his assessment - it is a cap system that takes into account the best wackers (on average) and adjusts a bodyguard cap accordingly. If the ceiling was 100 and you had 110 before it was implemented, it would disregard the extra ten in case your account was fired at. (eg. Player A shoots at player B, who is armed with 110 bodyguards. 100 bodyguards are figured into the defense only, as the other 10 are "over" the cap limit. Their only use at that point would be to provide a cushion for when your bodyguards are actually wacked at)

I didn't take into much consideration the fact that a reset would be required, and for that I also apologize - however, for one reason or another, mostly on the fact that it'd be cheating people out of their work (Which Gwarble has mentioned) discussion of resets has usually been moot.

With that in mind, I think Squishy's suggestion of implementing his version of the cap might be better off seeing as it takes into consideration how well the site in general - wackwise - is doing, and adjusts accordingly to the ceiling it places on players. If it's justified, it will raise the bodyguard limit - or, after a large war where a good portion of the decent shooters have been killed, lower it.

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.

Er, I'm quite aware that the word cannon is a metaphor, but that doesn't mean we're all running around with muskets that take 60 seconds to reload or something. I tend to envision most players using the , AKA Tommy Gun, personally. Well, that or a good old fashioned hunting rifle, depending on precisely what shot they're trying to take. The Tommy Gun was common during the prohibition era, used by both criminals and law enforcement. Drive by shootings with the massive drum magazine were notorious. Someone who's a very good aim would quite easily be able to drive by a building and kill a handful of bodyguards if there were dozens hanging around. It makes little sense that a fully automatic gun that holds 50 rounds would be incapable of killing more than one bodyguard at a time. Of course, if you were a crummy shot, all you managed to do was pepper the building's walls with bullets and everyone got up unharmed.

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.

Gah. Bracket close fail. Pardon the blue text.

Maybe that is where we differ Lucretia. I have always thought people were shooting with a hand gun as opposed to a Tommy Gun.

I have certainly never thought of performing a driveby shooting because that would involve someone else being in on the hit and currently it only takes one person to attempt to make a hit. I would also think that driveby shootings don't really fit in with the whisper system we currently have in place when shooting people. But however maybe driveby's could be something that could be brought into the game as part of multi user actions for attacks on bodyguards.

I don't see what whispers have to do with bodyguard shooting. Further, there would be nothing stopping someone from whispering in your ear or shouting at your body from the car or whatever even if you did just get pumped full of 20-30 bullets from a Thompson. And in any case, even if you're using a handgun there's no reason you would be forced to stop after shooting the first bodyguard. We're not the man with the golden gun here, we obviously are using more than one bullet. So why not shoot two then run away? Why not shoot three, if you're that quick on the draw and aiming? The relevant consideration seems like it would be "how badass are you?" not the physical possibility of shooting multiple people in a short timespan. I don't see much RP justification for why you'd only be able to shoot one bodyguard at a time, no matter what assumptions you're using as far as how people are carrying out their hits. I do, on the other hand, see some gameplay benefits to be gained through making bg shots more practical.

Wowza, been a bit since I looked over here!  I actually had an idea with regards to BGs that I had given to Izzy over the summer that might be a way to meet everyone's needs who has been speaking about it.  More to come later, I promise it's super-sweet, work beckons!

Deimne/Swayzk (and anyone else interested), for info, here's the original discussion: http://mafiareturns.com/comm/thread/70417

has there been any progress in implementing the original idea from Billy?

it might not be perfect but I think its a step in the right direction

I was just wondering if there was any progress made on the original idea presented by Billy. This thread has been a long time dead, but it does offer some good ideas that I reckon a lot of people would want to see implemented.